Country To Become a Chinese Province?
The year 2018 should be remembered as the dawn of accepting foreign workers for Japan, and the country’s administration effectively became a Chinese province as floods of Chinese visitors acquire permanent residency and come to exercise intrinsic influence through legislatures and public offices.
When the first-generation Japanese boomer generation fades into the twilight from around 2030, Japan’s population is projected to shrink to barely 100 million from 126 million in 2018 – while foreign nationals and immigrants are set to grow to nearly 10 percent of the shrinking population from 2 percent now.
At the core of Japan’s immigration policy change, to one that encourages foreign labor from centuries-old one that admits foreigners with reluctance, is the country’s acute labor shortage. Labor shortages are as such that many businesses are extending retirement ages to 65 from 60, and retailers that are experiencing even tighter conditions are shortening store hours and hiring senior citizens who are over 70 and sometimes over 80. Japan’s unemployment rate was 2.4 percent in February with only 1.66 million workers, or de facto negative supply, out of work as economists have predicted no end in sight in tight conditions.
So, by the 2018 summer, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s cabinet would recommend relaxing or effectively lifting current regulations allowing unskilled foreign workers to work in Japan for up to five year, to 10 years, and submit legislation to amend the Immigration and Refugees Law to parliament this fall. The policy change effectively allows simple foreign labor – dish washers, construction workers, etc. – to work and live in Japan as ‘engineers.’
The policy shift, the first since the founding of Japan more than 5,000 years ago, overlaps with the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games: As a key economic stimulus, Japan wants to double the number of foreign tourists to Japan from 23million in 2017 by 2020 and even more after the games positioning tourism as one of the next key economic growth areas.
Fine, yet what’s likely to occur over the next few decades would be the dominance of vital workplaces by foreign labor, particularly Chinese who account for over 1/3rd of more than 2.4 million foreign certified workers and a higher percentage of undocumented foreign residents. In Tokyo’s Ikebukuro entertainment district, Chinese restaurants and shops line up streets, with Chinese workers there reportedly working with expired worker visas or overstayed their tour visits to Japan. The Toshima Ward office, where Ikebukuro is located, is known to be accepting children of undocumented foreign residents on the basis of racial equality and child care policies.
Of the ward’s population of 285,000 in 2017, nearly 10 percent were foreign nationals and when undocumented foreigners are included, the ratio is believed close to 20 percent. And of those, half of them are believed to be Chinese. It is easy to speculate how the data would look like in 2020 and thereafter. The Chinese would come to represent even more than now, and by then, like what’s seen in many American legislatures – state, city and rural assemblies – the Chinese should become visible in Japanese politics and government offices. An official of Toshima Ward office, One Mr. Yasui, told me that other than that the office has foreign workers, he cannot comment for reasons of privacy protection.
Maybe nothing wrong about that in the modern world, but long-term, it sets the ground for Japan to look like a Chinese province, its leader, not Abe definitely, visiting Tienamen Square to kowtow in front of the Chinese leader, who could be Xi Jinping then.
It’s how China thinks the bilateral relationship should be, as had been so for centuries after China found country of Yamato (name before Nippon or Japan) 2 or 3 B.C. extending silk-looming, pottery, metallurgy and other advanced technologies in exchange for . That historical father-son relationship was broken only twice and briefly: Japan-China war in 1894-1895 and Japan’s occupation of Manchuria and invasion into Shanghai, Beijing and other cities in the run-up to Ward War II.
Perhaps because of its emergence as a major economic power that has boosted many Chinese people’s wealth topping that of the Japanese, Beijing has been mum in recent years about wartime atrocities believed committed by the Japanese imperial army, almost contrasting with South Korea that demands wartime apologies and compensations from Japan and building comfort women statues in the United States and elsewhere.
That belies China’s silence. China certainly has not forgotten about the Japanese military atrocities, and in fact, Chinese victims and their kin every now and then demand Japan’s apologies, yet the Beijing government does not bring it up as a key problem standing between the two countries. As Wang Yi insisted ‘economic cooperation’ from Japan during this week’s bilateral foreign ministerial meeting, the first in eight years. Clearly, China thinks it is better to pursue a forward-moving diplomatic policy and acquire Japanese technologies and other concessions than stalling on the wartime atrocities.
So it’s hardly a surprise that the Japanese Justice Ministry, police and labor authorities that are charged with immigration and undocumented foreign national issues take lenient approach toward Chinese visitors and residents. At Narita International Airport outside Tokyo the other day, Chinese tourists arriving from Shanghai on a low-coast carrier were herded to the immigration gate but the Japanese immigration officials gave only a perfunctory glance at the visitors’ passports and rubber-stamped them – while visitors from other countries were screened closely and some of then grilled with questions before being admitted.
After clearing through the gateway necessities, Japan is an anything goes destination for the Chinese, freer than their home country or the United States. Police and local governments are accommodative to the Chinese whether they are legal residents or not, and they can always seek protection of long-time Chinese residents living in Ikebukuro, Shinjuku and other areas that have become undeclared China towns where Chinese gang groups are known to operate. In fact, police are said to forgo swoops of China towns for fear of revenge while nabbing Vietnamese, Thai, Philippines and other nationalities.
The result is surging legal and undocumented Chinese residents in all parts of Japan, which one can confirm by spotting new-generation Chinese restaurants dotting almost every Japanese urban area that hire many undocumented Chinese.
Of about 2.4 million foreign national residents in Japan, as tallied by the Ministry of Justice as of 2016, 700,000 were Chinese. The real number of foreigners, told a Japanese foreign ministry senior official the other day, is at least twice as many, and the Chinese account for the largest portion. The number is bloated by the Chinese tourists missing from official government data, he said, speculating that something like one percent of Chinese tourists arriving in Japan do not go back to China. Over the past decade, 10,000 to 70,000 Chinese tourists might have overstayed their legal stays and remain in Japan, and that number is growing to the tune of increasing foreign tourists to Japan, he agreed.
Perhaps by 2030, Japan would be flooded with Chinese, something that the Beijing government is not doing with intent but may be happy to observe as Japan gives a semblance of a Chinese province. So China is not only receiving wartime compensations without making overt demands to Japan but managing Japan as a geographically near tourist destination, for a win-win result for the two countries but to the horror of the United States.