Huddled Masses

   Back in the Dark Days of my first marriage, I hatched a scheme for my Great Escape. Like the plan in the Steve McQueen movie, mine involved getting papiere first. To be exact, I needed the Japanese equivalent of a Green Card, the eijûken (永住権, permanent residence visa/right), which would allow me to remain in Japan and work wherever I liked even after divorcing my wife.

   This was over a dozen years ago and at the time I didn’t know many people who had an eijûken.

   Rumors abounded. One friend, the unmarried publisher of an English monthly, had gotten his after numerous years promoting the city and region through his magazine. (Apple polisher!) As the owner of a company, he was also the employer of several Japanese. All good things in the fickle eyes of Immigration officers. Another friend, who was running an import and wholesale business, was able to skirt the eijûken visa issue entirely by getting a business visa. Still another friend, a Mexican with a sketchy employment record since coming to Japan, told me the key was having “muchos niños”.[1]

   None of these were really viable options for me.

   But, then an ex-girlfriend, a woman from Beijing, told me that she had managed to get the eijûken herself.

   In addition to being Chinese—the first mark against the poor girl[2]—she was separated from her husband, a no-good sonovabitch whose failed business had left him deep in debt and working in the “water trade”[3] in the city’s seediest part of town, Nakasu.

   If she could get an eijûken, I thought, by gum, I can get one, too!

   To apply for the permanent residency visa you have to supply the authorities with all kinds of documents—tax returns, proof that you are enrolled in the national health care scheme, and so on, in addition to completing a lengthy form that reads like an overly inquisitive job application. (For details, check the Immigration Bureau’s website.)

   The biggest challenge for me was that I didn’t have half of the documents necessary. I went into Immigration, anyways, assuming that I would be denied, but hoping that in my failure to get the visa I would learn exactly what I needed to hand in the next time I applied. To my great surprise and delight, however, they gave me the eijûken on the first go around.

   I learned a number of things from this.

   The first was the Law of the Ticked Box.

   I’ve come across this again and again over the years. Bureaucrats in Japan are a class of people who can’t be bothered to do real work or make decisions on their own, and avoid at all cost doing things without precedence[4]. They will prefer to reject something outright than look into the mitigating details.

   A shoe importer recently told me of an on-going headache of his. A shipment of shoes from Mexico had been blocked at Customs. The reason for the delay was that two numbers on the documents did not match. Even though the shoes inside the shipment and those described in the bill of lading were the same, the two-digit discrepancy in numbers meant that the shipment had to be either returned to Mexico or disposed of by Customs. The Customs official, it seems, didn’t want to take responsibility for any unticked boxes on the document he would have to file later.

   When I applied for my eijûken I figured that the officials at Immigration weren’t so much interested in the documents I was providing so long as I was providing some kind of document they could put into a file which would enable them to tick a box showing that they had done their job. When in doubt, overwhelm a public official with paper.

   As I was for the most part self-employed at the time that I applied and not quite reporting my taxes in full—oops—I didn’t have tax returns. So, I handed in some W-2-like withholding slips (源泉徴収票, gensenchôshûhyô) from the few places where I did piecemeal work—it hardly added up to a respectable salary. As for health insurance, I wasn’t enrolled in the National Health care scheme but I did have a policy with AXA and offered them a copy of that, instead. It must have been the most half-arsed application for an eijûken they had ever come across. And yet, I walked away with a permanent residence visa.

   It’s worth pointing out that while I did not have muchos niños—I was childless at the time—I had been living in Japan for about eight years by then, married for three or four of the most recent years, and was on my third spousal visa. Boxes ticky-ticky-ticked!

   The second thing I discovered was that officials from one ministry were not communicating with officials from other ministries. In the U.S., if the Bureau of Immigration found an immigrant who hadn’t been paying taxes, they would most likely report him to the IRA. But here? Avoiding taxes does not fall within the purview of Immigration’s authority, so why bother?

   The third and most important thing I learned was that Japan in its own discreet way was ratcheting up immigration. As far as I know, this has not been made public and evidence is still anecdotal.[5] But, where the eijûken, and naturalization, was at one time a rarity among foreign residents in Japan, it seems to have become fairly common, and not only among Westerners, but among Chinese and other Asians, too.[6]

   The easing of immigration makes sense as nothing the government has tried so far to increase the birth rate has borne any fruit. Ask the average Japanese, however, what they think about opening the doors to more immigrants and you won’t find too many enthusiastic supporters. Many Japanese believe the very reason their country is safe is the homogeneity of its people. You only have to look at America with all its racial tensions and crime, they say, to see that immigration is not the solution.

   But immigration is the solution. It would not only bring in much needed consumers and tax payers, but also young people with the ambition to make the Japanese Dream come true for themselves. Selective immigration could also mean that Japan would be able to invite the best and brightest from all over the world to come study, work, research and invent, reinvigorating the creative and innovating force that Japan has long been. The alternative would be the slow and painful decline of one of the most prosperous modern countries the world has ever known.

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[1] The Immigration Bureau offers some examples of successful applicants.

[2] The Chinese are to Japan what the Mexicans are to the United States: virtually personae non gratae, unless they have lots of money to spend once in the country. The slogan of Japan’s immigration should be: Bring us your Coddled Masses . . .

[3] The “water trade” (水商売, mizu shôbai or 水稼業, mizu kagyô) refers to businesses which make their money by entertaining and whose fortunes can rise and fall depending on their popularity with customers and include restaurants, geisha houses known as machiai (待合), bars, and “snacks”.

[4] There is an excellent (though slightly dated) book by Misao Miyamoto called Straightjacket Society: An Insider’s Irreverent View of Bureaucratic Japan, which goes into great detail about this. It is a must-read for serious students of Japan.

[5] Anecdotal in that there sure seem to be a lot more foreigners (both Western and Asian) today than there were twenty years ago. In fact, in 1990 there were about 1 million foreigners living in Japan, the vast majority of them being Koreans (zainichi kankokujin) whose ancestors had come to Japan during the colonization of the Korean peninsula. Today there are over 2 million. In the 18 years leading to 2010, the number of foreigners living in Japan increased 80%. The number of Chinese has more than doubled. (This does not include illegal aliens). For more information, check here and here.

[6] Incidentally, a Japanese-Brazilian woman who was married to a Taiwanese doctor she met while studying at a Japanese university once told me of the hoops she and her husband had to go through to become naturalized. This was well over twenty years ago. It had taken nearly a decade, and untold sums of money “donated” to influential politicians to finally gain citizenship. Their first try had been rejected because of a parking ticket of all things.

The "Problem" with Japan

   Whenever I hear politicians and commentators fret over Japan’s low birth rate and its implications for the viability of the pension system, I can’t help but ask the hell the country’s “leaders” have been doing for the past thirty years. When the pension system was set up, Japan still had a relatively young population where each retiree was supported by half a dozen or so workers paying into the pension scheme. As Japan developed and become wealthier, however, life expectancies were extended and the birthrate fell. In the mid ‘70s, the fertility rate fell below 2.0 for the first time, and the time implosion bomb started ticking. Although they knew the greying of Japan was going to become a major issue in the not so distant future, politicians—and I put most of the blame on the Liberal Democrats (LDP), today’s opposition party—did nothing to address it, letting the problem fester and worsen.

   At the wedding of my sister-in-law a decade ago a number of LDP bigwigs attended as the groom’s father had once been a Diet member back during the LDP’s heyday and was still active in local politics.

   Japanese wedding receptions are usually kicked off with a number of dull speeches given by bosses and other friends of the couple before the drinking begins, but at this particular reception a local politician made a long-winded speech in which he said, “We have put in place a number of policies such as the fūfu bessei (夫婦別姓), allowing you women to keep your maiden names after marriage, so what’s stopping you? Get married and have lots of children!”

   As if an attachment to one’s maiden name was the root of the issue. Feckin' eejit.

   If the politicians really want to address the issue they’ll need to do a number of things:

   One, support women who have more children by

      ◉ getting the economy back on its feet. There’s nothing like economic uncertainty to prevent a family from having a second or third child.

Triumph's "Dwindling Birth Rate Countermeasure" brassiere (少子化対策ブラ). Don't know about you, but it works for me!      ◉ improving the access to affordable daycare for working mothers. Daycare for anyone but the coddled civil servants and public employees who can enroll their children into publicly run day-care institutions more easily than others tends to be rather expensive. It can cost as much as ¥60-80,000 per month, or a quarter to half of a working mother’s salary.

      ◉ giving long-term financial support to families with young children, such as free healthcare, larger tax credits for those with children, grants for education, and so on. France did this, and has the highest birth rate among EU nations (save randy Ireland). It took twenty years, however, of continued support to get that birthrate up.

      ◉ encouraging Okamoto and other prophylactic makers to produce defective condoms that leak or tear easily, thereby increasing the number of unplanned pregnancies. In the event that these companies refuse to cooperate, then government officials should be armed with fine needles and discharged to neighborhood convenience stores where they will tamper with the condoms.

      ◉ encouraging immigration, yes, immigration. Real, long-term, permanent immigration. (More on this in a follow-up post)

   Two, get the country’s financial house in order by

      ◉ raising taxes on the wealthy and inheritance.

      ◉ raising the consumption tax gradually over the next ten years or so.

      ◉ raising the retirement age and age at which benefits kick in, and cutting benefits to the wealthy.

      ◉ reducing governmental waste (more on this below)

      ◉ lowering corporate taxes which are comparatively high and creating other incentives to encourage companies to keep manufacturing and jobs in Japan.

      ◉ scaling back on Koizumi reforms that made it easier for companies to rely on part-timers and contract workers and has brought down wages and standards for many in Japan. You can’t expect consumers to buy the crap your company produces if they don’t have the money to buy it or the security to plan for it.

      ◉ lowering property taxes to encourage the purchase of homes and condominiums.

      ◉ giving more autonomy to regional and local governments.

   Three, reduce government waste by

      ◉ eliminating the todôfuken (都道府県) system which divided Japan into prefectures that had been based loosely on the feudal system of the Edo period. The prefectures ought to be combined, creating half a dozen states or shû (州) or regional administrative blocks, such as Kyûshû-Okinawa, Shikoku, Chûgoku, Kansai, and so on. This will prevent much of the wasteful duplication of projects that have blighted the Japanese countryside with airports that are seldom used and museums that nobody in their right mind would ever visit. The mayor of Osaka, Tōru Hashimoto, and his Restoration Party (維新の会, Ishin no Kai) has been trying to do this with Ōsaka.

      ◉ giving these new regions more autonomy in and responsibility over how public money is raised and spent.

      ◉ breaking up the all too powerful and often inept bureaucracy.

      ◉ reducing the number of Diet members by at least half and putting in place term and age limits.

      ◉ ending the practice where a politician benefits financially for projects that he brings to his constituency. I am not a fan of pork barrel politics and think that politicians should be forbidden from voting in favor funding projects for his constituency because of conflict of interest. The politician should, however, be able to vote against those projects which go against the wishes and needs of his constituents.

   I could go on and on, but then, what does it matter to me? I’m just a stupid gaijin.