Finally, ahead of the BBC

Having missed the Nova news, despite it being round the corner, and letting The Times scoop it.  I would like to point out that I still have the drop on the  BBC: By clicking on the link you can read their coverage of Japanese immigration’s introduction of compulsory fingerprinting of all foreigners entering the country… at least two weeks after I mentioned it in “You’re not from round here, are you?”, below.  They seem to have been speaking to “some people” who said very similar things to me too. Hurrah! I am in the moral majority!

Not from round here, are you?

It’s a tricky thing, racism. If you look for it, you can find it everywhere and blame it for everything, it can be made the reason for everything that goes wrong in your day in Japan from dawn to dusk. Generally Japanese people don’t intend to offend, it’s just that their media and education haven’t really caught up to the idea that denigrating someone’s race or drawing stereotypical inferences from it is bang out of order.

At it’s very mildest it’s the expectation that no foreigner can speak Japanese (see below), or that we should be offered a knife and fork in a restaurant because no non-Japanese person could possibly have mastered the ancient art of chopstick use. My personal favorite is going to a restaurant, ordering the meal – in Japanese, only for the waiter to address his replies exclusively to my Japanese and hitherto silent girlfriend. I suppose actually being able to  get in the door to order the meal is a bonus: As foreigners, we are also barred from some restaurants, clubs, onsens as this video attests.

To be fair, “racism” may be too strong a word for the everyday experience – unless you have the ultra-nationalists in their black speaker vans come around your neighbourhood espousing ideas for sending nuclear weapons into North Korea and the like. There’s certainly no Japanese Ku-Klux Klan or racially aggravated violence to speak of. It’s more that normal Japanese people have little contact with foreigners, and seem bewildered what to do when that opportunity presents itself. But many Japanese people are at least uneasy around foreigners. Perhaps we are viewed stereotypically because there are only stereotypes to draw from. Blonde hair, blue eyes, large noses, speaking terrible Japanese, these stereotypes proliferate in Japanese TV shows and print media.

However, this occasionally irritating but ultimately harmless cultural insensitivity hides a much darker undercurrent, the effects of which go straight  to the highest level of government: the governor of Tokyo has stated, on record (See the section “racism”), that were there a natural disaster in Tokyo, all the foreigners were likely to rampage – looting, pillaging and much worse. We are barely tamed beasts, it seems, and thus we are to be watched carefully.

Today, this distrust has reached new heights with the announcement that all foreigners entering the country are to be fingerprinted and photographed. Ostensibly the reason for this is to combat terrorism and rising crime. I can perhaps see their point in doing this for visitors without visas – illegal immigration is becoming a world wide problem. But I have a visa, have lived here for ten years and pose a lot lower threat to law and order than the yakuza who are based near my city’s station. I already have to carry a special “Alien Registration Card” everywhere I go or face arrest – this already has my photo, signature, domicile and place of work written on it! Why not photograph the whole population? Crime, while rising, is lower than almost anywhere else in the world, and as far as I know is only committed by foreigners in proportion to their makeup of the entire population. By fingerprinting all the foreigners, you are telling the whole country that ALL foreigners are potential criminals and somehow untrustworthy. It won’t stop crime, but the sales of masks and gloves might go up.

The only country that photographs and fingerprints its tourists and visitors is the USA. Now, pardon me, but the USA has a much larger problem with terrorism than Japan. So does Britain, Spain and even France and Germany. They don’t take these draconian measures. The only terrorism perpetrated on Japanese soil has been perpetrated by the Japanese, most recently by the Aum Shinrikyou attacks on the Tokyo underground, and previously in the 70’s and 80’s by Japanese communist lunatics. But not a foreigner. Not once.

By bringing in these needlessly stringent rules the government assures the population that it is being strong on law and order, by picking on an easy target (since it’s not like we foreigners can vote against it) whilst really achieving very little: by concentrating on the foreigners it makes for more division in society, plays up to the right wingers and makes us feel less welcome in the communities in which we live. And of course, by focusing on the foreigners as a source of potential trouble, it makes domestic attacks like Aum’s subway atrocity more likely, since the police are literally looking the other way.