Tokyo

Permanent residents no longer to get public assistance – except when they do

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What is it like to be a foreigner living in Japan on a prolonged basis – i.e., a Permanent Resident of Japan – and you can’t make ends meet? Would the social safety net catch you or leave you to your own devices?

One of my teachers at a university in Tokyo was a Caucasian American who had been married to a Japanese woman for several decades. During the first 15 years of his residency, as he once related to us, every day he was stopped by a police officer at a kōban on his way to work. ( “Kōbans” are small neighbourhood police stations, usually staffed by only one person at a time. There are about 6,000 of them spread out all over Japan, and they deal with such basic tasks as giving directions, low-level crime, lost and found objects, and so on.)

In other words, during the 70’s and 80’s my teacher was stopped almost every day, usually by the very same police officer, and he was asked to produce his visa, which over time became a permanent residency card. The police officer always carried out this document control procedure with a smile, but the Kafkaesque absurdity of the situation was abundantly clear: how could a foreigner whose legal documents were in order, have turned into an illegal alien from one day to the next? If his papers were in order on one day, logically, they would still have been in order on the next day.

In judging the motivation of the Kōban officer who was irrationally eager to check the same residency papers of the same man over and over again, it is tempting to assume racism and xenophobia. Indeed, the objective observer can only interpret this case as a form of harassment. But was this harassment necessarily racism? Is there a distinction to be made between racism and xenophobia, in the context of an island nation such as Japan, with its particular history and cultural configurations? This question is not easy to answer, and I will not go into it here.

I also have to add that, according to my American teacher, after 15 years the practice suddenly came to an end. He could only guess at the reasons for the change, but at long last he was no longer stopped during his commute at the same Kōban over and over again.

The above anecdote is forever at the back of my mind while reading about the experiences and travails of the permanent resident. In July, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that permanent residents of Japan are not eligible to receive public assistance. In doing so, it overturned a High Court decision to grant public assistance to foreigners with legal residence. The Supreme Court overturned that decision because, in its opinion, permanent residents do not meet the legal definition of “a Japanese citizen”. Up to this point, whether or not to grant financial aid to permanent residents had been left to the discretion of local authorities, which could decide for themselves in which cases to extend it, and in which cases to refuse it.

However, despite coming from the Supreme Court and ostensibly being the last word on the matter, it does not mean that every single permanent resident will be denied aid from now on. The ruling is not likely to have much impact on the practice of allowing local authorities sort to things out based on the particulars of each individual request for aid, and based on their own judgment. Mainly, what the Court did was restrict the permanent resident’s right to complain in those cases when assistance is refused.

But the arbitrariness and seeming randomness of the current system is arguably a problem in its own right: permanent residents simply don’t know what to expect, and the decision might appear random to them. There is a Kafkaesque quality to such a situation, that is reminiscent of my American teacher’s experience of having to show the same police officer his legal documents every day for 15 years.

Pacifism’s Flame Flickers

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“We offer up … our pain, as fire seeks to burn and consume us.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche, in ‘Human, All Too Human’

In November of 2014, a man set himself on fire in Tokyo’s Hibiya Park as an apparent protest against recent changes made to Japan’s self-defense policies. He did not survive. This was similar to an incident near Shinjuku station in June, when a man doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire before the eyes of the horrified passers-by which he had been addressing at length on the subject of Japan’s self-defense policies.

Sixty years ago, in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat, the explicit promise to “give up war” was written into the Japanese constitution, permanently enshrined as Article 9 of that document. Ever since, there has been a constant tension between that limitation and the de facto rebuilding of the Japanese Defense Forces into one of the largest militaries of Asia. There has also been a constant tension between the political forces who want to amend the constitution and those which want to preserve the official, stated policy of pacifist self-defense. For the past six decades, the Japanese public has generally been on the side of the latter.

There are times, such as the present, when the public is more emphatically on the side of those who would preserve the pacifist Article 9 both in letter and in spirit. And while two self-immolating individuals can certainly not be equated with the Japanese public as a whole, the acts of these two men can perhaps be seen as an exaggerated expression of this long-held public conviction on this issue. Their deed is grounded in a deep wellspring of collective pacifist sentiment, and in the remembrance and traditions of past protests.

These men felt they could not tolerate the latest accelerated shift in Japan’s policies towards what Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has taken to describing as “collective self-defense”. Most crucially, this label is attached to new policies which include the possibility of preemptive measures: the ability to strike at a perceived threat to the nation before it has fully materialized. Equally controversial has been the government’s effort to expand the military budget. The political opposition hears in this the rumblings of past imperial adventures, whereas Abe points out the need to adapt to growing hostilities in a changing regional context. Thus Abe points defends the “pre-emptive strike” measure as a new interpretation of the Constitution.

Opinion polls continue to show that a majority of the public oppose these changes. The renewed activism that has recently sprung up around the constitutional issue is remarkable, when you consider that Japanese civil society has been disengaging from politics for several decades.