Chris Burgess (November 2016)

China as the Key to Understanding Contemporary Japanese Policy Making

Chris Burgess (November 2016)

In September 2016, the media in Japan carried a number of stories about the Japanese politician known as Renho who was running for the leadership of the opposition Democratic Party. The attention centred on whether Renho, born in Japan to a Taiwanese father and Japanese mother, had fully renounced her Taiwanese nationality as required by the Japanese Nationality Law.

In an interview at the time, Renho decried all the fuss.“I was born and brought up in Japan,” she commented, “what can I say except that ‘I’m Japanese’?Quite honestly, I think this incident says a lot about the environment in Japan today.” She asked whether, in this age of globalisation, foreigners would really want to come and live in a Japan which appears so intolerant of diversity. “There is a danger”, she warned,“that people overseas will misunderstand Japan as being a closed culture.”

One interesting thing about this episode is that it highlights how Japan remains relatively closed to the world, a country without an official immigration policy where the perception of ethnichomogeneity remains strong. But equally interesting is how the topic of dual nationality has become taboo. While in the past, notably in 2008, there were serious moves to reform the Nationality Law and have Japan recognise dual nationality, today the topic has fallen completely off the political radar. The Yomiuri Shimbun, explaining why Japan does not recognise dual nationality, claimed that it was because of potential confusion over which country’s law should be applied, giving the example of a person getting married in two countries. This made little sense given that most developed countries have long recognised dual nationality without serious incident. Even Japan’s conservative neighbour Korea revised its Nationality Law in 2011 as a measure to prevent brain drain, attract talented foreigners, and fight the low birth-rate – all issues supposedly at the top of Abe’s agenda. So why has dual nationality become a taboo topic in Japan?

This question has a simple one-word answer: China. The largest group of foreign residents in Japan – 665,847 at the end of 2015 –are from mainland China.Of these, 225,605 hold general permanent residence, again the largest group. If Japan were to allow dual nationality, many Chinese would no doubt take advantage of the revision to gain the right to vote in elections and exercise political power. Evidence that this is the real reason that dual nationality has become a taboo subject comes from previous deliberations on granting permanent residents the right to vote in local elections, a proposal that also enjoyed considerable support in the past but which is now similarly taboo. At that time, critics cited the risk to national security if nationals of countries “hostile” to Japan wielded political influence.

The two examples above hint at how completely China has come to dominate and drive Japan policy-making in only a few short years. This can be traced back to September 2012 when Japan nationalised three of the five Senkaku Islands (known as the Diaoyu Islands in China) in the East China Sea. Although the territorial dispute had long been shelved, Japan’s nationalisation (ironically as a measure to prevent nationalist Tokyo Mayor Ishihara from buying them) outraged China and sent bilateral relations into freefall. Since then, mass Chinese ship incursions around the Islands have become commonplace, with over 230 on a single day in August alone. Fighter jets were also scrambled a record 571 times against Chinese aircraft in fiscal 2015, a record high reminiscent of Cold War levels.

Friction with China has significantly affected Japan’s policy on Okinawa. In recent years, a key political issue has been how to reduce the burden on Okinawan people caused by the presence of US bases. Currently, US bases comprise about 18% of the main island and problems such as noise pollution, US military crimes, aircraft accidents, and environmental degradation have resulted in increasingly bitter local protests and demonstrations.However, the proximity of the Senkaku Islands to Okinawa – officially they are part of Ishigaki City – has turned Okinawa into what has been called “the very front line of national defence.” Indeed, in January Japan doubled the number of F-15 fighter jets stationed in Naha. In response, some voices in China have begun to question Japanese sovereignty over the Ryukyu Islands, including Okinawa, alarming Japanesepoliticians. The result has been the opposite of the de-militarisation demanded by Okinawa’s residents.

As the earlier Renho case suggested, friction with China has resulted in a more insular, conservative national identity, strengthening the notion that Japanese are a homogeneous people (tan'itsu minzoku) who constitute a racially unified nation (tan'itsu minzoku kokka).For example, in response to a recent UN recommendation that Japan recognise Okinawanpeople as indigenous, the government said that there are no indigenous peoples except for the Ainu (a group who was only recognised as indigenous in 2008). One lawmaker noted that the UN proposal represented a risk to the national interest since it related to jurisdiction over Okinawan land and resources, including the Senkaku Islands.

Growing friction in the East China Sea coupled with an increasingly assertiveposition by China in the South China Sea have seen Japanese public opinion on China turn strongly negative. A March poll by the Japanese Cabinet Office found that 83.2% of respondents felt no affinity towards the Chinese, the highest figure since the poll began in 1978. Since Chinese tourists comprise the biggest group of foreign tourists– 5 million or one quarter of the total in 2015 – increasingly negative attitudes towards Chinese raises doubts whether the government’s goal to welcome 40 million tourists by the 2020 Tokyo Olympics is realistic. And while the positive economic effects of tourism –epitomised byChinese “binge shopping” (bakugai) – has been one of the most successful parts of Abe’s growth strategy, there are signs that the Japanese public is growing less enthusiastic about the influx of foreigners, especially since the shopping sprees have tailed off. Social media in particular has increasingly featured stories of bad mannered Chinese tourists, something that tourism policy makers have begun to sit up and take notice of.

Nowhere is the clash between economic policy – which favours opening up and embracing globalisation – and public opinion – which is increasingly xenophobic, particularly towards China and the Chinese – better illustrated than Japan’s policy on migration and immigrants.A rapidly ageing populace coupled with a low birth-rate will see the population drop by some 19 to 20 million by 2040. Already, serious labour shortages are emerging in a number of industries. A 2000 report by the United Nations Population Division entitled ‘Replacement Migration: Is it a Solution to Declining and Aging Population?’ noted that Japan would need to accept 600,000 foreign workers a year for the next fifty years simply in order to sustain its economy at the 1995 level. But while migration might appear to outsiders to be an obvious solution to Japan’s demographic woes, immigration has long been taboo to policy makers inside Japan.

Japan’s ‘no immigration principle’ can be traced back to the first Nationality Law of 1899 and remains an exclusionary system that aims to (a) prevent an influx of unskilled labour and (b) restrict access to Japanese nationality. Even today, Japan does not officially have an ‘immigration policy’ and the term ‘immigrant’ is studiously avoided by policy-makers.Prime Minister Abe made this clear in a joint meeting of the Council on Economic and fiscal Policy and the industrial Competiveness in 2014 when he took pains to stress that “we should be careful not to mistake the ‘utilisation’ of foreign workers in nursing care and house-keeping as immigration policies.”

The public is firmly behind the ‘no immigration principle.’Opinion polls consistently show 60 to 65% against Japan opening its doors to foreign workers. While many Japanese do worry about the effects of the declining population, increasing the rate of working women and the elderly are the preferred solutions. Behind this opposition to migration is a fear that Japan is becoming less safe and public safety is declining, with a strong perception that this is because of crimes committed by foreigners. These fears have only been heightened in recent years by terrorist atrocities in Europe and other countries with high migration levels. In fact, foreign crimes peaked in 2005, reaching record lows after a crackdown on illegal overstayers between 2004 and 2009. Moreover, the foreign crime rate remains much lower than the Japanese rate, even when including immigration crimes (which Japanese of course cannot commit). Nevertheless, the foreign crime discourse remains strong thanks in part to the National Police Agency which continues to highlight the “high level” of foreign crime, particularly the rise in violent crime committed by foreigners. Latest figures show 14,267 offences committed in 2015 (a third of which was visa crime) with 10,042 arrests, the former down around 70% on 2005. Chinese dominated arrests, at over 36% of the total, reinforcing public perceptions that foreign crime is largely Chinese crime.

“Illegal” foreign residents – those overstaying their visas – remain a particular concern in Japan, despite their numbers having fallendramatically in recent years: as of January 1st 2016 there were an estimated 62,818 “illegals”, way down from the 1993 peak of almost 300,000. Chinese made up the second largest group, after South Koreans, at 8,741. Among these overstayers, a significant number – 5,803 – were foreign trainees who went missing. Chinese made up more than half this figure at 3,116.

The trainees described above were part of the Technical Intern Training Program (TITP), an international cooperation programme set up by Japan in 1993 to teach technical skills to people from developing countries which they can then take back with them to support their country’s economic development. Today, though, the TITP has taken on a very different role from what was originally intended: it has become a back-door guest-worker program to supplement Japan’s growing labour shortages. In 2015, there were some 908,000 foreign workers in Japan, up from 486,000 in 2008, and a significant number of these – 192,655 in 2015 – work under the TITP. These trainees or interns worked at around 35,000 workplaces around the nation as of the end of 2015, especially in small factories and farms.

The fact that a record number of foreign trainees went missing in 2015 is evidence of a seriously flawed program, one which has been strongly criticised for human rights abuses, including poor working conditions, low or unpaid wages, and confiscation of passports. An inspection by the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare earlier this year found nearly 3,700 workplaces to be in violation of labour standards, including safety standards, up 24% from the previous year. The U.S. Department of State’s 2016 “Trafficking in Persons Report” highlights cases of forced labouroccurring within the program and notes that the Japanese government “did not prosecute or convict forced labor perpetrators despite allegations of labor trafficking in TITP.”

Following a 2010 revision, some improvements have been seen in the working conditions of trainees on the TITP. Moreover, a new bill likely to be enacted during the current Diet session, aims to further strengthen surveillance and supervision of employers of foreign trainees. However, the problem remains that due to the “no-immigration principle” rooted in fears of an influx of Chinese workers, Chinese overstayers, and Chinese crime, the TITP remains one of the government’s only options to deal with increasingly serious labour shortages, a purpose for which it was not intended. So at the same time that the government in introducing a bill to strengthen oversight of the TITP it is introducing another that will expand the trainee program to include workers in nursing care and agriculture, two sectors suffering from an acute lack of manpower. The Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare for example, points to a shortage of about 380,000 caregivers by 2025 while the number of farmers has halved in the past 20 years. The reforms have sparked growing unease that non-certified foreign care workers with poor Japanese may impact quality of care and solidify already low wages, causing a further deterioration in working conditions. However, the alternative of setting up a proper guest-worker program remains politically taboo. In sum, despite some support for opening up, especially in business circles, many if not most Japanese seem resigned to a smaller economy – and a lonelier old-age – if that is the price that has to be paid for maintaining social cohesion and public safety.

The lack of a coherent immigration policy might suggest that conservatism and nationalism have become the main drivers of contemporary Japanese policy. Certainly, since Abe’s second term as Prime-Minister began in December 2012, many have noted the re-emergence of a right-wing nationalistic discourse in Japan, known as ukeika(a turn to the right) in Japanese. This discourse has its roots in Abe’s first term, perhaps best represented by the reform of the 1947 Fundamental Law of Education (FLE) in 2006. The focal point of the revision – and one of the key educational goals – was patriotism, and the new law stressed the importance of developing ‘a self-awareness of being Japanese’ and fostering respect for traditional culture and morality. The background to this was a move towards historical revisionism – the reinterpretation of Japan’s wartime history – which began in the late 1990s. Abe himself made several controversial statements about the so-called “comfort women” and Japan’s war criminals in his first term, and became the first prime-minister since Koizumi to visit Yasukuni Shrine in December 2013. Abe’s visit provoked outrage in China and Korea and he has since refrained from visiting to avoid further antagonising those countries.

Reform of the FLE was only the first of a number of reversals of the political reforms introduced during the post-war occupation. Recent years have seen a number of steps towardsmilitary ‘normalisation’ driven by the perception of China as a growing threat. The first was the introduction of a new National Security Council in December 2013, modelled on the U.S. NSC. Almost exactly a year later, the State Secrecy Law came into effect amid much protest: in 2015 the total number of administrative documents containing information classified as specially designated state secrets was reported at 272,020.Reporters without Borders has called it “a very harsh law that deters journalists from embarking on investigations” and ranked Japan at 72 in its 2016 Press Freedom Index, a sharp fall from 26 in 2002. More recently, in March 2016, a package of security laws came into effect, reinterpreting the constitution to allow the military to operate overseas for “collective self-defence.” Known colloquially in Japan as ‘the war law’, the reinterpretation effectively allows military combat for the first time in 70 years. Although the scenarios presented by the government typically consisted of coming to the aid of U.S. allies under attack by North Korea, there is no doubt that Japan has a firm eye on Chinese growing assertiveness in the South China Sea.

The final step in this “normalisation” is to re-write the post-war constitution, something Abe has long been very clear he is eager to do. The LDP has already presented a draft for amendments, changes ProfessorTessa Morris-Suzuki calls “so profound that they should probably be described, not as plans for constitutional revision, but rather as plans for a new constitution.” Reform, though, would seem to be simply a matter of time since Abe now has a super-majority after two electoral landslides.

While nationalism and conservatism present analluring framework for understanding why Japan does what it does, these risk disguising the fact that China tends to be the overriding concern. The issue of whaling is one example of how the China card can override nationalistic concerns. Despite widespread international condemnation, Japan has long continued whaling as an expression of national identity and pride in traditional food culture. However, in April 2014 Japan found itself in a dilemmawhen the International Court of Justice – in a case brought by Australia, one of Japan's closest friends and security partners in the region – ruled that Japan's “research” whaling was not scientific and ordered Japan to halt whaling in the Antarctic. Since the Japanese government has consistently stressed the importance of respecting international law and a rules-based international maritime order in relation to China’s moves in the South China Sea, it found itself effectively forced to choose between China or nationalism. The July ruling against China by The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), on a case brought by the Philippines, merely reinforced this dilemma. As a result, although Japan did make moves to re-start whaling, these have been on a much smaller scale; moreover, at the recent IWC meeting in Slovenia Japan failed to submit a proposal to resume commercial whaling as it had done regularly for the last 20 years.