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Visible Minorities: Retrospective on 25 Years of Activism

SNA (Tokyo) — I’ve been involved in activism in Japan for many years. Indeed so many that my online archive of work, Debito.org, turned 25 years old last week. With that in mind, I’d like to devote this column to a retrospective of the past quarter century: What, if anything, has Debito.org contributed to help make conditions for Non-Japanese residents and Visible Minorities better?

Debito.org first went live on April 15, 1996, during the earlier days of the World Wide Web, as a means to respond to online bulletin board critics. When topics came up over and over again, I’d just archive a previous essay on Debito.org and send a link. After a couple hundred essays were organized into general information sites, Debito.org became a platform for issues involving foreign residents of Japan.

The first major issue I took up was “Academic Apartheid” in Japan’s universities. This is where all Japanese full-time faculty were granted contract-free tenure from day one of employment, while all foreign academics, despite many being better qualified than their Japanese counterparts, got perpetual ninkisei contracts (some of them term-limited) without the possibility of tenure.

I discovered a “smoking gun” one day in my university mailbox: A paper directive from the Ministry of Education encouraging national and public universities to fire their older foreign professors by not renewing their contracts. I scanned it, archived it, and sent a link to prominent advocates like Ivan P. Hall (author of Cartels of the Mind) for further exposure. It turns out that a government demanding their universities axe all their foreigners over forty is state-sponsored discrimination, and it blew up into an international issue that even then-US Ambassador Walter Mondale took up.

All of that information is still up on Debito.org today, and it turns out that a permanent archive that is searchable, citable, with context and without paywall, is a valuable resource, especially as many unscrupulous people would rather have a history of their actions and policies disappear into the ether. Once archived on Debito.org, it didn’t.

Soon other issues on Debito.org garnered national and international attention, even generating public policy movements. For example, building on the “Academic Apartheid” issue, I created the “Blacklist of Japanese Universities” that refuse to grant any foreign educator a job with tenure. It’s still my most accessed website, and I still get the occasional thank you from teachers steering clear of Japan’s academic quagmire.

Then it went beyond academia. When I found that foreigners were not allowed to be cited as residents with their families on local Residency Registries (juminhyo), Debito.org found a ministerial clarification that made exceptions for foreigners who were “head of household.” Hundreds of people downloaded and used it, embarrassing local governments unable to explain the silliness of the system.

With this came our most successful public demonstration ever. “Tama-chan,” an itinerant sea lion resting in the Tama River, had been given honorary residency by the city of Yokohama. So we dressed up as seals and asked for the same treatment. Cameras and national media converged, we submitted a petition in costume, and it became clear just how idiotic it was to require citizenship for official residency. In 2012, we watched with satisfaction as the government abolished the separate foreign registry system and allowed foreigners to have juminhyo.

Then we looked at the shenanigans of Japan’s police. When I found that hotels were unlawfully requiring all “foreign guests” to submit their Gaijin Cards and/or passports as a precondition for entry, we found the letter of the law that stated an ID check was only required from foreign tourists without an address in Japan, not from Japanese or foreign residents. I then created a portable guide for foreign residents to display at the front desk and avoid the hassle. We soon discovered the culprit: The National Police Agency had been making up rules about ID checks, illegally putting pressure on hotels to report any “foreigner” under their roof to police. That issue became a series of Japan Times articles, and at least one foreign embassy intervened to get official clarifications on the law.

It was the same with Japanese police stopping anyone on the street who “looked foreign” for instant Gaijin Card checks, and occasional pat-downs and shakedowns. Debito.org created portable legal writ that indicated that probable cause and a warrant was required. Suddenly other Japanese were videoing their interactions with bored, aggressive cops, and avoiding being shaken down as well.

Debito.org was also the first to report that the National Research Institute of Police Science was getting tax money to create a process for identifying “foreigner DNA” at crime scenes. After embarrassing exchanges in the media that questioned the science of conflating DNA with citizenship, the National Police Agency tried to deny racial profiling was standard operating procedure, claiming this policy had nothing to do with foreigners (even though gaikokujin was in its very title). Weeks later, all records of the policy quietly disappeared—except on Debito.org.

And in 1999, when we discovered that various places of business open to the public were displaying “Japanese Only” signs, refusing entry to all Visible Minorities (including Japanese citizens), Debito.org created a real-time information site cataloging the spread of this practice nationwide, naming and shaming perpetrators on the “Rogues’ Gallery of Exclusionary Establishments.”

People still send me signs. Last week we found a coffee shop in Nagasaki saying, “Foreign people are forbidden to enter this restaurant to prevent infection,” showing how racism continues to evolve with the times. Years later, the Rogues’ Gallery would become the fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation and monograph Embedded Racism: Japan’s Visible Minorities and Racial Discrimination (Lexington Books).

This set the stage for the Otaru Hot Springs Case, a landmark lawsuit that established in our judiciary that “Japanese Only” signs and rules constituted “racial discrimination” (not merely “discrimination against foreigners” or “cultural misunderstandings”). And to offer pathways for others pursuing their rights in court, I wrote multiple editions of a first-person account of the proceedings as the book Japanese Only (Akashi Shoten) in Japanese and English.

Decades later, these issues have resonated worldwide. The United Nations on three separate investigative missions has cited the research of Debito.org as part of its findings, as has the United States State Department annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for many years.

In 2013, at a meeting at the UN Committee against Torture, Japan’s representative Hideaki Ueda claimed that Japan’s human rights record was that of “one of the most advanced countries in this field,” occasioning ironic laughter from the audience and him angrily shouting, “Why you are laughing!? Shut up!! Shut up!!”

But it wasn’t all activism. Debito.org also archived a path of assimilation into Japan, including how to psychologically cope with a daily barrage of alienation, buy land and build a house, get married (and divorced), get permanent residency, have kids and put them through elementary school, give effective presentations to the government and media, and become a Japanese citizen. This became a book I co-authored with administrative solicitor Akira Higuchi called Handbook for Newcomers, Migrants, and Immigrants to Japan (Akashi Shoten).

Ultimately, Debito.org became a community for people wishing to offer a minority voice, countering narratives that a) portrayed “foreigners” as criminals and terrorists, b) saw “gaijin” as temporary guests instead of taxpaying residents, and c) saw a “Japanese” as something identifiable on sight. From this sprang newspaper columns, hundreds of journalistic articles, and several scholarly publications and books. It’s gone from a hobby to a life’s work, and the Debito.org Blog (a forum for daily discussion on current events) will incidentally be celebrating its fifteenth anniversary in June.

Has all this activism changed anything in Japan? That’s not for me to say. There are a lot of moving parts behind any social movement, but one narrative that has definitely changed is “Japan has no racism.” These days, the claim has been relegated to pedantic academic writing (offering the hair-splitting logic that Japan’s “ethnic discrimination” is mild compared to the “real” racism found in the West), or within internet discourse of the rightwingers or the ignorant.

But back in the early 1990s, denialism was the dominant narrative. Even the Hokkaido government was officially welcoming foreign businesses to “an island free of racists.” The Otaru Hot Springs Case blew that out of the water, and for decades after that, having a handy gallery of “Japanese Only” establishments on Debito.org to offer any skeptic demanding examples of exclusionism, ensured that memories did not fade, and allegedly “isolated cases” were contextualized within a trend.

This has percolated into public policy. Every December during “Human Rights Week,” even the do-nothing Human Rights Bureau of the Ministry of Justice perfunctorily mentions the discrimination foreigners face. The Ministry of Justice finally conducted a landmark national survey of foreign residents in 2017 to quantify just how deep discrimination runs here. Even a denialist as strident as former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe established mild laws against hate speech in 2016.

And last week, an April 11, 2021, editorial by the Asahi Shinbun called for “comprehensive” laws against discrimination, pointing out that current regulations violate international treaty by lacking penalties for discriminators.

These are exactly the arguments Debito.org has made for a quarter century now. The next quarter century will see us pushing to remove Japan from a short and ignominious list—the only major developed country without laws and penalties against racial discrimination.

That is the ultimate goal. Will we succeed? See you in another 25 years.

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