SNA (Tokyo) — Why not just go back to your country? This simple exhortation to foreigners experiencing difficulty living in Japan captures the stark social reality for many of them. Foreigners (gaikokujin) are seen by many Japanese as a separate category of human, rather than individuals each with his or her own life and character.

Last year, the number of foreigners living in Japan jumped by 7.4% (202,044) to a record 2,933,137, according to the Immigration Services Agency. Permanent residents made up the largest visa group after increasing by 2.8% (21,596) to a record 793,164; followed by technical interns, up 25.2% (82,612) to 410,972; those on student visas, up 2.6% (8,791) to 345,791; and special-status permanent residents, down 2.8% (8,915) to 312,501.

Foreigners now make up about 2.2% of the country’s population, with permanent residents accounting for more than a quarter of them. These stats belie the facile notion that foreigners will eventually pack up and go home. Nevertheless, foreigners still face a monotone reality of preconceived notions about them.

I cannot but feel despair on many levels about how corporations and the government continue to insist on treating foreigners as outsiders, as The Other.

I teach labor and social security law at Sagami Women’s University in Kanagawa Prefecture. My students often express surprise that Japan’s social security programs apply to foreigners just as they do to Japanese. These students are not particularly closed-minded or racist; they simply have become overly accustomed to the myriad narratives that emerge from a schema that divides the world into us Japanese and them foreigners. Their whole lives, these students have breathed in these narratives like oxygen, so for them it stands to reason that Japanese and foreigners cannot possibly be eligible for the same programs in the same manner.

A fundamental principle of all these labor laws and social security laws is equal protection between citizens and foreign nationals. Article 3 of the Labor Standards Act prohibits discrimination in pay, work hours, and other conditions based on nationality, creed, or social position. Nearly every social security law, including the National Health Insurance Act, the Employees’ Pension Insurance Act (1954), the Long-Term Care Insurance Act and the Child Rearing Allowance Act, has been designed on this same principle of equality since the nationality exclusion provisions were repealed in the 1980s.

The Public Assistance Act is considered Japan’s safety net of last resort. The law retains the word kokumin, which means citizens, to refer to welfare recipients. The prevailing interpretation is that foreigners do not enjoy the right to receive public assistance as Japanese do. Permanent residents and those on fixed-residence visas, citizen’s spouse/family visas, permanent resident spouse/family visas, and special-status permanent residents can avail themselves of the system mutatis mutandis and at the discretion of the local government officials.

The right to life is an inalienable right guaranteed in Article 25 of Japan’s Constitution, i.e. “the right to maintain the minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living.” This includes public assistance, but foreigners do not have this right per se. In effect, the national government is saying, foreigners do not have the right to life.

In the famous Shiomi case, the Supreme Court ruled on March 2, 1989, that “The national government can decide social security policy for foreigners based on political determinants, and it is acceptable to prioritize citizens over foreign residents in providing public assistance from limited resources.” Personally, I look forward to this verdict being overturned as soon as possible.

How have foreign residents been impacted by the current Covid-19 pandemic Tozen Union, which I lead as executive president, is a labor union made up of members from more than 25 countries, including workers in various industries and job types. The greater part of members teach at language schools, as assistant language teachers (ALTs) at public schools, or as adjunct professors at universities. Schools closed after the seven-prefecture declarations of state of emergency on April 7 and the nationwide declaration on April 17, leading to many different crises.

One English conversation school that specializes in one-on-one lessons has instructors sign individual service provider (gyomu-itaku) agreements rather than employment contracts. Teachers therefore had no furlough wage protection under the Labor Standards Act during the corona-related suspension of operations, and were not provided any information regarding when the school would resume operations. A student became infected at one of this company’s schools, but corporate management failed to tell instructors, who found out by reading the company’s website news.

When a union member protested this slight during collective bargaining, the lead management negotiator snapped, “We don’t need to inform people external to the company.”

In other words, an employer at an English conversation school whose core business depends upon thousands of teachers, dismissed without hesitation their role and their very existence as merely “external people.” Her disdain filled me with something that extended beyond anger and into profound sadness. How would she run her school if these “external people” suddenly disappeared?

Of course, not all corporations are so inhumane. In Tozen Union, we have local chapters of Filipino workers at small town auto parts factories. The pandemic forced a slowdown in production, but management is guaranteeing their full pay during the suspension of operations. During the pre-Covid era, the members negotiated and won better wages, monthly guarantees, gender pay equity.

The coronavirus hits all manner of workers hard, regardless of nationality or race. But most foreign workers are treated as temporary outsiders. Employers design contracts to keep foreign workers out of Japan’s public health and pension scheme; offer only fixed-term contracts on the assumption that foreign workers will return to their home country; and unabashedly segregate the workplace.

Our union set up the Tozen Corona Hotline for Skype consultations. We have received countless inquiries from workers in many types of jobs around the country, members and non-members alike. A common theme is anxiety over whether their fixed-term contracts will be renewed or not, particularly because infections began to spike just around the end of March, when many one-year contracts are renewed.

Covid-19 brought into stark relief problems that have long faced foreign workers. Just when we must all come together in solidarity, transcending race and nationality, we see a push to ostracize foreigners; we hear racist statements from the mouths of public figures.

I can’t help thinking how stupid we humans are. The coronavirus challenges us to decide what kind of society we want for ourselves.

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