SNA (Tokyo) — My family and I often patronized a Chinese restaurant a couple of minutes away from our apartment. It’s open late at night and serves great food at decent prices.

We love the black vinegar cucumber and never fail to order it. The Chinese woman who owns the restaurant serves it to us without saying a word other than kore desu ne (Here you go). Once we took a vegan acquaintance, and she made a special vegan dish for him, which is extremely difficult in Chinese cuisine. The restaurant was always crowded with many workers from nearby companies and neighbors.

Last year, restaurants were asked to refrain from business and to shorten their hours to prevent the spread of Covid-19. We citizens were also asked to refrain from eating out. Last week, I was shocked to see a notice posted at the entrance of the restaurant: Thank you for your patronage over the years. Our restaurant will close on January 31, 2021.

It’s hard to imagine that the coronavirus didn’t have an impact on this. A popular restaurant beloved by the community can disappear so easily. I felt an inexplicable sense of loneliness at the sudden demise of a small business that I had taken for granted. I wondered what the Chinese family who ran it would do now.

As of February 2021, Japan is in the middle of a second state of emergency. The coronavirus momentum has not lost any of its toxic steam and the state of emergency is likely to be extended for another month. Since the pandemic struck us, more and more people are losing their jobs, having their wages reduced, not being paid by their companies even though they have been ordered to take a leave of absence, or being forced to close their stores or businesses.

The damage is not limited to any nationality or race. Three million foreigners reside in Japan. They live, work, go to school, raise their children, and take care of the elderly just like other members of the community. But their situation is more precarious than Japanese citizens, and the social safety net is full of holes. This has aggravated the damage from Covid-19. The coronavirus has uncovered the problem of poverty among foreigners more than ever before.

Even before the pandemic, indigent foreigners existed. Foreigners detained as “illegals” were sometimes released from detention on a provisional basis. The provisional release system is in such bad shape that it’s effectively half dead. Those released are not permitted to work nor join the national health insurance system.

Since their residence status is provisional, they must live in constant fear of a second round of detention. Without supportive volunteer organizations and churches, these foreigners might literally die on the streets, and the Japanese government would let them. They are lucky when they manage to find such support groups, and when they don’t, they inevitably end up homeless.

Many of the provisionally released foreigners have been persecuted back in their home countries and have applied for refugee status. The Japanese government arrests them and asks questions later; treating them like criminals, including incarceration.

This is happening today in Japan. Many Japanese people are unaware of this fact, nor do they imagine that their government is acting so ruthlessly. In order to avoid the sanmitsu, known in English as the Three C’s (closed spaces, crowded places, close-contact settings), the Immigration Bureau has released three times as many foreigners on the provisional release system as during the pre-Covid times. But they still throw them out on the streets with zero plan to provide support. This has led to a large number of indigent foreigners wandering the streets with nowhere to turn.

Article 25 of the Constitution guarantees the Right to Life, defined as “the right to lead a healthy and cultured minimum standard of living.” It is true that the grammatical subject of Article 25 is “all citizens” (kokumin), and if you take this term literally, you may think the right to life is not guaranteed to foreigners. But should the ultimate right to life of a human being depend on nationality? I don’t think so.

Article 30 states, “the people have the obligation to pay taxes,” but the fact that the subject of the sentence is the “people” does not mean that foreigners living in Japan are exempt from the obligation to pay taxes. They pay and must pay taxes just as Japanese do.

Seventy-five years ago, when the Constitution was ratified, there were few foreigners in Japan, so the question of the meaning of kokumin didn’t immediately arise. But with nearly 3 million foreigners living in Japan today, the Right to Life should transcend nationality. This is especially true when confronting a common enemy as dangerous as the coronavirus.

What happens to our Right to Life in the middle of this ongoing catastrophe? Many people are wandering the streets. It’s times like these that we need strong leaders to take an unbending stand on behalf of all residents.

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