SNA (Tokyo) — You’ve probably heard adages like “Best laid plans…,” “Sh*t happens,” or Murphy’s Law. They exist as constant cautions to anyone designing something. Things do not always go as planned, unforeseen circumstances will arise, or sheer incompetence may become the standard. Snafus are inevitable, so anyone with any sense tries to account for them.

But sometimes government-designed policies lack sense. Or, in places where the government is as unaccountable as Japan’s, policymakers ignore cautions—or don’t get cautioned at all because a docile mass media is mobilized behind a national goal. So when things go wrong, very bad things can happen, especially when punishments for noncompliance only go one way and hurt innocent people.

That is in the cards yet again with Japan’s Covid border controls.

The current policy is that if you are a resident of Japan returning from overseas, you face a mandatory self-quarantine system. Everyone, regardless of nationality, signs a Foreign Ministry pledge that says, in part:

For 14 days after arrival in Japan, (1) I must stay at home or the accommodation listed in 2. below. I must consult the public health center and Health Monitoring Center for Overseas Entrants in advance when I need to change my accommodations due to unavoidable circumstances. (2) I must not have contact with anyone who I do not live with. (3) I must not use public transportation (trains, buses, cabs/taxis, domestic flights, etc.) for 14 days after entering Japan.

To ensure that people keep to the pledge, everyone upon arrival must install three things on their personal (or rented) cellphone: 1) a location tracking app, 2) a contact-confirming app, and 3) a video calling app (Skype or WhatsApp). The phone’s map app must also be set to record your location for the full fourteen days.

Further, reentrants must notify the authorities of their current location each day. If not, authorities will contact them via Skype, WhatsApp video call, or by voice cell phone number.

This sounds reasonable—if managed competently. After all, getting things set up on a cellphone involves some tech savvy (which many older people lack), so there should be easy installation at the airport. There should also be some avenues for follow-up questions. Finally, the policy should be applied equally to all reentrants regardless of nationality, since Covid is an equal-opportunity vector infector.

But here’s where the first problem comes up: It isn’t applied equally, and this is by design.

As Kyodo News reported, “The health ministry, which has asked for people to honor their pledge, has warned that penalties for noncompliance include publicly revealing names or, in the case of a foreign national, revocation of their status of residence and deportation.”

Read that again: This means if you get flagged as a Japanese, you get your name exposed to the public. Okay, that’s uncomfortable. But foreign residents will lose everything—their lives, livelihoods, and anything they ever invested in Japan—by getting booted out.

So with punishments this disproportionate, they better make sure nothing goes wrong.

Guess what? Kyodo also produced the headline: Up to 300 people per day breaking self-quarantine pledge in Japan. Fortunately, it did not distinguish non-notifiers by nationality, but this is a significant number. So what is happening?

Well, Japan Times reported that the location tracking app chosen by the government is confusing or faulty in design. (It only gets 1.5 stars on the Apple App Store.) Other sources have notified Debito.org that required software passwords were not received, nor were follow-up phone calls from the authorities when they couldn’t report in. Worse, the airport service installing the cellphone apps was understaffed, and in some cases apparently run by people with language difficulties offering unclear explanations.

Speaking of unclear explanations, officials at the Immigration Services Agency and the Health Ministry have reportedly been giving contradictory advice about how isolated you have to keep yourself. Do you have to stay completely sequestered within four walls for fourteen days, or can you go outside alone for some socially distanced exercise? What circumstances fall into the category of “unavoidable”? Can you nip out to get some food? The regulations are vague on these points.

That’s a serious design problem.

The Japanese media has also not been on top of these issues. Kyodo has reported the government’s statistics without any analysis, noting “around 200 to 300 people every day could not be confirmed to be in their pledged quarantine locations, with 70% failing to report their whereabouts to authorities and 30% found to be away from the locations.”

Any follow-up investigation on Kyodo’s part? Nope. Instead, the article just parrots the government’s outrage at the mess that the government itself caused through negligence and incompetence.

Masahisa Sato, an influential ruling party lawmaker on foreign and defense issues, sputtered on cue about how punishments were too lenient for rule-breakers, and compared the situation to a burst water pipe flooding the area. One proposal is to send private security investigators after nonrespondents; just ferret out the wrongdoers because obviously the government has done nothing wrong.

It doesn’t have to be this way—if we had a government that was actually held accountable for its actions; and if we had a mass media deterring the government from crafting discriminatory policy in the first place. Journalists should anticipate where things might go, and then investigate and criticize how things did go.

Alas, that’s a tall order in Japan. In the more than three decades I’ve studied this place, I’ve found that any policy that involves foreigners becomes a huge media blind spot. That’s because Japanese journalism rarely treats news that affects foreign residents as part of the “public interest.” Put simply, foreigners usually don’t count.

And if this was a policy affecting only foreigners, then the regular line of reasoning would be that foreigners should just be good guests and follow the rules we set, their civil or human rights be damned.

But the only reason why this issue has received any attention at all is because Japanese are also being affected, what with the rolling states of emergency around the country due to other flawed government policies regarding testing, distancing, and vaccines.

Moreover, this media blind spot doesn’t stop at simple negligence. When foreigners do become part of the news, it’s usually to blame them for something. And that’s the fear again with this current scandal.

As we’ve covered here throughout the pandemic, foreigners have repeatedly been blamed for something or another, starting from the Diamond Princess cruise ship outbreak last year, continuing through the blanket border entry bans of foreigners only, and on to the drumbeat about foreign Covid variants (which were verifiably brought in and incubated by Japanese who had not observed the government’s previously lenient “honor-system” quarantines).

The truly jaded might say the current system was designed as yet another avenue for cancelling Non-Japanese residents’ visas.

As you know, Japan has no official immigration policy, again by design. After all the insecure jobs and revolving-door visas, which throw all sorts of unforgiving obstacles to ever obtaining permanent residency or immigrant status, this new system of tracked self-quarantines can easily become a great opportunity to boot out even permanent residents who dare to travel overseas.

But this time, Japanese are getting a little taste of what it’s like to be a foreigner in Japan, since the outcomes of these flawed policies affect Japanese too, with deadly results.

No wonder the subculture-oriented publisher Takarajimasha took out a full-page ad in all major newspapers on May 10 protesting the government’s refusal to cancel the 2020 Olympics despite all the outbreaks. As they said, “At this rate, politics is going to get us all killed.”

That’s what the Fourth Estate, not its advertisers, should be saying. Yet when the Japanese government does stupid things, like holding an international superspreader sports event in the middle of a pandemic, designing unscientific policies that treat Japanese as epidemiologically exceptional, and then shift the blame to foreigners when inevitable snafus happen, Japan as a system will continue to hurt innocent people.

It’s just a shame that when “sh*t happens,” it winds up happening mostly to our Non-Japanese residents. That’s what you get when there’s hardly anyone out there publicly defending them. This must change. Don’t let Japan’s inept policymakers continue to get away with their blame games.

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