Journal

Huddled Masses

2012-02-23T02:00:06Z

Back in the Dark Days of my first marriage, I hatched a scheme for my Great Escape. Like the plan in the Steve McQueen movie, mine involved getting papiere first. To be exact, I needed the Japanese equivalent of a Green Card, the eijûken (永住権, permanent residence visa/right), which would allow me to remain in Japan and work wherever I liked even after divorcing my wife.

This was over a dozen years ago and at the time I didn’t know many people who had an eijûken.

Rumors abounded. One friend, the unmarried publisher of an English monthly, had gotten his after numerous years promoting the city and region through his magazine. (Apple polisher!) As the owner of a company, he was also the employer of several Japanese. All good things in the fickle eyes of Immigrations officers. Another friend, who was running an import and wholesale business, was able to skirt the eijûken visa issue entirely by getting a business visa. Still another friend, a Mexican with a sketchy employment record since coming to Japan, told me the key was having “muchos niños”.[1]

None of these were really viable options for me.

But, then an ex-girlfriend, a woman from Beijing, told me that she had managed to get the eijûken herself.

In addition to being Chinese—the first mark against the poor girl[2]—she was separated from her husband, a no-good sonovabitch whose failed business had left him deep in debt and working in the “water trade”[3] in the city’s seediest part of town, Nakasu.

If she could get an eijûken, I thought, by gum, I can get one, too!

To apply for the permanent residency visa you have to supply the authorities with all kinds of documents—tax returns, proof that you are enrolled in the national health care scheme, and so on, in addition to completing a lengthy form that reads like an overly inquisitive job application. (For details, check the Immigration Bureau’s website.)

The biggest challenge for me was that I didn’t have half of the documents necessary. I went into Immigration, anyways, assuming that I would be denied, but hoping that in my failure to get the visa I would learn exactly what I needed to hand in the next time I applied. To my great surprise and delight, however, they gave me the eijûken on the first go around.

I learned a number of things from this.

The first was the Law of the Ticked Box.

I’ve come across this again and again over the years. Bureaucrats in Japan are a class of people who can’t be bothered to do real work or make decisions on their own, and avoid at all cost doing things without precedence[4]. They will prefer to reject something outright than look into the mitigating details.

A shoe importer recently told me of an on-going headache of his. A shipment of shoes from Mexico had been blocked at Customs. The reason for the delay was that two numbers on the documents did not match. Even though the shoes inside the shipment and those described in the bill of lading were the same, the two-digit discrepancy in numbers meant that the shipment had to be either returned to Mexico or disposed of by Customs. The Customs Official, it seems, didn’t want to take responsibility for any unticked boxes on the document he would have to file later.

When I applied for my eijûken I figured that the officials at Immigration weren’t so much interested in the documents I was providing so long as I was providing some kind of document they could put into a file which would enable them to tick a box showing that they had done their job. When in doubt, overwhelm a public official with paper.

As I was for the most part self-employed at the time that I applied and not paying taxes—oops—I didn’t have tax returns. So, I handed in some W-2-like withholding slips (源泉徴収票, gensenchôshûhyô) from the few places where I did piecemeal work—it hardly added up to a respectable salary. As for health insurance, I wasn’t enrolled in the National Health care scheme but I did have a policy with AXA and offered them a copy of that, instead. It must have been the most half-arsed application for an eijûken they had ever come across. And yet, I walked away with a permanent residence visa.

It’s worth pointing out that while I did not have muchos niños—I was childless at the time—I had been living in Japan for about eight years by then, married for three or four of the most recent years, and was on my third spousal visa. Boxes ticky-ticky-ticked!

The second thing I discovered was that officials from one ministry were not communicating with officials from other ministries. In the U.S., if the Bureau of Immigration found an immigrant who hadn’t been paying taxes, they would most likely report him to the IRA. But here? Avoiding taxes does not fall within the purview of Immigration’s authority, so why bother.

The third and most important thing I learned was that Japan in its own discreet way was ratcheting up immigration. As far as I know, this has not been made public and evidence is still anecdotal.[5] But, where the eijûken, and naturalization, was at one time a rarity among foreign residents in Japan, it seems to have become fairly common, and not only among Westerners, but among Chinese and other Asians, too.[6]

The easing of immigration makes sense as nothing the government has tried so far to increase the birth rate has borne any fruit. Ask the average Japanese, however, what they think about opening the doors to more immigrants and you won’t find too many enthusiastic supporters. Many Japanese believe the very reason their country is safe is thanks to the homogeneity of her people. You only have to look at America with all its racial tensions and crime, they say, to see that immigration is not the solution.

But immigration is the solution. It would not only bring in much needed consumers and tax payers, but also young people with the ambition to make the Japanese Dream come true for themselves. Selective immigration could also mean that Japan would be able to invite the best and brightest from all over the world to come study, work, research and invent, reinvigorating the creative and innovating force that Japan has for so long been. The alternative would be the slow and painful decline of one of the most prosperous modern countries the world has ever known.

[1] The Immigration Bureau offers some examples of successful applicants.

[2] The Chinese are to Japan what the Mexicans are to the United States: virtually personae non gratae, unless they have lots of money to spend once in the country. The slogan of Japan’s immigration should be: Bring us your Coddled Masses . . .

[3] The “water trade” (水商売, mizu shôbai or 水稼業, mizu kagyô) refers to businesses which make their money by entertaining and whose fortunes can rise and fall depending on their popularity with customers and include restaurants, geisha houses known as machiai (待合), bars, and “snacks”.

[4] There is an excellent (though slightly dated) book by Misao Miyamoto called Straightjacket Society: An Insider’s Irreverent View of Bureaucratic Japan, which goes into great detail about this. It is a must-read for serious students of Japan.

[5] Anecdotal in that there sure seem to be a lot more foreigners (both Western and Asian) today than there were twenty years ago. In fact, in 1990 there were about 1 million foreigners living in Japan, the vast majority of them being Koreans (zainichi kankokujin) whose ancestors had come to Japan during the colonization of the Korean peninsula. Today there are over 2 million. In the 18 years leading to 2010, the number of foreigners living in Japan increased 80%. The number of Chinese has more than doubled. (This does not include illegal aliens). For more information, check here and here.

[6] Incidentally, a Japanese-Brazilian woman who was married to a Taiwanese doctor she met at a Japanese university once told me of the hoops she and her husband had to go through to become naturalized. This was well over twenty years ago. It had taken nearly a decade, and untold sums of money “donated” to influential politicians to finally gain citizenship. Their first try had been rejected because of a parking ticket of all things.

If possible . . .

2012-02-21T00:48:43Z

Japanese politeness and reserve is taken to a new level in this NO SMOKING sign which has the rider narubeku (なるべく, "if at all possible") attached. It's a very subtle way to appeal to the reasonableness of smokers to refrain from lighting up, something that is much more effective than admonishing in that often snooty tone, "Go-enryo onegaishimasu" (ご遠慮願います, "You are requested to refrain from . . . ").

Debt and Taxes

2012-02-19T10:48:00Z

A somewhat dated political cartoon featuring the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in the upper left against an increase in the consumption tax proposed by the Liberal Democrats (LDP). The more things change, the more they stay the same. The Japanese government has recently unveiled plans for raising the consumption tax gradually over the next three years. From April 2014 the rate will be bumped up from the current 5% to 8%, and a year later to 10%. The IMF, meanwhile, has argued that the rate must be raised to at least 15% if Japan is to be serious about tackling the public debt which currently stands at more than double the size of its GDP. (By comparison, the ratio of Greece’s public debt to GDP is 143%; Italy’s, 119%.)

"When in a fix raise the tax on tobacco." Poor smokers have seen the price of cigarettes go up and up in recent years thanks to politicians too timid to take bold measures to reduce debt. The opposition LDP, which is vehemently against the tax hike is making renewed calls for a dissolution of the House of Representatives. These useless bastards, who can rightly be blamed for much of Japan’s present day woes, have been bolstered by a slide in the Noda cabinet’s approval rate, a dismal 32%, and polls suggesting that some sixty percent of people are opposed to an increase in the consumption tax.[1]

I’m not a big fan of the IMF, an organization which has caused undue suffering the world over, but I have to agree with it here. Besides, the consumption tax is quite low when compared to other countries. I do, however, have two concerns about the Noda plan: the uniformity of those planned tax hikes, and, two, the over-reliance on revenue increases alone to address Japan’s debt crisis.

When you consider how much the national and local government wastes on unnecessary public works—such as cementing the countryside over, spoiling Japan’s once beautiful coastline with “tetrapods” (gigantic concrete blocks resembling jacks), reclaiming land in a country with a falling population, and building gleaming new airports in places where nobody in their right mind would fly in or out of—it’s not difficult to see that there is quite a bit of room for cuts in spending. I say, for every one percent increase in the consumption tax, the government should try to find ways to reduce government spending by 10 percent. They could start with cutting the pay and number of politicians, reducing budgets in the nation’s behemoth bureaucracy, eliminating redundancies, and so on (See previous post). It’s high time for Japan’s public servants to start serving the public rather than the other way around.

Secondly, increases in the consumption tax should not be uniformly levied, as is the case today, but applied in a manner such that the tax is less regressive, less burdensome on those least able to pay. For example, maintain or reduce the 5% consumption tax on basic foodstuff, but raise it to 20% on, say, junk food and fast food. Keep it at 5% on domestically produced clothing, but 25% on clothing manufactured in China or Vietnam. Maintain the 5% consumption tax on hybrid and electric cars, but raise it to 15% on other vehicles, 25% or more on gas-guzzling SUVs and luxury cars. By manipulating the tax rates in this manner you can steer people towards habits that have long-term positive benefits on the environment, health, and society.[2]

On second thought, nix that idea. It’ll only encourage corporations to grease politicians’ palms in order to get their products exempted from the higher consumption tax. (More on this later.) Let’s just keep the tax on unprocessed foods, such as veggies, fruit, fish and meat at the current 5% and raise the tax on everything else. But, by all means, let’s bring the spending down first.

[1] According to Asia One News, “Nearly two-thirds of respondents to a recent nationwide Yomiuri Shimbun survey believe it is necessary to raise the consumption tax rate to maintain the nation's social security system. But only 16 per cent of the respondents said the tax increase should be in line with the government and ruling parties' plan to raise the tax to 8 per cent in April 2014 and then to 10 per cent in October 2015.”

[2] Some readers might comment that the government already has an “eco-point” scheme which provides rebates to consumers who opt for energy saving appliances and cars. I say, keep the program going.

Winter Wonderland

2012-02-19T06:07:53Z

I can confidently say without having to look at the news that Fukuoka is enjoying (yes, enjoying) its heaviest snowfall in eighteen years. None of the weather sites had predicted it. None had said that it would not only snow heavily all day Saturday, but would continue snowing throughout the night. Their proclivity to err on caution meant that when I woke up this morning, I was happily surprised to find a Winter Wonderland outside my bedroom window. (Nothing brings out the little boy in me quite like ground covered with several inches of new snow.)

I’m tempted to hop on a train and ride out to the southern part of the prefecture to see how much snow they got, but unfortunately I’ve got things to do. Ho-hum.

A Woman's Nails

2012-02-17T12:12:36Z

For a very limited time--offer expires on Sunday night--A Woman's Nails will be available for free at Amazon.com.

Waste not, want not

2012-02-16T02:04:57Z

When I wrote in an earlier post of Japan’s need to reduce wasteful spending, I was thinking first and foremost about the need to reduce both the number of lawmakers in the national and local assemblies and to cut the generous emolument paid to politicians.

The Japanese Diet has 722 members, 480 in the House of Representatives—the Lower House in which real power lies—and 242 in the House of Councillors, or Upper House. In a country that has only 40% of America’s population, there is no reason it should have 35% more representatives in its national assembly. You could cut the number of politicians by about half to say 350—250 in the lower house and 100 in the upper house—and there would still be more than enough representation.

As for the salaries of Japan’s politicians, I first became concerned when my wife, who was working in the local mayor’s office, told me that the city assembly members earned some ¥800,000 per month whether they were in session or not. Whenever the assembly did meet, they were given an additional per diem just for showing up. Biannual bonuses and first-class “fact-finding” trips abroad at public expense were a matter of course, and when they completed their term they received another bonus. Not a bad deal—almost made me want to change my citizenship and become a politician—but when the city had been struggling with debt brought on by misguided projects, for which these feckless leaders voted, I couldn’t help that something was wrong.

An interesting article last year in the Japanese Times which went into detail about the finances of the Tokyo metropolitan government, headed today by his majesty Shintarô Ishihara, helped to understand that Fukuoka was not alone in overspending and overcompensating its leaders.

The article said, “At ¥11.8 trillion, the metro government’s budget for fiscal 2011 is equal to Saudi Arabia’s, and was barely eclipsed by South Korea’s ¥14 trillion and Norway’s ¥12.7 trillion budget in fiscal 2010.”

I don’t know about you, but I was flabbergasted when I read that. Granted, the yen has been riding high lately which has a way inflating the price of everything, but Korea, a country that is technically at war and has the world’s sixth largest standing army at 653,000 troops, and a population 3.7 times larger than the city of Tokyo, spends only 19% more to run an entire country than Ishihara spends to run the Tokyo metropolitan government.

What’s more: “According to the metro government, Gov. Shintarô Ishihara will receive ¥1,359,900 a month in fiscal 2010. His bonus, paid in June and December, totaled about ¥6.6 million, bringing his annual income to about ¥26 million. At the end of each four-year term, Ishihara also received retirement benefits. He received more than ¥47.2 million at the end of the first term in 2003, followed by over ¥45.2 million at the end of his second term in 2007. He is expected to receive ¥43.5 million after his third term expires in April.”

That’s a hell of a lot of money. In his first term in office alone Ishihara earned a total of about ¥151,200,000 (between $1.3 ~ 2 million, depending on the exchange rate). By comparison, Obama earns roughly the same amount of money—$400,000 per year (about ¥31 million)—as leader of the free world.

Something is very, very wrong with this picture and the sooner Japanese cotton on to this, the better. It's high time for a Green Tea Party to shake this country up and end politics as usual.

Al Hysteria

2012-02-14T04:54:03Z

If you follow the news you may have already heard about Hamza Kashgari the Saudi blogger/journalist who was sent back to Saudi Arabia from Malaysia after fleeing to the southeast Asian country due to death threats arising from three allegedly blasphemous tweets.

As for the controversial tweets which sparked the controversy? According to the Daily Beast, Kashgari tweeted on the prophet’s birthday:

“On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you.

“On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.

“On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.”

For his honesty, the 23-year-old journalist may receive the death penalty in a country where apostasy is a capital offence. That, however, might not be enough for some: The National Post reported that an online reader of al-Madina had written, “The only choice is for Kashgari to be killed and crucified in order to be a lesson to other secularists.” A Facebook page, “Saudi people want punishment for Hamza Kashgari”, was reported to have grown to more than 20,000 members, but appears to have been removed by the administrators.

Unlike many Americans, I do not hold the religion of Islam in contempt or fear its followers. There are Muslims in my own family. Also, I feel that the United States would better advance its aims in the Middle East by taking a more Arab-friendly stance rather than continuing to do the bidding of Israel, a country which I believe is the second greatest source of instability in the region after the United States.

That said, I can’t help but feel that Muslims do a great disservice to their cause whenever they overact like this. How do you expect us in the West to take you seriously when your hypersensitivity to questions of religion brings all debate to a crashing halt? With almost one and a half billion Muslims in the world today, your faith should be more than strong enough to permit those few who harbor doubts to speak frankly.

Free Hamza Kashgari!

Bemused

2012-02-13T04:36:08Z

A friend noted the other day that I hadn’t posted anything in quite a while.

It’s true.

I was hoping to post something daily once the spring break started and I would be getting paid for essentially not showing up for work. (If someone working at a Japanese university tells you he’s busy, be vewy, vewy suspicious.) The thing is, the Muses, Thalia and Calliope, have been very kind to me since I returned from my holidays in the States: I am off to a promising start on two novels (one of which I alluded to in an earlier post, and another you can read here).

I try to hammer out a chapter or so of each every morning, which usually leaves me with little time or energy for writing anything else. Not that I don’t want to, mind you.

I have also been asked to put together a series of presentations on e-publishing. (Bit like the blind leading the blind, I’m afraid.)

Anyways, your patience is requested.

The "Problem" with Japan

2012-02-05T02:06:11Z

Whenever I hear politicians and commentators fret over Japan’s low birth rate and its implications for the viability of the pension system, I can’t help but ask the hell the country’s “leaders” have been doing for the past thirty years. When the pension system was set up, Japan still had a relatively young population where each retiree was supported by half a dozen or so workers paying into the pension scheme. As Japan developed and become wealthier, however, life expectancies were extended and the birthrate fell. In the mid ‘70s, the fertility rate fell below 2.0 for the first time, and the time implosion bomb started ticking. Although they knew greying of society was going to become a major issue in the not so distant future, politicians—and I put most of the blame on the Liberal Democrats (LDP), today’s opposition party—did nothing to address it, letting the problem fester and worsen.

At the wedding of my sister-in-law a decade ago a number of LDP bigwigs attended as the groom’s father had once been a Diet member back during the LDP’s heyday and was still active in local politics.

Japanese wedding receptions are usually kicked off with a number of dull speeches given by bosses and other friends of the couple before the drinking begins, but at this particular reception a local politician made a long-winded speech in which he said, “We have put in place a number of policies such as the fûfubessei (夫婦別姓), allowing you women to keep your maiden names after marriage, so what’s stopping you? Get married and have lots of children!”

As if an attachment to one’s maiden name was the root of the issue. Moron.

If the politicians really want to address the issue they’ll need to do a number of things:

One, support women who have more children by

◉ getting the economy back on its feet. There’s nothing like economic uncertainty to prevent a family from having a second or third child.

Triumph's "Dwindling Birth Rate Countermeasure" brassiere (少子化対策ブラ). Don't know about you, but it works for me! ◉ improving the access to affordable daycare for working mothers. Daycare for anyone but the coddled civil servants and public employees who can enroll their children into publicly run day-care institutions more easily than others tends to be rather expensive. It can cost as much as ¥80,000 per month, or a quarter to half of a working mother’s salary.

◉ giving long-term financial support to families with young children, such as free healthcare, larger tax credits for those with children, grants for education, and so on. France did this, and has the highest birth rate among EU nations (save randy Ireland). It took twenty years, however, of continued support to get that birthrate up.

◉ encouraging Okamoto and other prophylactic makers to produce defective condoms that leak or tear easily, thereby increasing the number of unplanned pregnancies. In the event that these companies refuse to cooperate, then government officials should be armed with fine needles and discharged to neighborhood convenience stores where they will tamper with the condoms.

◉ encouraging immigration, yes, immigration. Real, long-term, permanent immigration. (More on this in a follow-up post)

Two, get the country’s financial house in order by

◉ raising taxes on the wealthy and inheritance.

◉ raising the consumption tax gradually over the next ten years or so.

◉ raising the retirement age and age at which benefits kick in, and cutting benefits to the wealthy.

◉ reducing governmental waste (more on this below)

◉ lowering corporate taxes which are comparatively high and creating other incentives to encourage companies to keep manufacturing and jobs in Japan.

◉ scaling back on Koizumi reforms that made it easier for companies to rely on part-timers and contract workers and has brought down wages and standards for many in Japan. You can’t expect consumers to buy the crap your company produces if they don’t have the money to buy it.

◉ lowering property taxes to encourage the purchase of homes and condominiums.

◉ giving more autonomy to regional and local governments.

Three, reduce government waste by

◉ eliminating the todôfuken (都道府県) system which divided Japan into prefectures that had been based loosely on the feudal system of the Edo period. The prefectures ought to be combined, creating half a dozen states or shû (州) or regional administrative blocks, such as Kyûshû-Okinawa, Shikoku, Chûgoku, Kansai, and so on. This will prevent much of the wasteful duplication of projects that have blighted the Japanese countryside with airports that are seldom used and museums that nobody in their right mind would ever visit. The mayor of Osaka, Tôru Hashimoto, and his Restoration Party (維新の会, Ishin no Kai) has been trying to do this with Ôsaka.

◉ giving these new regions more autonomy in and responsibility over how public money is raised and spent.

◉ breaking up the all too powerful and all too inept bureaucracy.

◉ reducing the number of diet members by at least half and putting in place term and age limits.

◉ ending the practice where a politician benefits financially for projects that he brings to his constituency. I am not a fan of pork barrel politics and think that politicians should be forbidden from voting in favor funding projects for his constituency because of conflict of interest. The politician should, however, be able to vote against those projects which go against the wishes and needs of his constituents.

I could go on and on, but then, what does it matter to me? I’m just a stupid gaijin.

The Incredibly Shrinking Nation

2012-02-05T01:56:02Z

In 2004 Japan’s population peaked at 127.8 million people[1]. Because the fertility rate[2] in Japan has remained far below the 2.2 or so needed to maintain a population, the population has been falling steadily. If nothing changes, the population of Japan is predicted to fall to less than 90 million by the year 2055.

While the nation anxiously wrings its hands, I have to ask what to me seems like an obvious question: is this really a problem?

Personally, I think there are far too many people in this crowded country and population decline ought to be not only welcomed, but celebrated as one of the successes of a modern society. If you go to nationmaster.com and have a look at the birth rates, you’ll find that Japan is fourth from the bottom, down there with Macau and Hong Kong, two of the worlds most densely populated places.[3] The countries with the highest birthrates are, not surprisingly, poor, less developed, and predominately African ones.

Now, I realize that with population decline comes a number of seemingly knotty issues, such as how the pension system will be funded, and so on.[4] But, on the whole, I think the demographic change provides far more opportunities than it does challenges. (The same can be said about last year’s massive earthquake and tsunami. I’ll write more about this later.)

While the population of Japan as a whole has been in decline for the past eight years, you might be surprised to learn that cities like Fukuoka have grown steadily.

When I first moved to Fukuoka in 1993, the city had a population of 1.246 million people. Since then, the population has increased and stands at 1.443 people today. The foreign community has doubled from 12,621 in 1993 to 24,555 in 2011.

What is the cause of this growth? One theory (my own) ascribes the increase to the comparatively large number of attractive women in the Fukuoka, the so-called Hakata Bijin (博多美人, “Hakata Beauty”), which has eager men flocking to the city in droves.[5] Others point more correctly to kasoka (過疎化), or the depopulation of towns and villages as people pull up stakes and move to the cities where there are better-paying jobs and more opportunities.

Out of curiosity, I looked into the demographics of Iizuka, that oft-maligned (mostly by me) city to the northwest of Fukuoka, to see how the population had changed over the years. I was surprised to see that although the city’s population was down from a high of 140,463 people in 1995, it was still higher than in the decades following the end of the war when the mines were still giving up plenty of coal and jobs abounded. I guess having a powerful politician fighting for your cause—in this case former Prime Minister Tarô Aso—does have its benefits, if not plenty of pork barrel. The city is today home to one of the campuses of Kyûkôdai (九工大, Kyûshû Institute of Technology).

Fukuoka, though, has much more going for it, which might explain why so many people from throughout the Kyûshû-Okinawa region relocate here. That might also explain why for several years running Fukuoka has been chosen by a number of magazines, including Monocle, as one of the world’s best cities. (Personally, I think that’s going a little too far. It is a nice place, but one of the world’s best? C’mon, who ya kiddin’?)[6]

[1] Numbers vary. The Japanese language site gave the above figure. Another English language site had the population at 128.1 million in 2010.

[2] The fertility rate refers to the average number of children born to women throughout their reproductive years. The fertility rate, which was 3.65 in 1950, fell to 1.91 in 1975. It stands around 1.37 today.

[3] Japan is the 38th most densely populated country in the world.

[4] I will discuss this so-called problem in the next post.

[5] Many young women will disagree with this, claiming that the city doesn’t have many men. They’ll even argue that there are eight women for every available man. I don’t know where this statistic comes from, but I’ve heard it again and again over the years. Funny, but the two single women who first told me of this imbalance have moved to Tôkyô where—surprise, surprise—they remain single.

[6] I often joke that “Fukuoka is a nice place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit it”. There just isn’t that much for tourists to do and see.