Todays Top Storiesddd
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
Peace Study Walking in Yokosuka
GCPEJ, Hague Appeal for Peace
Global GLOBAL CAMPAIGN FOR PEACE EDUCATION
Japan will hold the following event.
Peace Study Walking in Yokosuka
Please join our walking tour/one hour boat tour in
Yokosuka bay, observing the US base. It is a part of the 18 th
annual peace festival at Mikasa Koen.
1000 yen will be coasted on board.
Date: October, 19 Sunday
Meet: 12 oclock, at Yokosuka Cyuo station (Keihinkyuko)
East exit
Prof. Hideo Fujita will accompany us and English interpretation
will be provided by a volunteer.
The follow up discussion will be held at Sogogukushi Kaikan
with peace activists in the area.
Further info:
Mr. ASAKAWA(Tel/fax:048-825-1006) or
Mr. Kentro Kojima(e-mail: ?j
-PEACE DEMONSTRATIONS
WORLD PEACE PARADE 9.27
In solidarity with the people in the world, let’s join the peace rallies and parades around the world on September 27, 2003.
Parallel action in Japan:
Date:
27 Sept 2003
Time:
13:00 Opening
13:30 Peace Concert
14:00 Peace Rally
15:30 Peace Parade
Venue:
Shiba-Koen No.23 (under Tokyo Tower)
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
-Lies and More Lies (John Pilger)
This story comes from the ZNet Sustainer section. Please become a Sustainer and help Znet and ZMagazine remain in existence.
http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm
EXACTLY one year ago, Tony Blair told Parliament: “Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing.
“The policy of containment is not working. The weapons of mass destruction programme is not shut down. It is up and running now.”
Not only was every word of this false, it was part of a big lie invented in Washington within hours of the attacks of September 11 2001 and used to hoodwink the American public and distract the media from the real reason for attacking Iraq. “It was 95 per cent charade,” a former senior CIA analyst told me.
An investigation of files and archive film for my TV documentary Breaking The Silence, together with interviews with former intelligence officers and senior Bush officials have revealed that Bush and Blair knew all along that Saddam Hussein was effectively disarmed.
Both Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, and Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s closest adviser, made clear before September 11 2001 that Saddam Hussein was no threat - to America, Europe or the Middle East.
In Cairo, on February 24 2001, Powell said: “He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours.”
This is the very opposite of what Bush and Blair said in public.
Powell even boasted that it was the US policy of “containment” that had effectively disarmed the Iraqi dictator - again the very opposite of what Blair said time and again. On May 15 2001, Powell went further and said that Saddam Hussein had not been able to “build his military back up or to develop weapons of mass destruction” for “the last 10 years”. America, he said, had been successful in keeping him “in a box”.
Two months later, Condoleezza Rice also described a weak, divided and militarily defenceless Iraq. “Saddam does not control the northern part of the country,” she said. “We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.”
So here were two of Bush’s most important officials putting the lie to their own propaganda, and the Blair government’s propaganda that subsequently provided the justification for an unprovoked, illegal attack on Iraq. The result was the deaths of what reliable studies now put at 50,000 people, civilians and mostly conscript Iraqi soldiers, as well as British and American troops. There is no estimate of the countless thousands of wounded.
In a torrent of propaganda seeking to justify this violence before and during the invasion, there were occasional truths that never made headlines. In April last year, Condoleezza Rice described September 11 2001 as an “enormous opportunity” and said America “must move to take advantage of these new opportunities.”
Taking over Iraq, the world’s second biggest oil producer, was the first such opportunity.
At 2.40pm on September 11, according to confidential notes taken by his aides, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, said he wanted to “hit” Iraq - even though not a shred of evidence existed that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the attacks on New York and Washington. “Go massive,” the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying. “Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” Iraq was given a brief reprieve when it was decided instead to attack Afghanistan. This was the “softest option” and easiest to explain to the American people - even though not a single September 11 hijacker came from Afghanistan. In the meantime, securing the “big prize”, Iraq, became an obsession in both Washington and London.
An Office of Special Plans was hurriedly set up in the Pentagon for the sole purpose of converting “loose” or unsubstantiated intelligence into US policy. This was a source from which Downing Street received much of the “evidence” of weapons of mass destruction we now know to be phoney.
CONTRARY to Blair’s denials at the time, the decision to attack Iraq was set in motion on September 17 2001, just six days after the attacks on New York and Washington.
On that day, Bush signed a top-secret directive, ordering the Pentagon to begin planning “military options” for an invasion of Iraq. In July 2002, Condoleezza Rice told another Bush official who had voiced doubts about invading Iraq: “A decision has been made. Don’t waste your breath.”
The ultimate cynicism of this cover-up was expressed by Rumsfeld himself only last week. When asked why he thought most Americans still believed Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks of September 11, he replied: “I’ve not seen any indication that would lead me to believe I could say that.”
It is this that makes the Hutton inquiry in London virtually a sham. By setting up an inquiry solely into the death of the weapons expert David Kelly, Blair has ensured there will be no official public investigation into the real reasons he and Bush attacked Iraq and into when exactly they made that decision. He has ensured there will be no headlines about disclosures in email traffic between Downing Street and the White House, only secretive tittle-tattle from Whitehall and the smearing of the messenger of Blair’s misdeeds.
The sheer scale of this cover-up makes almost laughable the forensic cross-examination of the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan about “anomalies” in the notes of his interview with David Kelly - when the story Gilligan told of government hypocrisy and deception was basically true.
Those pontificating about Gilligan failed to ask one vital question - why has Lord Hutton not recalled Tony Blair for cross-examination? Why is Blair not being asked why British sovereignty has been handed over to a gang in Washington whose extremism is no longer doubted by even the most conservative observers? No one knows the Bush extremists better than Ray McGovern, a former senior CIA officer and personal friend of George Bush senior, the President’s father. In Breaking The Silence, he tells me: “They were referred to in the circles in which I moved when I was briefing at the top policy levels as ‘the crazies’.”
“Who referred to them as ‘the crazies’?” I asked.
“All of us… in policy circles as well as intelligence circles… There is plenty of documented evidence that they have been planning these attacks for a long time and that 9/11 accelerated their plan. (The weapons of mass destruction issue) was all contrived, so was the connection of Iraq with al Qaeda. It was all PR… Josef Goebbels had this dictum: If you say something often enough, the people will believe it.” He added: “I think we ought to be all worried about fascism (in the United States).”
The “crazies” include John Bolton, Under Secretary of State, who has made a personal mission of tearing up missile treaties with the Russians and threatening North Korea, and Douglas Feith, an Under Secretary of Defence, who ran a secret propaganda unit “reworking” intelligence about Iraq’s weapons. I interviewed them both in Washington.
BOLTON boasted to me that the killing of as many as 10,000 Iraqi civilians in the invasion was “quite low if you look at the size of the military operation.”
For raising the question of civilian casualties and asking which country America might attack next, I was told: “You must be a member of the Communist Party.”
Over at the Pentagon, Feith, No 3 to Rumsfeld, spoke about the “precision” of American weapons and denied that many civilians had been killed. When I pressed him, an army colonel ordered my cameraman: “Stop the tape!” In Washington, the wholesale deaths of Iraqis is unmentionable. They are non-people; the more they resist the Anglo-American occupation, the more they are dismissed as “terrorists”.
It is this slaughter in Iraq, a crime by any interpretation of an international law, that makes the Hutton inquiry absurd. While his lordship and the barristers play their semantic games, the spectre of thousands of dead human beings is never mentioned, and witnesses to this great crime are not called.
Jo Wilding, a young law graduate, is one such witness. She was one of a group of human rights observers in Baghdad during the bombing. She and the others lived with Iraqi families as the missiles and cluster bombs exploded around them. Where possible, they would follow the explosions to scenes of civilian casualties and trace the victims to hospitals and mortuaries, interviewing the eyewitnesses and doctors. She kept meticulous notes.
She saw children cut to pieces by shrapnel and screaming because there were no anaesthetics or painkillers. She saw Fatima, a mother stained with the blood of her eight children. She saw streets, mosques and farmhouses bombed by marauding aircraft. “Nothing could explain them,” she told me, “other than that it was a deliberate attack on civilians.”
As these atrocities were carried out in our name, why are we not hearing such crucial evidence? And why is Blair allowed to make yet more self-serving speeches, and none of them from the dock?
-Treatment of Japan’s International Residents/?‘?Û?Z–¯?v‚ɑ΂µ21?¢‹I‚Ì“ú–{
From Arudou Debito (—L“¹?@?o?l?i‚ ‚é‚Ç‚¤?@‚Å‚Ñ‚Æ?j?@
“Since 2001, whenever I gave a speech, I distributed a four-page Japanese handout of background information and links:
Until now it was only in Japanese (because most of my speeches were in Japanese), but with the three speeches this week in Tokyo it’s high time for an English translation. That
follows in this email.
Entitled:
--------------------------------------------
“Treatment of Japan’s International Residents
Problems and Solutions for a 21st-Century Japan”
--------------------------------------------
You can find it at:
http://www.debito.org/handout.html
with full and updated information, links, and other things that will inform those who aren’t able to come to the speeches this week in Tokyo, and enrich the experience for those who do.
Anyway, here comes the text. Enjoy. Bests, Arudou Debito in Sapporo
///////////////////////////////////////////////
Treatment of Japan’s International Residents
Problems and Solutions for a 21st-Century Japan
By Arudou Debito (http://www.debito.org)
///////////////////////////////////////////////
The world has now entered the 21st Century, with the promises and problems of global and “borderless” societies. Japan too has itself found itself in the throes of an inevitable internationalization, with record numbers of resident foreigners, registered and unregistered, year on year. Govt. statistics dated June 2002 show that registered foreigners (that is, on more than a one-year visa) reached 1,778,462 souls (1.5% of the population), and is increasing by about 10% per annum. However, even though international residents pay taxes and contribute to Japanese society the same as citizens, there are several societal and legal barriers to them enjoying equal rights and social treatment. In fact, overt exclusionism remains largely unremedied, often by Japanese Government (GOJ) design. This handout will
describe several social and structural problems that warrant attention, and in the end propose some modest solutions to make Japanese society easier for everyone regardless of nationality to live in.
///////////////////////////////////////////////
1. SOCIETAL BARRIERS TOWARDS JAPAN’S INTERNATIONAL RESIDENTS
1) THE PROJECTION OF THE FOREIGNER AS CRIMINAL
a) Unfettered defamation.
In the Shuukan Asahi of Feb 25, 2000, there was an ad run by Miwa Lock KK, Japan’s biggest locksmith, headlined: “Are your safety measures adequate? Crimes by foreign gangs skyrocketing” in a cynical attempt to promote sales by breeding fear of foreigners. Ads like these equating foreigners with criminals would be banned in most developed countries as hate speech. But not in Japan. See
http://www.debito.org/TheCommunity/communityissues.html#gaijinimages
b) Politicians and media engage in “foreigner bashing”.
On April 9, 2000, Tokyo Gov. Ishihara Shintaro made a speech to the Nerima Ground Self Defense Forces, saying,"foreigners and ‘Third-County Nationals’ (a derogatory term for certain foreign Asians) are committing heinous crimes over and over”, and called for the SDF to take action in the event of a natural disaster to round them up. He later indicated he meant rounding up “illegal foreigners”, but how an officer would determine “illegality” on
sight was left unclear. This sentiment fed into a May 1, 2000 Sankei Shinbun cover story (http://www.debito.org/sankei050100.html) erroneously claiming “foreign crime is skyrocketing”, and without comparison to (rising) Japanese crime. Ishihara also wrote in his Sankei Shinbun column of May 8, 2001, “Japan, Guard Your Inner Flank”, where he claimed that Chinese have genetically criminal tendencies due to “ethnic DNA”. More at
http://www.imadr.org and http://www.annie.ne.jp/~ishn Actual National
Police Agency crime statistics for non-Japanese between 1991-2001 at http://www.debito.org/crimestats.html (demonstrating that foreign crime has
levelled off, even falling in some areas). The rate is far below the Japanese crime rate (esp. when excluding visa violations, which Japanese cannot commit), but reporting that fact does not eye-catching headlines make.
c) The National Police Agency wilfully exaggerates foreign crime.
One of their 2001 homepages depicts foreign gangs invading the Japanese archipelago (http://www.npa.go.jp/koho2/mado_3.htm). The Shizuoka Pref. Police published a Feb. 2002 handbook entitled “Characteristics of Foreign Criminals--How to Avoid Being Victimized”, depicting the local Brazilian and Peruvian population as violent indigents. Distributed to shopkeeps, it provides advice like “if two or more foreigners walk in your store, report their licence plate number to the police” (perfect for police targeting with circumstantial evidence). See
http://www.debito.org/TheCommunity/shizuokakeisatsuhandbook.html
d) Targeting as police policy.
The NPA 2000 White Paper (pg 37) reported the May 1999 establishment of a “Policymaking Committee against Internationalization"--the nuance being that “kokusaika” is now a social bane, not a boon. It is specifically charged with taking measures against foreign crime. As with any committee with line-item budget, it found ways to justify its annual tax budget--by issuing “beware of bad foreigners” etc. banners and posters for public places (bank ATMs, train and subway stations etc) nationwide. How were foreign-looking customers to enter banks etc now without arousing fear in other customers, and criminal suspicion in police? Unclear, especially since the author (a Japanese citizen) has been stopped several times (illegally) and questioned for no reason except for walking while White. See
http://www.debito.org/TheCommunity/communityissues.html#police
http://www.debito.org/policeapology.html
e) Result: Public opinion shifts against protecting foreigners’ human
rights.
According to the Mainichi Shinbun (Apr 4, 2003), a PM Cabinet Survey on human rights asked the question, “Should foreigners in Japan have their human rights protected equally with Japanese?” Only 54% of respondents said yes, down 11.5% from the last survey in 1997. Respondents agreeing with the statement, “Foreigners not having the same human rights protections is unavoidable” rose from 18.5% in 1997 to 21.8%. Why a GOJ survey would make
protection of human rights for human beings seem optional is odd enough, but in any case, quantifiable social damage has been done by all the foreigner-bashing. A Ministry of Justice official noted in the same article, “It is probably due to the rise in foreigner crime.”
http://www12.mainichi.co.jp/news/search-news/875450/8aO8d9190l-0-4.html
///////////////////////////////////////////////
2) LEGAL BARRIERS TOWARDS JAPAN’S INTERNATIONAL RESIDENTS
It must be noted at this point that foreigners do not have exactly the same rights as citizens anywhere in the world--or else there would be no benefits to citizenship! So this section will talk about the systematically unequal treatment of foreign residents in Japan not found in other developed countries.
a) The Foreigner as Invisible Family Member.
Japan has a Family Registry (koseki) system, whose bugs appear in the case of international marriages (i.e. citizen with non-citizen). Even though the marriage is recognized under Japanese laws as legal, the Koseki does not list foreigners under the “husband” or “wife” columns. Instead, they are listed with the fine print of the family dossier. Not only is this
profoundly disrespectful to the institution of marriage, but also social welfare systems often kick in, sending information to what appears to be a single-parent household. See
http://www.debito.org/ayakoseki.jpg
b) The Foreigner as Invisible Resident.
Japan also has a separate Residency Certificate (juuminhyou) system, which indicates where a person lives. However, only people with the abovementioned Koseki may be listed on it. Nowhere else in the OECD (even Germany, with a similar system) is citizenship required for residency, and foreign family members (upon request, and at the discretion of local bureaucrats) may only be listed as a “remark” on it. This has presented problems with child custody in divorce proceedings, and will make exact whereabouts of all household members unclear in the event of a natural disaster. Moreover, adding insult to injury, a sealion named “Tama-chan” was awarded an honorary Residency Certificate in Feb 2003 by Yokohama Nishi Ward, ignoring the thousands of other foreign, taxpaying, mammals in their midst. See
http://www.debito.org/TheCommunity/communityissues.html#juuminhyou
An example of a Residency Certificate:
http://www.debito.org/juminhyo.jpg
c) “Native-Born Foreigners”.
Japan confers citizenship by blood (jus sanguinis), not birth (jus soli) like almost all OECD countries. The result is ethnic “Zainichi” Korean and Chinese etc minorities (some forcibly brought to Japan during its colonial period) are born and have lived here as foreigners for generations now. Numbering close to a million people, this means the majority (around 60% in
1996) of “registered foreigners” in Japan are natives--a situation found nowhere else in the developed countries. The proportion will soon shift in favor of immigrants, but the point is clear--why should native-born and raised people like the Zainichis be legally treated for the most part like foreigners fresh off the airplane?
d) So why don’t more people naturalize? Because it is not at all easy.
The author, who has successfully undergone the process, can attest to the rigorous procedure followed (not just the paperwork, found in all countries), including background checks, interviews with the neighbors, even inspections of house interior, refrigerator, and children’s toys to see how “Japanized” the candidate is. Success is not giving inspectors a “feeling of incongruity”. This “Good Behavior Survey” may reject people for even a speeding ticket--meaning most Japanese could not pass the test. Also, dual nationality, uniquely in the OECD, is not allowed in Japan, making for identity sacrifices. No wonder fewer than 15,000 people per year (about ten days’ worth of successful candidates in the USA) become new citizens of
Japan. The arbitrarity of the process became clear in 2000, when Peru-born former president Alberto Fujimori fled to Japan and was nearly immediately granted Japanese citizenship--bypassing the yearslong naturalization process--despite criminal allegations, and an extradition order from the Peruvian govt.!
http://www.debito.org/residentspage.html#naturalization
http://www.debito.org/kikapg1.jpg
http://www.debito.org/kikapg2.jpg
http://www.debito.org/japantodaycolumns10-12.html#12 (on Fujimori)
///////////////////////////////////////////////
3) ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL BARRIERS TOWARDS JAPAN’S INTERNATIONAL RESIDENTS
Despite residency and taxpayer status, foreigners systematically endure inordinate economic and political disadvantages. For example, blanket refusals for credit cards and house loans (impossible without Perma-nent Residency, which takes 5 to 10 years to qualify for). Many issues are outlined on “The Community” Issues Page
(http://www.debito.org/TheCommunity/communityissues.html),
but egregious examples are:
a) Contracted employment status specifically for foreign university
educators.
A contracted position may not sound bad to Western ears, but Japan’s tertiary education system (the second largest in the world) does not contract full-time Japanese educators. Since almost all full-time Japanese enjoy permanent tenure from day one of hiring, a contract becomes a term limit only for foreigners. Abuses of the system include “The Great Gaijin
Massacre” of 1992-4, where most foreign faculty above the age of 35 in National Universities found their contracts were not being renewed--in a successful attempt by the Ministry of Education to bring in younger, cheaper foreigners. Since these veteran teachers had not paid into overseas pension plans (and decades of Japanese pension payments are nonrefundable), they could not simply “go home”. They got stuck with part-time work with no benefits to pay house loans, kids’ college tuition, or fulfill pension plans. According to Ivan Hall’s CARTELS OF THE MIND (WW Norton, 1998), there are more full-time foreign faculty with permanent tenure in one American university than in all of Japan! Not to mention a systemwide disdain ("academic apartheid") towards foreign educators regardless of qualification, seeing them merely as cheap disposable labor. See the Blacklist of Japanese Universities, a list of institutions with breathtakingly unequal employment policies, at
http://www.debito.org/blacklist.html
b) No laws against racial discrimination at the national or local level.
Japan is the only OECD country with this situation. Westerners, jaded by pressure groups decrying “racist” at too many junc-tures, may consider this refreshing, but consider a society with no legal protections at all against racism. From 1993, bathhouses in Otaru, Hokkaido, claiming that ill-mannered Russian sailors were driving away regular Japanese customers,
put up “JAPANESE ONLY” signs--excluding not all Russians, but all foreigners! “Banning all Russians only would be discriminatory,” they claimed, so treating all foreigners equally differently than Japanese was their solution. The problem with this vigilanteism is that “foreign” got judged by physical appearance, and Japanese people who looked like
foreigners, such as children of international marriages and naturalized citizens, were banned as well. The authorities wrung their hands, admitted this was racial discrimination and contrary the Japanese Constitution, but as it was not specifically *illegal* there was nothing they could enforce to stop it. Then they refused to pass any laws against it, in violation of the
UN Convention on Racial Discrimination (which Japan effected in 1996), hoping the problem would just go away. It didn’t. It got worse, in fact, as more places realized they could signpost away foreigners with impunity.
First it was other bathhouses in Otaru, then other places around Hokkaido (Wakkanai, Monbetsu, Nemuro, Sapporo, Ohtaki-mura--which is not even a port town), then other businesses (bars, discos, ramen shops, sport shops, barbershops, restaurants), then other cities nationwide (Misawa, Akita, Tokyo Shinbashi and Ogikubo, Hamamatsu, Nagoya, Naha). See photos of these establishments and their signs at
http://www.debito.org/roguesgallery.html
Finally, after all other possible measures were exhausted, the author and two other excluded friends took one of the Otaru bathhouses (for racial discrimination) and the City of Otaru (for doing nothing for so long it became the mere epicenter of this new type of overt discrimination in Japan) to court in Feb 2001. In Nov 2002, the Sapporo District Court ordered the bathhouse to pay plaintiffs each one million yen, but exonerated Otaru City of any negligence and of any responsibility to make racial discrimination illegal. The case is still on appeal. See
http://www.debito.org/otarulawsuit.html for full information on the case
and its background,
http://www.debito.org/japaneseonly.html for more on Arudou Debito’s book
in Japanese on the case, JAPANESE ONLY, published in 2003 by Akashi Shoten.
On sale at amazon.co.jp. And,
http://www.debito.org/misawaexclusions.html for a particularly nasty
case in Misawa, Aomori-ken, where the author was refused entry despite
displaying a Japanese passport--by foreign hostesses!
c) Wilful GOJ misinterpretation of international treaty.
In its (very late) periodic reports to UN committees on human rights (1998, 2001), the GOJ states, “We do not recognize that the present situation of Japan is one in which discriminative acts cannot be restrained by the existing legal system. . .a law prohibiting racial discrimination is not considered necessary.” The GOJ also voided any domestic application of the International Convention on Racial Discrimination by stating that nobody in Japan is covered by it: Minorities such as Ainu and Burakumin are not racially different, while Koreans, Chinese, etc are not citizens anyway.
The UN: “We regret that previous recommendations on civil and political rights have largely not been implemented”, chiding Japan for its “repeated use of popularity statistics to justify attitudes”, and finishing with “human rights standards are not determined by popularity polls”.
http://www.debito.org/japantimes060303.html
http://www.debito.org/japanvsun.html
d) NTT DoCoMo’s “Foreigner Tariff”.
Citing delinquent payments by repatriating foreign customers, NTT, Japan (and the world’s) largest telecom company, had its mobile-phone subsidiary, DoCoMo, levy a 30,000 yen deposit on all phone contracts for foreigners from April 1, 2002. Although company reps told the author and the media that foreigners default at “six times the rate of Japanese”, they refused to make public any hard figures, and eventually admitted 1) most foreigners do not default, and 2) the damages done by Japanese defaulters far outweighed the foreign. Nevertheless, DoCoMo refused to levy the deposit on all customers, rightly fearing widespread flight to Japan’s two other cellphone operators, Vodafone and AU. It was obvious that DoCoMo assumed foreigners were too few to matter and wouldn’t fight back. After some bad press, DoCoMo later that year amended the policy to tariff foreigners without credit cards, but to this day has the tariff in place. Foreign customers are to DoCoMo apparently less trustworthy than regular Japanese, a belief the other carriers do not share.
A boycott of DoCoMo is still on. See
http://www.debito.org/TheCommunity/NTTdocomotariff.html (info site)
http://www.debito.org/TheCommunity/NTTkougibun.html (multilingual
protest letter to hand in if and when you unsubscribe from DoCoMo).
The point is, if Japan’s largest corporate conglomerate can get away with doing this to foreigners, consider what other smaller businesses down the food chain can do.
///////////////////////////////////////////////
MODEST PROPOSALS FOR IMPROVING THE TREATMENT OF JAPAN’S INTERNATIONAL RESIDENTS
Let us not forget that foreigners are in Japan fulfilling a role--some here at the GOJ’s behest (the Nikkei Brazilians, Peruvians, etc for factory work), others for intellectual, cultural and economic transfer (educators, businesspeople, JICA, etc,), others fulfilling various market demands, and the majority by dint of birth. Almost all pay into Japan’s pension system,
groaning under the strain of the world’s fastest aging society, and all into a tax system hobbled by perpetual fiscal irresponsibility. It is churlish to presume that a nation can take from residents and not be responsible for defending their rights--i.e. rights to maintain a standard of living, spend their wages, and avail themselves of the fruits of society like any other resident of Japan. But that is what Japan is doing in too many cases. To help resolve this, I charge Japan’s administrative, legislative, and judicial branches to consider the following proposals:
1) Pass laws at all levels of government outlawing discrimination by race, appearance, nationality, national and social origin. (Model law submitted in 2001 by the author and friends to the Hokkaido and Otaru City Assemblies, and the Democratic Party of Japan at
http://www.issho.org/kinshiho-modelhoan.html)
2) Empower the ineffectual Ministry of Justice’s Bureau of Human Rights
with punitive powers.
http://www.debito.org/policeapology.html
3) Create regional human-rights ombudsmen, with appropriate oversight and
punitive powers.
4) Abolish full-time contracted positions for foreign educators at universities, and employ them on the same terms as Japanese full-time faculty.
5) Create family and residential registry systems to register non-Japanese equally with citizens.
6) Ease the naturalization process and legalize dual nationality.
7) Grant citizenship from birth, shorten the time period for Permanent Residency, and make the Re-Entry Permit (aka the “Gaijin Tax") system free of charge.
8) Ease restrictions on granting credit to international residents, including government loans to homeowners based on individual merit, not solely Permanent Residency.
http://www.debito.org/TheCommunity/communityissues.html#credit
9) Publicly promote at the national govt. level the fact that foreigners are not temporary guests, but rather residents, taxpayers, and immigrants, worthy of most privileges and immunities of citizens, and a social boon, not a bane.
10) Grant suffrage to Permanent Residents, as most would be already be citizens in OECD countries.
11) Promote the fact that in 21st-Century Japan, “Japaneseness” can no longer be a matter of blood or appearance, rather a matter of legality--for the sake of Japan’s hundreds of thousands of Japanese children with international roots.
///////////////////////////////////////////////
http://www.debito.org
Sept 22, 2003
ENDS”
IMF Demo Arrest in Tok
At a legal demonstration of 10 persons outside an IMF.World Bank Conference, one person was arrested after being assaulted by about 100 police officers. Demonstration 9/23 in Tokyo’s Ginza to protest illegal police violence and arrest, according to the organizers.
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-Children of the Gulf War” at Trafalgar Square
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7th “Children of the Gulf War” photo exhibition
at Trafalgar Square on 27th September
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“Children of the Gulf War” at Trafalgar Square
Saturday, 27th September 2003
The National Demonstration Day!!
Start at 13:00 till 18:00 or 18:30
(Cancelled if it rains)
For more information, please visit our website
http://www.chimerafilms.co.uk/children.html
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Dear friends,
Midori at the “Children of the Gulf War” photo exhibition UK tour writing.
The next Saturday, 27th of September is the National Demonstration Day for
“End the Occupation of Iraq” and “Freedom for Palestine”. We will be holding
the exhibition at the Trafalgar Square between 1.00pm and 6.00 or 6.30pm.
We will be displaying there about 30 photos from the “Children of the Gulf
War” and will be exhibiting new photographs by Takashi Morizumi titled
“Children Under the Air-strikes”. He was in Iraq in March and April, during
and after the recent Iraq war. You can find some of them at our homepage.
http://www.chimerafilms.co.uk/children.html#schedule
During the ‘Second Gulf War’, US and UK force had used the DU (Depleted
Uranium) weapons much more than the last time. Some specialists estimate the
quantities of the DU remaining in Iraq is over 500tons or 2000tons. The
invisible war against people of Iraq starts again. The soldiers and their
children, visitors and peace-workers come from other countries might be
suffered from the DU. Clean up the mess immediately!
Mr.Morizumi is in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan now. He has visiting there many
times from 1994. During the era of the Soviet Union, the nuclear tests had
done there. It was the top secret. The victims of the nuclear tests are
living, dying and giving birth there. You can view some of their photos from
Morizumi’s homepage at the below.
http://www.morizumi-pj.com/semipalatinsk/semi-index.html
http://www.morizumi-pj.com/semipalatinsk/taiji.html
http://www.morizumi-pj.com/semipalatinsk/syasinka.html
Please come and see the “children of the Gulf War” photo exhibition at the
Trafalgar Square on next Saturday!
If you can help me for promoting this event, I will send you a small
poster/flyer for putting it on the notice board at your school, office or
somewhere by attachment. (You need ‘illustrator’ on your desktop for opening
the attachment.) Please let me know.
With love,
Midori
the ‘Children of the Gulf War’ photo exhibition UK tour
http://www.chimerafilms.co.uk/children.html
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7th “Children of the Gulf War” at Trafalgar Square
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