One essential thing is to get rid of the tendency to regard foreign workers as cheap, expendable substitutes for a decline in the domestic labor force. Japanese need to socially and culturally reinvent themselves to live with the foreign population.
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Masahiko Ishizuka, who teaches at Waseda University’s Graduate School of Journalism. (Nikkei Weekly)
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escape_artist
Although I agree with this statement, no one, let alone a whole society/culture, "socially and culturally reinvent[s] themselves" overnight. I expect this to take a very long time, if ever. One smart thing to do in the meantime is find a job that Japanese people can't do, i.e., that only non-Japanese can do as speakers/users of their native non-Japanese languages or mother tongues.
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Dollhopf
Being a German, I can only plead to the responsible decission makers in Japan to handle this topic very cautious.
Of course, Japan is different to European countries in many ways. You cannot be reached on the country way but are protected by the sea. Maybe your welfare system is not so easily to exploit. And also you have no Judaeo-Christian cultural background which commits one to see the good in strangers that these strangers never intend.
Nevertheless, learn from our faults in Europe. They are obvious. Wrong managed migration can be a terrible threat. Janan is unique. Japan is a bonfire for the world. Do not endanger your innermost sanctum with questionable experiments.
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Thenewfront
Dollhopf
I am a foreign worker, what threat am i to Japan? I think you will find in GErmany the people under threat are the immigrants from skinheads.
People must respect other cultures and embrace them, not look at them with perceived fear, spread by a xenaphobic right wing government.
Let's not see history repeating itself, with fear mongering of foreigners, and blaming them for societies problems.
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Blue_Tiger
The problem is that herei n Japan, it is ingrained into peoples' heads that Japan is the #1 place in the world. why go anywhere else? That means foreigners will always be "foreign", no matter if a person of foreign parentage is born here, grows up here, lives all of his or her life here, knows the language as a native speaker, and is completely and totally sensitive to Japanese culture. In fact, I've had Japanese students at the college where I teach who were caled gaijin by their friends simply because they chose to spend more than just a month or two in the USA, ne of the students graduating from a US High School.
This kind of change will not happen over night! I agree wth escape_artist!
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Dollhopf
Answer to Thenewfront
You wrote: "People must respect other cultures and embrace them"
Being a foreign worker in Japan, it is your obligation to respect and embrace the Japanese culture. You are the guest. You are not in the position to demand the assimilation of the Japanese around you. Being a worker, you and your employer made a contract you agreed to. People make contracts for their mutual advantage. If you are not pleased with the conditions, then you should cancel your contract and leave that country.
You wrote: "Let's not see history repeating itself"
Otherwise, do not make the same fatal mistakes others suffer from in the very moment. Therefore it is absolutely necessary to be very carefull when transforming a nation into a so-called country of immigration. I hope that Japan does not repeat the same mistakes that we in Europe can't redress anymore. We already lost more than our ethics allow us to concede.
We know from sociological studies that the performance in school sinks constantly when more than 20 percent of the pupils of a class have a migrational background. But classes with 80 percent are standard meanwhile. Germany was shaken up by the open letter of the staff of the Rütli school in Berlin in 2006, reporting of orgies of violence by pupils during classes.
And by 2010 in all larger German towns the non-German offspring will have outnumbered the native offspring. Parallel societies emerged. We have districts into which no German police man can set his foot any longer without fearing for his life.
You wrote: "perceived fear, spread by a xenaphobic right wing government"
Otherwise, it was the left wing government which, driven by ideology, enforced the circumstances with all means. Politicians which defined nowadays Germany to a threat for the world and sought to curtail it from outside and ethically thin out from inside.
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