The Web site of Japan's Immigration Bureau has never been particularly foreigner-friendly: information about almost everything, from obtaining a visa to getting deported, is available only in Japanese.
But foreigners say the site's newest feature is downright nasty.
The bureau this year began soliciting tips over the Internet about suspected illegal aliens, enlisting the public in a high-profile deportation campaign ordered by authorities who say foreigners are to blame for a surge in crime in Japan.
"What's next -- paid informers?" asked Osvaldo Yamamoto, 30, a welder from Brazil. "Nobody wants to overstay their visa, but everybody wants a chance to work. Reporting on these people is a worse crime."
The online tip-off system, which started in February, is the latest in a series of measures announced by authorities in a campaign to halve the estimated 250,000 illegal aliens in Japan over the next five years.
Raids and roundups of illegals have multiplied, and visa requirements are becoming more strict. Employers and even language schools that sponsor foreigners are under heightened surveillance. About 50,000 foreigners were deported last year for visa violations.
Authorities say they're just keeping the streets safe, echoing police, conservative politicians and media reports alleging that foreigners are behind a surge in crime that's rocking the foundations of law and order.
"It's shaken people's belief they are living in the safest country in the world," said Hidenori Sakanaka, Tokyo's top immigration official. "We can't ignore this situation."
Authorities cite some scary-sounding statistics.
Arrests of foreigners jumped 23 percent last year, hitting a record high for a third straight year. Over half of those nabbed were illegal aliens, and almost two-thirds of crimes by foreigners involved groups of two or more.
The figures got a chilling -- and widely publicized -- illustration last year when several Chinese students were arrested for murdering a Japanese family, ransacking their house and throwing their handcuffed bodies into a bay.
Rights groups, however, see something different: a disturbing trend toward scapegoating in a country where foreigners make up less than 2 percent of the population of 127 million.
"The overwhelming majority of people who break the law in this country are Japanese, but nobody would dream of asking for tips about suspicious Japanese," said Shinichiro Nakashima, a member of Kumustaka, a support group for foreign workers in southern Japan.
Nakashima points to a fact rarely mentioned in the same breath as foreign crime: While the total number of crimes reported in Japan has risen to record highs for seven of the last eight years, the foreigners' share remains as tiny as their numbers.
Last year's headline-making figure of 40,615 offenses by foreigners amounted to 1.45 percent of the total. Most illegal aliens were arrested for a charge with no impact on public safety: overstaying their visas.
The Internet tip-off system has become a flash point for foreign anger. Groups ranging from Amnesty International to the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Japan have blasted it for encouraging the public to look at all foreigners as potential criminals and called for a general amnesty for illegal aliens.
Overstayers talk about a sense of betrayal. Ismail, a 43-year-old electrician from Pakistan who spoke on condition that his full name not be used, was invited to Japan in 1992 as a trainee for an electronics company. He stayed on after his visa expired, moving from job to job. Now he fears deportation may be a mouse click away.
"We are not criminals, we are not losers," Ismail said. "We are working all day but there is no peace for us."
Wariness of outsiders has a long history in Japan. The country emerged from 200 years of self-imposed isolation only in the mid-19th century. Since then, generations of Japanese schoolchildren were taught to think of themselves as a "single-race nation," though the phrase is politically incorrect today.
Sakanaka said his agency is merely doing its duty. But the outcry over the online tip-off system forced authorities to add a disclaimer acknowledging most foreigners are "law-abiding."
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
RSS