Society

Japan's Cabinet has approved a draft bill that would allow the entry of more foreign blue-collar workers as the country's rapidly aging population faces labor shortages.

The bill is a major revision of Japan's policy on foreign labor. The country has long resisted accepting foreign workers, except for doctors, teachers and others in highly skilled fields. The proposed legislation would create two new visa categories for foreigners employed in more than a dozen sectors facing labor shortages, such as nursing, farming, construction and services.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe denied that the new policy means Japan is opening its doors to immigrants, to reassure his nationalist supporters. Opponents are concerned about crime and jobs taken away from Japanese, while proponents say foreign workers are indispensable in sectors facing labor shortages.

In the US, the widespread belief that the poor are simply lazy has led many states to impose work requirements on aid recipients—even those who have been medically classified as disabled. Limiting aid programs in this way has been shown to shorten recipients’ lives, creating a difference of more than 20 years in life expectancy between the rich and the poor.

When the wealthy are revealed to be drug addicts, philanderers, or work-shy, the response is at most a collective shrug. At the same time, behaviors indulged in the rich are not just condemned in the poor, but are used as a justification to punish them, denying them access to resources that keep them alive, such as healthcare and food assistance.

Nagoya-based husband-and-wife vlogging duo Rachel and Jun Yoshizuki run the YouTube channel Rachel and Jun. Their on-the-ground accounts of daily life in Japan have been viewed more than 200 million times.

They belong to a community of “J-vloggers”: YouTubers who attract millions of views by sharing their insights into Japanese culture, including anything from a tour of a Japanese high school, to what it’s like to stay in a tiny room in a capsule hotel, and what it’s like to be multiracial in Japan.

“All of us [J-vloggers] get comments from our audience that they went to Japan because of us, or they started studying Japanese because of our videos, or they visited this city because we made a video about it,” Rachel says.

On Friday, August 24, Misa Matsushima realised her lifelong dream and struck a blow for Japan’s women when she started duty as the country’s first female fighter pilot. Matsushima, who holds the rank of first lieutenant in the air self-defence force, completed her training in August 2018, just three years after Japan lifted its ban on women becoming fighter pilots.

“I have admired fighter jet pilots ever since I saw Top Gun when I was in primary school,” she told reporters on the eve of starting her new role. “I want to continue to work hard to carry out my duties, not just for myself but also for women who want to follow this path in the future.” Three other women are currently training to join Japan’s elite group of fighter pilots.

When asked to imagine a typical image of white-collar workers in Japan, salarymen in suits may come to mind. On the flip side, blue collar workers in "work wear" tend to be associated with less flattering stereotypes, dubbed the “3K”—kitsui (demanding), kitanai (dirty) and kiken (dangerous) in Japanese.

Work wear that looks exactly like a business suit, developed by a Tokyo-based plumbing firm, might be helping to improve the image of blue-collar workers. It has been proving popular recently among people in various industries, ranging from waste collection and building maintenance to agriculture.

The Japanese government wants women to work more and have more children, but it lacks concrete plans of how to do so. To begin with, there is a drastic need to increase government-funded care for children of all ages. In Japanese elementary schools, a lot of the activities and meetings fall in the middle of a weekday, and while public afterschool care does exist, in many places it is only for children up through third grade.

To truly support families and encourage people to have kids in the first place, both women and men should be encouraged to leave work earlier and take paid leave. As long as this issue is not properly addressed, then nothing is really going to change.

Japan has the lowest rate of gun deaths in the industrialized world. Why is that? Watch the video and discuss it with your teacher, or write about it using the discussion questions below.

To say the words, “I agree”—whether it’s agreeing to join an organization, or submit to a political authority, or subscribe to a religious faith—may be the basis of every community.

But to say, I disagree; I refuse; you’re wrong—these are the words that define our individuality, give us our freedom, seize our attention, energize our progress, and make our democracies real.

To listen and understand; to question and disagree; to be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind—this is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago.

Intelligent disagreement is the lifeblood of any thriving society. Yet in the United States we are raising a younger generation who have never been taught either the how or the why of disagreement. 

Can we do better?