Dogs and Demons   ::   Керр Алекс

The elite of fast-track investment bankers who were stationed in Japan transferred to Hong Kong andSingapore in the early 1990s, leaving second-string players in Tokyo. Long-established foreign communities in Kobe and Yokohama, dating to Meiji days, have shrunk to nearly the vanishing point, and international schools are closing. There is a clear shift among Westerners from long-term residents to short-term employees who come to Japan to make some money and then move on.

At the same time, the absolute number of foreigners in Japan nearly doubled in the 1990s. But one must look at the numbers carefully. The largest foreign group in Japan is the 640,000 Koreans, descendants of forced laborers brought over in the 1930s and 1940s. Many are third- or fourth-generation residents in Japan, speak no Korean, and are indistinguishable from the average Japanese.

Japan maintains a tight immigration policy, accepting fewer Vietnamese or other refugees than any other developed country, for example, and making foreign spouses wait decades before they are granted permanent residence. Yet there is a need for unskilled labor, and the way to meet this is to welcome South American descendants of Japanese emigrants. The great increase in foreign residents in Japan has been in this group of nikkei, foreigners of Japanese descent, from Brazil and Peru (from 2,700 in 1986 to 275,000 in 1997). While this group includes many intelligent and ambitious young people, very few of them manage to surmount Japan's high barriers to joining the mainstream and carve out successful careers. Sadly, most of them are doomed to live their days at the bottom of the social pecking order, doing work that modern Japanese shun. It will take generations for them to assimilate, and it will not be easy: in the summer of 1999, rightist gangs paraded through the Brazilian neighborhood in the town of Toyota, home of the automobile company and of a large concentration of nikkei workers, demanding, «Foreigners go home!» Even Japanese blood doesn't count for much, it seems.

If you remove Koreans and nikkei laborers from South America from the statistics, the remainder of the foreign population in Japan is minuscule, less than 0.4 percent of the total population. There was a time in the late 1980s when there was widespread debate about allowing foreign workers without Japanese blood into the country. But after the Bubble burst, the government tightened regulations. Japan turned back at the brink.

In the days of sakoku, «closed country» (1600-1869), when the shogunate restricted the Dutch and Chinese to the port of Nagasaki, Dutch traders lived on Dejima, a small artificial island in Nagasaki Harbor connected by a causeway to the mainland.