These cards purportedly are being used to help ensure that foreigners in Japan integrate with the system. For instance, they want to be sure everyone is signed up for the socialized health insurance system and paying into the pension system. However, this is all smoke and mirrors for the truth. The truth is that the cards will allow the police to scan you and extract personal information at will. It’s also a way of getting more foreign residents to pay into systems from which they almost certainly will never be eligible to collect benefits. To collect from the Japanese pension system, you have to pay in for at least 25 years, or your government must have a reciprocal arrangement with the Japanese government. Very few countries have such arrangements and few foreigners remain in Japan for 25 years. Essentially, this is a way of having people pay into the struggling Japanese social services systems without collecting anything on the other end.
This new system had been proposed for Japanese citizens as well, but they roundly rejected being tracked in this manner. Many of them are currently avoiding payments into various social service systems (including the pension system) and they are no happier about biometric data being encoded into ID chips than we foreigners are. They don’t want their privacy compromised or to be opened up to identity theft. We don’t want it either, but we have no power to stop the Japanese government’s efforts to tighten the leash around our necks.
If this recently passed legislation is not a strong enough indication of the increasingly hostile posture of the Japanese government toward foreigners living and working in Japan, the fact that the police are now subjecting foreigners to random and unwarranted urinalysis to test for drug use shows that they have no respect for our rights as human beings. Foreign folks leaving nightclubs or simply looking “suspicious” in the eyes of the police are being asked to pee in a cup for no reason other than not being Japanese. Similarly, people are being asked to allow the police to check their bags for weapons or drugs in high traffic areas of Tokyo for absolutely no reason.
Article comments
1 - Ruvy
Japan, If I remember correctly, is the country that forbde foreigners to enter for 3 centuries or so until the 1850's.
This is not th first article you have written about Japanes intolerance of foreigners and xenophobia. One from quite a while ago still generates comments, albeit of the stupidest kind.... It might be time to consider flipping the Japanese and their bigotry the bird, and finding a friendlier place to call home.
2 - Glenn Contrarian
Okay...now let's look at the other side of the story.
Back in 2000 I was in a three-day port visit in Sasebo, Japan - I was excited because that was the only time I'd ever had the chance to visit there.
While I was on the American base in Sasebo (at the enlisted club called the 'Triple Play'), my camera was stolen. Frankly, I wasn't surprised - I'd taken my eyes off it for a couple and it was gone...and I knew that it was my fault for not keeping a closer eye on it.
There's a longstanding reputation about the way the Japanese viewed Americans at our military bases there - if there was a crime committed, they'd look at us first, and for good reason.
This sounds prejudicial against us, but I saw the reason why in a one-day tour to Nagasaki.
The first place we went was to a 'Sea Tortoise Shell Shop', a tourist trap where everything for sale was made out of sea tortoise shell. In the front display window was a clipper ship made completely out of sea tortoise shell, and its price was 10,000,000 yen - or about $100,000. I looked around - the store was on a side street, no night lights were evident, and there was no apparent alarm system on the window. That begged the question - just how long would this $100K item have stayed safe in a similar spot in America?
Later I and two shipmates were trolling downtown looking for a place to eat. It was early afternoon and we were finding that many places were closed between lunch and dinner. The thing is, these restaurants didn't lock their doors. We only found out they were closed when we'd walk inside and see no one - not even any employees to keep an eye on things.
Yes, there's corruption in Japan like anywhere else, and it will get worse as time goes on; and YES, they've got their own problems like those who deny the Rape of Nanking or their culpability in WWII, and YES the Japanese are perhaps the most racist first-world culture (which racism would be a good subject for a whole 'nother article)...
...but overall compared to America, it's a FAR safer place, a far LESS corrupt place to live.
And they've got a FAR better and cheaper (!) health care system - you know, that really evil socialistic communist fascist Universal Health Care (they go to the doctor on average three times as much as Americans do, and pay FAR less). Sorry...couldn't resist.
Sayonara for now!