Illegal Workers Seen as Social Threat : Japan’s Affluence Brings a New Problem--Aliens

After 10 months of backbreaking labor and physical abuse, Reuben sits in a narrow hallway with a grubby linoleum floor and a row of closed doors, which the investigative division of the Immigration Bureau uses as a waiting room.

He is exhausted and disoriented, but he laughs at the sign on the wall, hand-lettered in clumsy English by a Japanese bureaucrat: “We don’t accept your surrender today.”

Reuben is an illegal alien seeking deportation, voluntarily, after his dream of earning big money in Japan went haywire. He asks that his last name not be published, but not just because of his legal troubles. Reuben harbors the seemingly irrational fear that his employer will track him down and make him go back to work before he can return safely to the Philippines.

“They worked me without rest,” the 29-year-old Filipino said about the landscaping contractor who hired him on the sly. “When I slipped up, the boss kicked me in the back.”

While Reuben intends to tangle with red tape so he can surrender, other people crowding the hallway and waiting for their names to be called on this day hope to find a way to stay and work in Japan. Because this is where the yen is--higher wages and greater opportunities than anything imaginable in Manila or Dhaka, Bangladesh, or Karachi, Pakistan, where they came from.

“Japan has the best of Asia,” said Quazi Rashid Mahmud, 25, a Bangladeshi who overstayed his tourist visa to work in Tokyo pubs. “But you have to have the right papers.”

Waves of unskilled, illegal workers are coming to Japan from developing countries in Asia, drawn by the power of the strong yen. Government and union officials estimate there are already 50,000 to 80,000 of them, sneaking in on tourist or student visas and grabbing the kind of dirty jobs that Japanese no longer want. If estimates of undocumented Korean workers are taken into account, the number of illegal aliens exceeds 100,000, and it is growing.

The foreigners constitute an invisible work force. They clean city buildings after midnight, toil out of sight in small suburban foundries and dig ditches on rural construction crews; some of the women work as hostesses in bars or as prostitutes.

They also get caught, sometimes, and sent home.

Despite a severe shortage of manual labor, Japan’s immigration policy prohibits unskilled foreign workers, even on a temporary basis. That has not stopped organized crime groups from importing the workers or businesses from hiring them when needed--at about 40% of the cost of a Japanese.

But serious debate over what to do about the situation quickly takes on xenophobic overtones.

Easing of Rules Urged

Critics of the system say immigration rules should be relaxed and foreign labor legalized to protect people like Reuben, the Filipino, from exploitation by unscrupulous bosses. Government officials and business leaders, however, take a hard line, pointing to social problems such as crime and unemployment in other developed countries--West Germany, for example--where guest workers and their families have stayed permanently.

Indeed, recent opinion polls show that most Japanese oppose opening the door to unskilled foreign workers. Organized labor has gone on record against it, and an advisory group to the Labor Ministry recommended in March that immigration restrictions be maintained for foreigners without job skills.

So large are the numbers coming in, however, that the bureaucracy seems unable to cope. Last year the Immigration Bureau of the Justice Ministry deported 14,129 people, seven times the number of a decade earlier. In a 10-day crackdown at Narita Airport in April, authorities subjected 558 incoming travelers to a special screening and turned away all but 100.

Signs of Cracking

The orderly homogeneity of Japan’s society, often hailed as an important ingredient in the nation’s rise to an economic superpower status, shows early signs of cracking at the seams. The sorcery of the strong yen could force Japan to internationalize in a way that it never would have conceived of before--with people, rather than material things or ideas.

“There are bound to be many social problems as Japan becomes more affluent and more workers come here from low-income countries to do the dirty work,” said Rokuro Ishikawa, chairman of Kajima Corp., a major construction company, and head of the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

“But it’s a fact that a fairly large number of unskilled workers are entering Japan illegally,” Ishikawa said. “The problem is that the government has not come up with an articulate policy.”

The Asahi newspaper, in an editorial in March, characterized the soul-searching caused by the problem when it decried that “deep down, many Japanese are xenophobic.” This is evidenced, the newspaper said, by the small number of refugees Japan has accepted for resettlement.

Call for New Attitude

“It is about time Japan changed its attitude,” the Asahi said. “Money and goods are crossing national boundaries today. It is time for Japan to recognize that this must apply to people as well.”

An obligation to accommodate foreign labor goes along with Japan’s new riches, some argue.

“Japan sells so many goods in Asia that we’re controlling the economies of these countries,” said Ben Watanabe, a progressive labor union official who counsels foreign workers in Tokyo. “It’s wrong to bring back their money and deny them the opportunity to work here.”

At the heart of the issue is the question of whether Japan’s tightknit, conformist society can ever truly assimilate foreigners who look different or maintain a distinct ethnic identity.

Koreans Not Citizens

The experience of Japan’s Korean minority, descendants of unskilled laborers brought here forcibly when the Korean Peninsula was a Japanese colony between 1910-1945, suggests this might be all but impossible. About 678,000 Koreans have permanent residency status in Japan but are not citizens, even though many were born here and some are third- or fourth-generation residents.

“There’s no other country in the world where you see people live for four generations and still not gain citizenship,” said Yaeko Takeoka, an attorney who is researching the foreign labor problem for the Japan Federation of Bar Assns. “Japanese don’t have any concept of what an ethnic minority is.”

Reuben, the Filipino laborer, said he came to Japan on a tourist visa last July after a friend told him high-paying work was plentiful here. He ended up in Nagano, a regional city near the Japanese Alps, where he tended golf courses and did landscaping for an abusive boss whose name he never learned. He was the only foreigner on the crew and spoke no Japanese.

He says he earned $725 to $800 a month, which, according to surveys, is about two-thirds the going rate for illegal workers in Japan. Reuben says he fled Nagano when the beatings became intolerable.

‘It Was a Big Mistake’

“I didn’t find the kind of work I’d hoped for,” says Reuben, who wears a dirty red sweat shirt and jika tabi --the traditional split-toed work boots favored by laborers in Japan. “I won’t be coming back. It was a big mistake.”

His case is not unusual, observers say, but neither is it typical. Most unskilled workers, especially Filipinos and South Koreans, are brought here in small groups by labor brokers with ties to the yakuza , or Japanese gangsters, they say. These foreign crews are generally employed at rural construction sites. They are moved in and out of Japan through yakuza networks established in the early 1980s to import prostitutes after overseas “sex tours” by Japanese businessmen lost popularity.

“We think of it as international trafficking in human beings,” said Takeoka, the lawyer.

Large numbers of men from Pakistan and Bangladesh also have flocked to Japan to work, taking advantage of bilateral treaties that make Japanese visas easy to acquire.

Exploitation of Women

Although much attention is now being paid to the recent influx of illegal male workers, exploitation of Asian women in Japan remains an unsettling problem. About 60% of Japan’s illegal aliens are thought to be women, most of them from the Philippines and, with few exceptions, employed in or on the periphery of Japan’s extensive sex industry.

For the past seven years or so, the media has been flooded with tales of Asian women being lured to Japan with false promises by bogus talent scouts. Once here they are put to work as bar hostesses and, the stories frequently go, forced into prostitution. Yakuza handlers confiscate passports and homeward-bound plane tickets as leverage, in many accounts.

Some women come to Japan on their own, however, and manage to stay out of the clutches of the gangs.

“We’ve been lucky, we’ve had a really good employer,” said Aida Penaflor, a 25-year-old bar hostess from Manila who arrived four years ago on a 15-day tourist visa with her older sister, Miriam. “We’re not prostitutes.”

Makes $10 an Hour

Penaflor said she makes about $10 an hour pouring drinks, lighting cigarettes and flirting with customers at the bar in a Tokyo suburb. While in Japan, the sisters have paid the rent on the family’s apartment in Manila and sent their brothers and sisters to school. They plan to go home later this month before their passports expire.

“I would love to stay here if it were legal,” she said. “There are so many chances for jobs, but we can’t get them without visas.”

It appears doubtful that the Penaflor sisters will be returning any time soon. Not only is the government of President Corazon Aquino cracking down on passport issuance but tourist visas are also getting harder to get at the Japanese Embassy in Manila. And the debate over Japan’s immigration rules is likely to continue for several years before any decisions are made.

The hesitancy to legalize unskilled foreign labor “plays into the hands of the yakuza or anyone else who wants to make a lot of money off these people,” said Carolyn Francis, an American missionary who counsels illegal aliens at a women’s shelter in Tokyo. “There are people who stand to profit by keeping it the way it is.”

Social Disorder Feared

Employers, especially the smaller firms struggling in a business climate that has changed radically since the yen began appreciating 2 1/2 years ago, theoretically benefit the most from cheap, underground wages. But even representatives of this layer of industry fear social disorder brought by the low-income foreigners they want to hire.

Akira Nishikiori, managing director of the National Federation of Small Business Assns., advocates finding a way to allow foreign workers to enter Japan temporarily but ensure that they later go away to avoid disturbing Japan’s harmony.

“There’d be social problems even with a limited relaxation of immigration rules, but the problem is how to prevent this from happening at the same time we stop exploitative labor conditions in the black market,” Nishikiori said.

“We need to become realistic in our labor relations,” he said. “There must be some way we can rationalize things to hire them when needed, and then send them back.”