COLUMN ONE : Living as Strangers in Japan : Short of workers but leery of foreigners, the nation ‘imported’ those of Japanese descent. But tensions and prejudices persist. One industrial town shows why.

“They steal the children’s bicycles and hang around the telephone boxes,” says Hachiro Nakano while slurping down a lunch of cold noodles. “They have dark skin,” she adds sliding four fingers down her cheeks. “It gives me the creeps.”

Says a salesclerk at a 7-Eleven convenience store, “They are always in the park on weekends, so I walk around the side to avoid them.”

Across town, a grocer grumbles while doing her books with a small calculator, “They come in and steal bananas and chew on cucumbers. It’s their culture.” One of her customers adds snidely, “If they keep coming in, Japan will be ruined.”

The foreigners do keep coming in. Many of them are Brazilians of Japanese ancestry--brought here to work in the plants that make this community of 36,000 people a thriving manufacturing center. With young Japanese workers scarce and unwilling to work long hours in dimly lit factories, business leaders--working with subsidies from the town treasury--have aggressively recruited foreign laborers.

As a result, Oizumi has the largest proportion of foreign residents of any Japanese community. About 10% of the population is foreign--a proportion that takes on a much larger significance in a nation that celebrates its homogeneity and acknowledges no minorities.

The town’s only previous experience with foreigners were the Koreans and Chinese forced to work here during World War II (half of the Chinese died of malnutrition within a few months of their arrival) and a small group of Americans who took over a factory site for an Army hospital during the Korean War. In both cases, the foreigners were unobtrusive.

But the thousands of Brazilians, Pakistanis, Nepalese, Bangladeshis and Iranians here now are all too visible and their presence has been profoundly disturbing to town residents. The fear and unease Oizumi feels, while at the same time acknowledging its need for labor, brings into sharp focus the raging debate in Japan over whether the nation should continue to import foreign workers.

Throughout Japan, a labor shortage brought on by a declining birthrate, the unwillingness of young Japanese to do “dirty” work and the nation’s slowness in integrating women into the labor force threaten to slow Japan’s remarkable economic growth. So foreign laborers have been brought in to fill the void. Pakistani accountants do manual labor on Japanese roads and Iranian computer programmers work at demolition sites. Here in Oizumi, former owners of Brazilian businesses spray-paint train seat parts in factories.

Carved out of flat green rice paddies about 100 miles west of Tokyo, Oizumi’s only notable heritage is its World War II role as the largest manufacturer of the famous Zero fighter planes. Today, it is a typical company town--one of hundreds across the nation spawned by half a century of industrial expansion. Life revolves around the production cycles of a Fuji Heavy Industries factory that makes Subaru cars, a Sanyo Electric commercial refrigerator plant and several dozen “metal bending” parts makers.

For years, the town’s factories drew workers from the poorer reaches of northern Japan. Starting about 1986, a strong yen set off a boom in the domestic economy, and companies began to turn to illegal immigrants to fill jobs.

Today, interaction between the native Japanese and the foreign workers is rare.

“We act as if they are invisible people,” says Seiichiro Okajima, a high school teacher who recently tried to break down barriers by giving students an assignment requiring them to ask foreigners about Islam.

“At first I was scared, but when I actually started talking to them I thought they really aren’t scary at all,” said a 17-year-old girl whose unusual encounter was the basis for a feature in the local newspaper. Yet, she adds, somewhat confused, “I wonder now if they weren’t really scary after all.”

Foreigners often live apart from the Japanese. Few Oizumi natives have visited the two Brazilian restaurants in town, or the Pakistani food store--filled with bins of pungent spices and Indian movie videos--in the adjacent town of Ota.

The Brazilians here increased rapidly after Japanese immigration authorities tightened restrictions on foreign labor last June, but left large loopholes to satisfy factory owners, who feel the labor shortage most acutely. Foreigners of Japanese ancestry would be allowed in on contract as would other foreign “trainees.” Authorities reasoned that foreigners of Japanese descent would be more likely to blend in with Japanese society.

Katsumi Yonezawa, president of Okayama Industries--a maker of train seat parts--flew to Brazil right away to find workers for several companies in his industry. In several trips, he has persuaded about 1,400 workers to come to Oizumi--part of a larger, well-organized influx of more than 100,000 Japanese-Brazilians who have come to work in Japan since the change in immigration laws.

As head of the industry group, Yonezawa takes very seriously his job as liaison between the townspeople and foreign workers. The organization provides housing and takes care of foreigners’ immigration documents. If the workers get in trouble, “we are responsible,’ Yonezawa says. Recently, he adds, Brazilians have begun to tax the system.

He discourages them from bringing their families. “I tell them they can’t bring their families with them, they are too much of a burden on us,” he says. “When the children come, we have to pay for an extra room in the apartment.”

Oizumi residents grumble about the cost of hiring four Portuguese-speaking teachers for the Brazilian children enrolled in the local elementary school.

While policy-makers may have thought Japanese-Brazilians would adapt easily to Japanese society, Yonezawa delights in describing just how un-Japanese he thinks they really are. “They don’t work as hard as the Pakistanis,” he says. And, he adds, they don’t show the same loyalty to employers as Japanese workers. Most don’t think twice before quitting a factory where they have been trained and taking a job that pays more, he says.

Brazilians must be housed in apartments isolated from any Japanese neighbors, Yonezawa says. They stay up late at night partying and “they don’t even separate their garbage properly,” he says referring to the Japanese practice of separating burnable and non-burnable refuse.

Local authorities closed down a popular samba dance club in a nearby town because it made too much noise. “The reality is they aren’t melting into the society,” Yonezawa concedes.

The Brazilians, for their part, have found their Japanese bosses wanting.

“Everybody told me the Japanese were polite and first in high-technology,” says Katya Fernandes, a second-generation Japanese-Brazilian.

Fernandes, who does manual labor in a metal parts factory, shows burn scars on her arms. The injuries result from the pressure she is under to move components quickly from hot welding trays, she explains. Once when she went to the bathroom, her boss actually opened the door and told her to get back to work, she says.

“We came because we thought the grass was greener,” says her husband, Armando.

The family is not able to save money, he says. If he worked the same 12-hour days at his auto shop in Brazil as he does in Japan, “I would have been able to make as much money as I do here,” he says.

Norberto Aoki, 47, who left his wife in Sao Paulo where she runs the family’s souvenir shop, says he came here to save the $20,000 he needs to buy a house at home. He has no complaints, but his wife and daughter want him back. He saves $500 of the $1,500 he earns every month and hopes to return in a year and a half.

Still, Aoki, who was recruited by Yonezawa, feels awkward about Japan’s policy of allowing only foreigners of Japanese descent to do manual labor in Japan. “It is strange that they do that. I don’t feel Japanese inside my heart,” he says.

The changes in immigration law to give preference to foreigners of Japanese ancestry and trainees has exacerbated the problems of Japan’s large population of illegal workers, who typically enter the country on tourist visas and stay beyond the limit. Many of these workers were brought to Japan by recruiting companies run by gangsters who take as much as half their wages.

In Oizumi, many are crowded into a neighborhood on the fringe of town where rows of mulberry bushes and cabbage patches are squeezed between ramshackle houses. In one such house, where Nepalese sleep five to a room, Basu Paudel, 25, complains about the Japanese.

“If we go to the supermarket or the theater, they seem frightened,” says Paudel, who worked in an Oizumi factory until losing his job recently. “I don’t know why they hate us. They say, ‘Japan is civilized and you are nothing.’ ”

Because they are working here illegally, these workers receive no health insurance and their children aren’t allowed in Japanese schools.

Bahman, an Iranian who doesn’t want his last name used, says he translated for a worker who lost four of his fingers. Although the employer paid $35,000 in compensation, hospital bills took nearly half of the money. The injured worker now has no idea how he will make a living, Bahman says.

Foreign workers say they are automatically blamed for any crime committed in town. The arrest rate among foreigners is higher than among natives. But most of Oizumi’s problems have been minor; police complain, for example, that foreigners speed along the narrow streets and jaywalk. There have been a few incidents, however, that have put the town on edge. An Iranian was arrested earlier this year for molesting a 10-year-old girl. And, in the same prefecture, a Brazilian was arrested for murdering a Japanese woman.

Most arrests in the area, however, are for robberies and assaults where foreigners are both the victim and the accused. In Ota, where many of Oizumi’s foreigners go after work for entertainment, half of the 14 people in the city’s jail on a recent visit were foreigners. Although foreigners make up just a small percentage of the region’s population, they account for 30% of Ota’s arrests.

Mustufa, a Bangladeshi who won’t give his last name for fear of being deported, says Japan is to blame if foreigners commit offenses such as whistling and making improper comments to Japanese women.

“They won’t let us bring our wives,” he says. At the same time, prostitutes refuse foreign customers. “You can’t go for five years without sex,” he adds. He says he cannot go home because he is supporting his two brothers through college and must stay at least three to four years before they complete their educations.

The Japanese exaggerate the limited crime in the area with frequent, unsubstantiated rumors about foreigners raping Japanese schoolgirls.

One high school-age girl says that when she sees a foreigner bicycling behind her she gets scared and pedals frantically to get away. “I thought he might be chasing me.”

Okajima, a high school teacher, believes parents are reinforcing the fear to prevent their daughters from having relations with foreigners. Just as parents tell children about the monster in the deep river to keep them from getting too close and falling in, so parents tell children about rapes to keep them away from foreigners, Okajima suggests. “It is not because of prejudice but for self-defense,” Okajima adds.

In a small tatami room, after serving the last customer in his sushi bar, Yasuyuki Nagashima, his wife, Tomie, and their daughter, Rie, sit down to eat and discuss the “foreigner problem.” Their son, wearing an Indians baseball cap and a sweat suit with the “Simpsons” logo emblazoned on the front, sprawls across the floor watching the American movie “Major League.”

The family is, by Japanese standards, very open-minded. Rie, 15, who won the town’s English-language speech contest, is critical of her classmates’ racism. She says her friends say things like “Yuck, I just saw 10 ‘Pakis’ on the way to school.” Paki, she says, refers to all foreigners whether they are Pakistani or of Japanese ancestry.

Rie’s father thinks the Japanese principle of tanitsu kokka, tanitsu minzoku (one nation, one race) is racist. And he takes a cynical view of the way Japan tries to be part of the West. “We see ourselves as Western, as being at a higher level,” says Nagashima. “We won’t take English teachers from places like India, only from white nations.”

Yet, the family is disturbed by what is happening in Oizumi. Tomie, the mother, says she worries about her daughter walking around town late at night. Nagashima fears that the introduction of foreign workers will contribute to a decline in Japan’s work ethic. He says foreign workers are in Japan because Japanese youngsters are too lazy to work. Many factory owners have extended work hours, he said, because foreigners want to work overtime to earn extra money, which forces Japanese workers who want to spend more time with their families to also work long hours or quit their jobs.

Nagashima has unpleasant childhood memories of American soldiers in town during the Korean War who frequently fought outside his parents’ cabaret.

“What impressed me is that they used to punch each other while Japanese tend to wrestle,” he says. The soldiers, however, did not disturb town life that much because they usually stayed on base, Nagashima explains. Today’s foreigners, he says, knitting his eyebrows, can be seen walking all around town. And, he adds, their numbers keep growing.

Monday in Business: How Japan is changing business practices to cope with labor shortages.