Japan’s ‘Social Refugees’ Long for New Life in U.S. : Migration: Thousands of Japanese are tired of the strictures and conformity of their lives. They are vying to leave their wealthy country in a ‘green-card’ lottery.

He’s sick of it all--the strait-laced system that demands conformity, rewards seniority over talent and keeps everyone working day and night in an expensive, teeming homogeneous spot. She’s gifted and single and yearns to be free--to be liberated from an uncreative society with an obsessive concern with gender-based roles.

Now they both have found a way out. But why on earth would 6,413 men and women from one of the world’s richest technological powers want to leave their native land and immigrate to the United States?

Just ask the Japanese who won last year’s “green-card’ sweepstakes--the U.S. bonus lottery that gave 40,000 permanent resident visas to citizens of 34 countries traditionally underrepresented under the current U.S. immigration system. To the “shock” of U.S. officials here, the Japanese were the biggest group of winners in last year’s sweepstakes except for the Irish, for whom 40% of the lottery slots were legally set aside, and the Polish.

Officials--who even now are bracing for another sweepstakes--had expected only several hundred Japanese to even be considered in the 1991 competition, based on the results of a similar lottery for 10,000 visas in 1987. In that competition, Japan placed sixth, with 518 winners.

Based on a survey of successful applicants by the U.S. Embassy, the Japanese green-card winners are atypical American immigrants. They aren’t, for example, fleeing government oppression, severe economic hardship or religious persecution. Instead, they are what one commentator here has called “social refugees.”

“I’m sick of traditional obligations,” explained one accounting executive in Tokyo who began his romance with America while a student at the University of Southern California.

Others said they are flocking West to escape Japan’s crushing conformity, its oppressive web of social debts and obligations and its limited opportunities for self-expression. Those who stray from Japanese social norms are particularly inclined to leave: divorcees, unmarried women in their 30s, business executives who prefer to spend time with their families rather than drinking with the guys after work.

The emigres also include women with graduate degrees complaining of limited opportunities. There are ballet dancers, classical musicians and would-be rock stars who crave America’s creative freedom. A business executive with a top educational pedigree wanted to spare his children from the “dehumanizing” Japanese education system. Then there’s the writer and social activist who said he treasured America’s cultural diversity, saying Japan’s “homogeneous society is efficient but not creative.”

“Japan is rich, but there’s a lot of stress,” said Aki Okabe-Sugiyama, a writer who plans to immigrate to San Francisco this fall with his wife, Michiko, and two sons. “So people want to escape.”

How many? More than most imagined, especially considering that Japan has never come close to hitting the ceiling of 20,000 spots allotted to each nation under the standard U.S. immigration process.

In 1990, 5,734 Japanese immigrated to the United States--representing just 1.7% of all Asian immigration and 0.4% of total immigration that year, according to federal statistics. (Because a 1965 law gives preference to immigrants with close relatives in the United States, the top nations have invariably been Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea and India for the past several years.)

The paucity of new immigration from Japan, as well as high rates of interracial marriage among Japanese and Japanese-Americans in the United States, has stirred some disquiet that the ethnic Japanese community in the United States would disappear in a few generations.

But U.S. officials say it now appears that the low rates of immigration among Japanese did not necessarily mean they were uninterested. It probably only meant that they did not qualify under the regular system requiring either close relatives or special job skills. “The basic underlying demand is still there,” a U.S. official said.

U.S. officials are now gearing up for the next round of the green-card sweepstakes, authorized over three years by the 1990 Immigration Act to diversify the nation’s immigrant mix. And though no details have been officially announced, many Japanese here are already scrambling to apply.

For instance, the Pacific Newcomer Services in Tokyo, which assists lottery applicants, has already received more than 1,500 inquiries, said chief adviser Kiyomi Kohno. Although the U.S. government is not yet accepting applications for this year’s lottery, 300 people have already plunked down the firm’s $160 application fee.

The firm is one of several companies and law firms here and in the United States trying to capitalize on the lottery fever--and the Japanese propensity to hire “experts” even at considerable fees. Besides its application fee, Pacific Newcomer Services, for instance, charges $2,400 to process the final documents for the winners.

Last year, hiring consultants might have improved an individual’s chances for selection because winners were chosen on a “first-come, first-served” basis. Many firms not only filled out hundreds of applications for each client but waited in line at the main post office in Arlington, Va., to hand-deliver them on the deadline day.

But to prevent a repeat of the chaos that prevailed, officials are expected to change the rules this year and limit applications to one per person. Other expected changes include selecting winners in a true lottery, rather than first-come, first-served, and accepting applications over a one-month period. As a result, a U.S. official in Tokyo stressed there was “absolutely no need” to use consultants “because they can’t improve your chances for selection.”

Kohno said, however, that her firm’s services would be especially useful to Japanese who speak little or no English or who are worrywarts and fear that their application might get lost in the mail or that they may miss the deadlines. She said her firm’s fees were modest compared with the $7,500 that she reported some law firms in Honolulu and elsewhere in the United States were charging. Of 700 clients last year, 130 won green cards, she said. Kohno says she hopes to attract as many as 10,000 clients this year.

Shigekazu Sanno, 32, may be one. An international sales supervisor at a Japanese firm in Tokyo, he wants to flee not so much the conformity as the hardship of life in Tokyo, where prices are sky high, living spaces are cramped and commutes may take two hours or more.

In contrast, Sanno fondly remembers his days as a college student in Seattle from 1979 to 1985. A friend had a fishing boat; skiing and sailing were 30 minutes away. He stayed in apartments equipped with what are, by Japanese standards, unimaginable luxuries: fireplaces, swimming pools, big refrigerators, Jacuzzis and recreation rooms.

When he returned to Tokyo, he had to stay in his company dormitory: one room illuminated by a single overhead lamp, no private phone or air conditioner and communal baths where hot water usually ran out by 10 p.m.

“If I could get a job in the States, I wouldn’t expect a high-status job that pays . . . a lot of money,” Sanno said. “But I could probably have a higher standard of life.”

A 28-year-old businessman, who asked that his name not be used, said he can make it in Japan if he must.

But he is dissatisfied with the business system here, dominated as it is by its rigid corporate life. Promotions are based on seniority, regardless of talent and the zealous effort to “unify” everyone squeezes out creativity, he said, noting that, in Japan, “they destroy talented people. They worry so much about trying to get rid of your bad points that they destroy your good points.”

Like many applicants, he said he would not necessarily stay in America forever. But he wants the option of a permanent right to work in the United States without giving up his Japanese citizenship.

As an indicator of just how prized a possession United States citizenship is here, U.S. Embassy officials in Tokyo noted that fewer than a dozen people last year switched from American to Japanese citizenship; the few who did were motivated by tax concerns, worries over their U.S. military draft status or were seeking to enter Japan’s foreign service, officials said.

A prominent subset among the Japanese who won green cards to become Americans last year were artists, inventors and creators. They included a singer who is well-known here, a leading graphic artist and the acupuncturist for a California professional football team.

Other major categories, according to a random survey of 500 winners recently interviewed by the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, were “executive defectors”--22% of those surveyed were corporate managers, many earning six-figure salaries. Most said they were seeking a higher quality of life or better educational opportunities for their children, who are often handicapped in Japan’s fierce educational wars after a stint abroad.

But “the women really pop out,” a U.S. official said. Of the winners, 47% were women, a greater proportion than in the normal pool of immigrants on work visas. They were older (average age 31) and more educated than the men (61% had some college education). They included a Tokyo University graduate with a doctorate in chemistry from UC Berkeley and a Boston University postdoctoral student in microbiology.

And 77% were single, compared with 63% of the men.

“A lot of the single (women) said they couldn’t stand the discrimination or the pressure of being over the Christmas cake barrier,” said a U.S. official, referring to the saying here that women, like Christmas cake, lose their shelf life after the 25th (birthday).

Okabe-Sugiyama, the writer, said he wants to give his sons, ages 7 and 4, a multicultural upbringing. Okabe-Sugiyama, a graduate of Meiji University in Tokyo and UC Berkeley, lived with his wife in San Francisco in the early 1980s, joining community struggles against redevelopment in Japantown. At that time, says Michiko Sugiyama, “I could meet so many people I had never seen or imagined.”

“Japanese think a homogeneous society is much better--more efficient, safe and conflict-free,” Okabe-Sugiyama said. “But in a multicultural society, your norm is always questioned. You have to change and adapt. And a new, more creative society emerges.”

In a new study by Masako Ishii-Kuntz, a UC Riverside sociologist, the “New Issei,” or Japanese immigrants since 1965, have a higher average income than other Asian immigrants. They include a higher percentage of college graduates and proportion of managers and professionals.

Her survey of 130 new immigrants in five Southern California counties also uncovered “social refugees.”

They included an executive for a Japanese auto maker who came to treasure time with his children while in America; he could not readjust to demands to entertain clients at night and on weekends when he returned to Japan. Then there was the Pasadena College of Art and Design graduate who found his ideas squashed by superiors in Tokyo. There was a mother of two who returned to America after her own family told her that her divorce was shameful and she was no longer welcome.

“They are not poor, but in one way or another there was (not a fit) between what they wanted to accomplish in Japan and what Japan could offer them,” said Ishii-Kuntz.

But not all of Japan’s green-card winners are among what most would consider the best and brightest. There is, for example, a “sushi chef” category of mostly illegal restaurant workers, some of whom have dodged immigration officials for eight or nine years. (“You want some bad fugu (a poisonous blowfish), ask a sushi chef where his green card is,” one official quipped.)

Another significant subset was labeled “rebels without a clue.” These are young men looking for “urban misadventure” while working in restaurants, travel agencies or hair salons. Most had no idea why they wanted to immigrate. When asked, their replies included: Because I like America; There’s freedom; Mai duriimu (It’s my dream), or Eh to desu ne, the Japanese equivalent of “Ummmmmmmm,” as one U.S. official summarized it.

Then, of course, there was one particularly memorable applicant, a former grunt for Japan’s military, known as the Self-Defense Forces. He strode into the embassy, hair teased into an Elvis Presley-like pompadour, and announced he wanted to join the U.S. Marines.

And then there was the guy with the most straightforward reason of all. Referring to the rampant nicotine consumption here, he explained he wanted to go to America because “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life surrounded by cigarette smoke.”