Prejudice Prevalent in Japan, Asian Foreigners Say : Society: Students and workers from abroad cite biases against them, ranging from rent to wages.

In his search for an apartment, every day was the same for Yoyok Ikhsan, an Indonesian exchange student in Japan.

Before he could get his head through the door of a real estate office, the agent would rise and say the dreaded words: Gaijin wa dame . No foreigners here. Finally his school found a place that would take him--a bathless, cockroach-infested room little larger than a VW bus. Gratefully, he moved in.

As leaders from the nations of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum meet in Osaka this week, they come to a nation that has turned its eyes toward Asia.

But for the Asians living in Japan, there is a gap between the rhetoric and the reality.

Japanese investment, loans and trade now flow increasingly to the East--not the West. From official development assistance to local cultural exchanges, Japan is celebrating its Asian-ness. Food from other Asian lands is the trendy new cuisine. And politicians, business people and bureaucrats write books on the bonds of Asian cultures.

Yet life in Japan for Asian foreigners is still hard. Many real estate agents refuse to rent to them, companies are reluctant to hire them for career-track positions, and many say they must put up with the contempt of their Japanese peers.

Because almost all social rights and benefits are premised on Japanese citizenship, even the law often fails to accommodate foreigners.

For example, although it is virtually impossible to become a naturalized Japanese citizen, all foreign workers have money taken out of their monthly salary for national retirement funds. In the event of a building fire or natural disaster like January’s devastating earthquake in Kobe, Japanese are granted emergency funds and accommodation, but foreigners are not. And the babies of unmarried Thai women, born in Japan and fathered by Japanese men, are not eligible for Japanese citizenship.

Furthermore, many official transactions, from obtaining a visa to renting an apartment, require a Japanese guarantor who agrees to take full responsibility for any problems that occur. In a nation where making friends is hard, and building trust takes years, many Asians say they spend weeks, even months, trying to find guarantors.

“The attitude toward Asia has definitely changed in the last five years,” says Naoko Yoshida, a member of the volunteer group Friends of Thai Women. “But that change in attitude still hasn’t filtered down to the level of individuals. There’s still incredible discrimination.”

Wan Lubin, a Chinese man who attended prestigious Kyoto University and now works as a researcher for Toshiba Corp., likens the situation of foreigners in Japan to a family that welcomes you into its home and saddles you with domestic duties but won’t trust you with the key to the front door.

All foreigners face problems, he says, but the prejudice against Asian foreigners is of a particular type.

“In Europe, neither the Gypsies nor the Jews had a country, and there was bias against both groups,” he says. “But for the Jews it was a bias based on jealousy, while for the Gypsies it was a bias born of a sense of superiority. In Japan, white foreigners would be the Jews. Asians would be the Gypsies.”

With Japan’s transformation into an international economic superpower over the past two decades, growing numbers of Asians have flocked to this country. Under an initiative of former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone to get 100,000 Asian exchange students a year to Japan by the year 2000, the number of Asian students has ballooned from 5,000 in 1975 to close to 50,000 today. A million more Asian foreigners fill Japan’s factory assembly lines, nightclubs and local businesses.

Now, although the lure of an ever-stronger yen continues to attract ambitious laborers from throughout the region, word is filtering back that Japan may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

The greatest dissatisfaction comes not from the laborers, who are willing to put up with more to send fat envelopes of yen home, but from exchange students. Last year the growth in the number of exchange students dropped off for the first time.

It is the reactions of these students--the best and the brightest of Asia, who could become the region’s future prime ministers and corporate tycoons--that may hurt Japan in the long run.

Satoru Suhara--a Japanese man who has counseled students at the Asian Cultural Assn. for two decades and is contacted by more than 6,000 students a year--says the young Asians come to Japan with high hopes but often leave with negative feelings about their Japanese experience.

This generation--free of personal memories of Japanese colonization in the region more than half a century ago--offered Japan a chance to demonstrate that its past attitudes of cultural and racial superiority have changed, Suhara says. But now, their feelings reinforce rather than overcome bitter World War II memories, he says.

“We aren’t trusted by Asian countries,” Suhara says. “No matter how many pretty things Japan says about relations with Asia, we continue to wound the hearts of young people.”

Take Ikhsan: He was sent to Japan eight years ago as part of an Indonesian government program to train engineers for the country’s space program. Although in Indonesia it is often said that three years of Japanese occupation during World War II were as bad as the previous 350 years of colonization, he says he is young, so that meant nothing to him.

“But,” he says, “since I have been here I see how the Japanese prey on the weak, and I understand that dark part of the Japanese character. It makes me scared of a Japan that would take a stronger leadership role in Asia.”

Professor Sumiko Iwao of Keio University, who has studied the experience of exchange students in Japan since 1975, says that compared to European and American students, whose opinion of Japan gets better with time here, Asian students have an increasingly dimmer view of the Japanese. The longer they are here and the better their language ability, the more alienated they become.

This is partially because, as every foreigner will tell you, you can stay here forever but you can never be fully accepted by the Japanese.

This message is pounded home directly, through unfriendly stares at Asian students who speak their native tongues on the subway, or who don’t bind their exotic-smelling garbage bags tightly enough, but also indirectly, by companies that charge Asian workers for pension funds they will never get and tax them for various kinds of national insurance they cannot receive.

Suhara says there is a ranking in the minds of many Japanese. Japanese are on top, then whites, then other Asians, on down. Among other Asians, he says, Chinese would probably rank at the top because of Japan’s deep respect for their culture, while Koreans would probably be last.

In this month’s Sapio magazine, 129 women ranked foreign lovers by nationality. On the top-choice list, Americans were first and Englishmen second; on the last-choice list, Iranians were first, Southeast Asians second and Chinese third.

“You can’t get rid of that kind of discrimination,” Suhara says. “But you can control it--with laws.”

What is hardest on them, some Asians say, is that Japanese tend to lump all other Asians together in one group, usually defining them by their worst representatives.

Professor Iwao says elite Chinese students go through a real identity crisis because “Japanese treat all the Chinese in Japan as criminals.”

Workers also experience discrimination, but many say they are willing to put up with it for pay many times higher than they could earn at home.

South Korean Kim Hal Han, 27, came from Seoul a year ago and runs a Korean grocery in Okubo, the Asian mecca in Tokyo, where smells of Burmese curry and Korean barbecue fill the air.

“Japanese don’t like Koreans,” she says in broken Japanese. “I don’t understand the hearts of Japanese.”

But when asked why she came to Japan and if she will stay, she grabs a pen and writes a huge yen sign, then grins. She says she will stay until she is 40 and rich.