Outsider Enters Japanese Ranks

He calls himself Japan’s first “lawmaker with blue eyes,” and he has a mission: to end racial discrimination in this long-homogenous culture.

Marutei Tsurunen, a 61-year-old naturalized Japanese citizen of Finnish heritage, took his seat in parliament last week amid lots of media attention and a pledge to fight social bias using his new platform as the first Westerner to serve in the Diet.

Twenty years ago, the idea of a Caucasian lawmaker in Japan would have been unthinkable. But Japanese these days are beginning to identify themselves more in terms of nationality than race, said Shingo Mabuchi, an associate sociology professor at Nara University.

Foreigners have also made inroads in a number of traditional areas in recent years, including sumo wrestling, baseball, TV entertainment and universities. The political arena represents a natural next step, Tsurunen said.

Tsurunen’s path to parliament hasn’t been easy. As a member of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, he ran for office four times and only succeeded this month after the seat was vacated by another official’s resignation.

The Finn, who was born Martti Turunen, arrived in Japan in 1967 as a missionary and worked for several years in an orphanage before becoming an English teacher, translator and author. After marrying a Japanese woman, he became naturalized in 1979, won election to a local assembly in 1992 and launched his first bid for national office in 1995.

After Tsurunen was elected as an assemblyman in the town of Yugawara, he shook things up by airing some of the assembly’s dirty laundry. Fellow representatives accused him of bad-mouthing the town.

Tsurunen said Friday that he then realized he’d be able to accomplish more by taking a lower profile and seeking change from within, an approach he plans to continue in parliament.

Of particular concern in Japan, Tsurunen said Friday, are large numbers of residents of Korean descent who aren’t allowed to vote, run for office or enjoy many other basic Japanese rights--even though many of them don’t speak Korean and are the third or fourth generation born in Japan.

“There are almost 2 million foreigners who are not citizens of Japan, and their situation is still very weak compared to Japanese,” he said in a news conference Friday at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. “I want to make their life better.”

Japan’s newest lawmaker added that the country should stop pressuring foreign residents, particularly other Asians, to assimilate and should instead allow them to keep their cultural identity.

The world’s second-largest economy is still grappling with many racial, cultural and migration issues despite a rapidly aging population that will almost certainly force the nation to open its doors wider in the future.

Cheol Eun Bae, a spokesman for the Korean Residents Union in Japan, welcomed Tsurunen’s election, adding that he hopes that the lawmaker can pressure Japan to ease requirements on running for local office in addition to expanding local voting rights.

Hiroshi Takaku, an independent political analyst, said Tsurunen isn’t likely to have a major impact on the substance or style of Japanese politics, a world often defined by payoff scandals and dirty deals.

“It will be interesting to see how he’ll do in Japan’s closed, smoke-filled rooms,” Takaku said. “But one person acting alone can’t change the system.”

Tsurunen’s ultimate contribution may be to show the outside world that Japan is changing, and to remind Japanese that they need to keep expanding their world view, said Makoto Tsuruki, a sociologist at Tokyo University.

“There’s still discrimination, but the situation is improving. Japan is beginning to realize its society is not homogenous,” Tsuruki added.

Tsurunen said Friday that his main focus beyond foreigner rights would be the environment and foreign relations.

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Makiko Inoue in The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.