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By Root 1081 0

he was asked what he liked about baseball in America, Nomo explained that Americans really enjoyed baseball, whether they were players or spectators. The key to Nomo's departure lies in the word enjoy, in contrast to endure. Nomo's escape opened the floodgates. In 1997, another star, Irabu Hideki, left Japan to join the Yankees; and in December 1999 the popular player Sasaki «the Devil» Kazuhiro went off to join the Seattle Mariners. So many successful players have left that baseball clubs had to change the rules in order to allow easier departure to the United States. In October 2000, Japan's most popular baseball star ever, Suzuki Ichiro, made his farewells, to a standing ovation from 26,000 fans, as he, too, set out for the U.S. majors. The situation in Japanese baseball was like ballet under the U.S.S.R. – raise a star, and the first thing he wants to do is defect.

Many refugees are people who are at the top of their professions. An inventor like Nakahara Shuji is nothing less than an international technology superstar, and yet he had no choice but to leave Japan. We are not dealing with the poor and disadvantaged here, or with the politically oppressed, such as those who fled Nazi Germany or China after the massacre at Tiananmen Square. It must surely be unique in world history that a free and wealthy society in a time of peace has become unattractive to the brightest and most ambitious of its own people. But this is what the stranglehold of bureaucracies and entrenched systems in Japan is achieving.

The flight of native talent abroad is an old story in Japan, almost a cliche. What is less known is that a significant shift is taking place in the makeup of Japan's resident foreign population. Expats who have lived there for decades are making a quiet exodus. In 1995, Otis Cary, then seventy-four, the dean of Kyoto's foreign residents, announced that he was planning to return to the United States. Cary, who was born in Japan and spent most of his life there, received an award from the emperor for a distinguished career spanning more than forty years as a professor at Doshisha University. Among the foreigners in Kyoto, his name was synonymous with love of the city. Nevertheless, Cary voiced no regrets. «It will be a relief to me,» he said.

David Kidd, a legendary art dealer (forty years in the Kyoto area), and Dan Furst, active in the theater world (ten years), both moved to Honolulu more than a decade ago – and others followed. John McGee, a distinguished Canadian who was head of Urasenke Tea School's International Department, resigned in 1999 and left Kyoto after twenty-seven years. The most common conversation I have these days is with foreign friends from Japan who are moving to the United States, South America, Hong Kong, or Bangkok. The second most common conversation is with the gloomy people who for one reason or another see no way out.

The elite of fast-track investment bankers who were stationed in Japan transferred to Hong Kong and Singapore in the early 1990s, leaving second-string players in Tokyo. Long-established foreign communities in Kobe and Yokohama, dating to Meiji days, have shrunk to nearly the vanishing point, and international schools are closing. There is a clear shift among Westerners from long-term residents to short-term employees who come to Japan to make some money and then move on.

At the same time, the absolute number of foreigners in Japan nearly doubled in the 1990s. But one must look at the numbers carefully. The largest foreign group in Japan is the 640,000 Koreans, descendants of forced laborers brought over in the 1930s and 1940s. Many are third- or fourth-generation residents in Japan, speak no Korean, and are indistinguishable from the average Japanese.

Japan maintains a tight immigration policy, accepting fewer Vietnamese or other refugees than any other developed country, for example, and making foreign spouses wait decades before they are granted permanent residence. Yet there is a need for unskilled labor, and the way to meet this is to welcome South American descendants