Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [155]
If you remove Koreans and nikkei laborers from South America from the statistics, the remainder of the foreign population in Japan is minuscule, less than 0.4 percent of the total population. There was a time in the late 1980s when there was widespread debate about allowing foreign workers without Japanese blood into the country. But after the Bubble burst, the government tightened regulations. Japan turned back at the brink.
In the days of sakoku, «closed country» (1600-1869), when the shogunate restricted the Dutch and Chinese to the port of Nagasaki, Dutch traders lived on Dejima, a small artificial island in Nagasaki Harbor connected by a causeway to the mainland. Only with special permits could the Dutch pass over the causeway, and the authorities usually granted these only during the day. At night the Dutch had to return to Dejima, where their guardsmen locked the gate behind them. Modern-day rules that restrict foreigners to certain discrete corners of Japanese society and keep them out of the mainstream can be traced to Dejima. And the dream of a physical Dejima for foreigners has never faded. During the days when I worked for American real-estate developer Trammell Crow, I ran across many national and local development plans that called for getting all the foreigners to move into special apartment buildings designed just for them – often on landfill islands.
Recently a young friend of mine, the child of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, joined a large coffee company as a new employee. The personnel department called him in and told him, «We see that you carry a Chinese passport. It is our policy not to give management positions to foreigners. Please change your nationality.» As this story makes clear, foreigners in Japan cannot expect career advancement.
There is one niche, however, a «Dejima of employment,» that is specially allotted to foreigners. It is the job of creating and selling propaganda. Japan issues such a massive volume of advertisement about itself, for both foreign and domestic consumption, that propaganda production deserves to be considered an industry in its own right. A surprisingly large percentage of the Europeans and Americans employed in Japan are working on selling Japan abroad, ranging from the Western students of architecture and gardens whose job is to preach Japanese culture to the world to thousands of spokesmen retained by religious foundations, banks, and trading houses. Yet of the expats I have known over the years who work for Japanese institutions, only a handful enjoy substantive responsibility. Most work in «international departments,» where their assignment is to polish up speeches or edit newsletters and magazines whose content is largely glorification of their company, industry, town, or art form.
The involvement of foreigners in producing propaganda obviously has an important effect on how Japan is seen by the rest of the world, so important that hardly a book on Japan in recent years has not mentioned it. Patrick Smith (Japan: A Reinterpretation) and Richard Katz (Japan: The System That Soured) refer to these committed Japanophiles as the Chrysanthemum Club.
One of the most fascinating questions about Japan as