Perspective of people from the government
As a member of the Japanese government, we think that risk management is one of the most important thing about the issues regarding to refugees. We understand that there are a lot of people suffering but on the other hand, there are a lot of people who is trying to take advantage of our policies. In Japan, we have a system called skill training policy. This was a policy where we invite workers from developing countries to share knowledge for the good of both countries. The problem is that we are somehow missing around 30000 foreigners after we teached them our resources. This number is not the number of people who left Japan. This is the number of people which we have no idea where they are. This is the part where we call the situation “high risk”. We can not trust a group of people where they may just take advantage of Japan and secretly eat up the resources.
Another obvious reason that we don not invite refugees is the wall of language. Japan has a high literacy rate in Japanese but most of the local people can not speak, write or read English. If the local people can’t speak English, there is no chance that they can communicate. This is not only because Japanese people can’t speak English. It is because refugees can not speak fluent English as well. If the refugee was capable of speaking English, we do have some options to communicate. But usually refugees are not skilled enough to speak “good English”. This makes a lot of obstacles in the translation method used in Japan, leading to a lack of communication.
First of all, we are the third largest donator in the world. We are using a large portion of taxes on supporting refugees, why do we have to be criticised for not inviting them? Places such as European countries were suffering from accepting a lot of refugees. We do not want to take the risk of destroying our local culture through the issues that they bring in. That is why we donate a lot of money so they can live in their own country or another country that they evacuated to. As the government, we would keep on supporting refugees through donation, but not by inviting them.
Perspectives of NPO, NGO
In Japan, being recognized as a refugee is a serious issue. Most of the people that came to Japan was not informed by the strict policies and they are still seeking for the refugee status.
It is easy to say that they can go to another country but that is not a option for a lot of refugees. They did not have the knowledge that Japan is highly strict on accepting refugees. They just knew that this country was safe, and was easy to get a traveling visa. This trapped them on to this isolated land since they do not have a country to go back.
The government only recognizes the people who have actually applied, but since you have to write a ton of documents in Japanese, most of the people are not even in the stage of “applying”. In Japan, it is told that there were 7000 applicants and 11 being accepted. This number gives 2 impressions to the reader.
There was only 7000 applicants in Japan.
Only 11 people were accepted.
Both of them are serious issues but you can easily get miss directed from this information. In Japan, it takes around 3 years to be recognized as refugee (including the fact that most people gets denied). Therefore, the application that the 11 people made were mostly from previous years.
The 7000 applicants are only people that actually completed the document, the number of people seeking to be a refugee is much higher. As you can see, the impression you obtain from the two facts is really different if you know about this issue.
We understand that the government does not have any space to change their regulation. We are just seeking for support. In terms of access, we have to locate our self in a urban area with high rents and open our office throughout the week. If we can have some more subisity or donations, we would be able to help the refugees that are suffering. We are not asking for a change in the world. We just need a portion of the power so we can at least confidently protect the people that are seeking for support.
I was shocked to know that there are other problems than language. Where I work now there are many foreign workers but also there are many Japanese worker who can speak English so I thought they don't have much problem with language so if we help the language problem it will solute many refugee problems, but by reading your blog I recognised that my thought was childish.
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