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Dogs and DemonsJapan 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 of Japanese emigrants. The great increase in foreign residents in Japan has been in this group of nikkei, foreigners of Japanese descent, from Brazil and Peru (from 2,700 in 1986 to 275,000 in 1997). While this group includes many intelligent and ambitious young people, very few of them manage to surmount Japan's high barriers to joining the mainstream and carve out successful careers. Sadly, most of them are doomed to live their days at the bottom of the social pecking order, doing work that modern Japanese shun. It will take generations for them to assimilate, and it will not be easy: in the summer of 1999, rightist gangs paraded through the Brazilian neighborhood in the town of Toyota, home of the automobile company and of a large concentration of nikkei workers, demanding, «Foreigners go home!» Even Japanese blood doesn't count for much, it seems ...» |
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