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2 INTERVIEW Overcoming the 'Japanese only'
factor By Victor Fic
When US-born Dave Aldwinckle became a
Japanese citizen named Arudou Debito in 2000, two
Japanese officials told him that only now did he
have human rights in Japan. Such prejudice
galvanized him into becoming a crusader against
anti-gaijin (foreigner) discrimination
after braving death threats to him and his family.
Is Arudou throwing the egg of morality and
legality against the rock of ancient bias? In this
exclusive interview with Asia Times Online
contributor Victor Fic, he sees Japan
turning inward.
Arudou Debito, 46, holds a
BA in government from Cornell University and an
MPIA (Master of Pacific International Affairs)
with a Japan concentration from the University of
California, San Diego. Since moving to Japan in
the 1990s, Arudou has become a controversial
figure due to lawsuits he launched against
Yunohana Hot Spring
and the Otaru municipal government in Hokkaido
over alleged discrimination against gaijin
(foreigners).
Victor
Fic: Did you ever think that you would
become a Japanese citizen?
Arudou
Debito: Hell no! I wasn't even interested
in foreign languages as a child. But I moved from
my birthplace, California, to upstate New York at
age five and traveled much overseas, learning
early to communicate with non-native English
speakers. I'd lived a lot of my life outside the
US before I graduated from high school and wasn't
afraid to leave home. But changing my citizenship
and my name, however, was completely off the radar
screen. I didn't originally go to Japan to
emigrate - just to explore. But the longer I
stayed, the more reasonable it seemed to become a
permanent resident, then a citizen. Buying a house
and land was the chief reason that I naturalized -
a mortgage means I can't leave. More on me and all
this on my blog [1].
VF: The
contrast with your earlier life is dramatic
because you started life as an above average
American guy in the northeast ...
AD: How do you define
"average?" I certainly had opportunities. I grew
up in a good educational district and had high
enough grades to get into Cornell University,
where I earned a degree in government. I
springboarded into a quality graduate program at
the Graduate School of International Relations and
Pacific Studies at the UC San Diego, and availed
myself of excellent Japanese studies programs,
including a mentor relationship with the late East
Asia expert Chalmers Johnson. I then did the hard
slog of learning the language and culture and it
set me up my life as an academic, writer,
commentator, and educator about issues Japanese.
VF: Why do you insist that
prejudice towards foreigners in Japan is severe?
AD: It's systematic. In my
latest Japan Times column [2] I discuss the lack
of "fairness" as a latent cultural value in Japan.
Japanese tend to see foreigners as unquestionably
different from them, therefore it follows that
their treatment will be different. Everything else
stems from that. My column gives more details, but
for now let me note that a 2007 Cabinet survey
asked Japanese, "Should foreigners have the same
human-rights protections as Japanese?" The total
who agreed was 59.3%. This is a decline from 1995
at 68.3%, 1999 at 65.5% and 2003 at 54%. Ichikawa
Hiroshi, who was a Saga Prefecture public
prosecutor, said on May 23, 2011, that people in
his position "were taught that ... foreigners have
no human rights " [3]. Coming from law
enforcement, that is an indicative and
incriminating statement.
VF:
When immigrants to the West naturalize, they hear
"congratulations!" But when you became Japanese,
you were greeted with another statement ... what
was it?
AD: On October 11,
2000, I naturalized. And yes, I heard
"congratulations". But I was also visited at home
by two representatives of Japan's Public Safety
Commission to tell me that they would now take
action against the threats and harassment I had
been getting during the Otaru Onsens case. They
said clearly, "Now that you are a Japanese
citizen, we want to protect your human rights."
Meaning rights to protect when I became a citizen
- not before.
VF: Can you
cite practical examples from daily life?
AD: Sure. Do you want to
live someplace? Many landlords in Japan state up
front that they will not rent to foreigners. Want
a loan? Many realtors also say flat-out no to
foreigners, and as long as there is no contract
signed, there is generally nothing legally you can
do. Want to get a job as a tenured academic in
Japan's universities? Too bad - very often those
jobs are explicitly not open to foreigners. Want
to become a volunteer firefighter, a public-sector
food preparer, a family court mediator or a
manager in the bureaucracy? Sorry, citizens only.
The same goes for many job opportunities at "Hello
Work", the government job placement agency for
Japan's unemployed. If you actually apply there,
you will find many job listings have an unofficial
nationality clause - simply because Japanese
bosses presume no foreigner can speak Japanese, or
their clients won't want to deal with a foreigner.
VF: You became a
human-rights activist in Japan after you
experienced prejudice ... what happened?
AD: Shortly after I had
lived in Japan for about a decade, married a
Japanese, had children, and bought a house near
Sapporo, I got a big surprise. I found out in 1999
that there were public hot springs, onsen
in Japanese, in a nearby city called Otaru that
had "Japanese Only" signs up. My friends and I
took our families there for a bath. Management
there allowed the people who "looked Japanese" to
enter but barred those who "looked foreign" -
meaning me, my German friend Olaf, another
American friend, and one of my daughters. She
looked "more foreign" than her older sibling, who
was "safe" because she looked more like her
Japanese mother. However, they let in a Chinese
member of our group because she looked "Japanese
enough". Then they kicked her out when she
revealed herself as foreign. It was a case study
in racial discrimination, and it eventually became
a court case that went all the way to the Japanese
Supreme Court.
Debito
in front of formerly "Japanese Only" bathhouse
"Yunohana", the subject of his lawsuit, in Otaru,
Hokkaido.
VF: Before you went to
court, you tried to reason with people ... arguing
what?
AD: The bathhouses
insisted that they had experienced difficulties
with foreign customers, meaning language and order
issues. They said that drunken Russian sailors
were making a ruckus, driving their Japanese
customers away. We countered that those sailors
were indeed obnoxious individuals, but you
couldn't paint all foreigners based upon the
actions of a few. Besides, the management's
practice of deciding who is "foreign" based upon
physical appearance was flawed because they were
in fact banning Japanese, like my daughter, while
letting in foreigners, like our Chinese friend. So
they should improve their filter and wait until an
individual misbehaves before banning that
miscreant.
VF: That sounds
like a reasonable proposal ... what happened?
AD: The bathhouses refused,
calling it a "matter of their business's
survival". Then the issue entered the crucible of
public debate where inevitably stoneheaded pundits
began saying, "Bathing is part of Japan's unique
culture, and foreigners naturally can't understand
our customs so there's nothing we can do but keep
them out". It got really absurd after I took
Japanese citizenship in 2000. One Otaru
onsen, a place called Yunohana, still
banned me from entry even after acknowledging that
I was now a citizen, saying that my Caucasian
features would cause "misunderstandings". So in
the end, it didn't really matter what anybody did
- the management in these places assigned you a
predestined position of insider or outsider based
upon how you were born and looked genetically.
VF: Doesn't the constitution
protect these rights?
AD:
No. The bathhouse owner can do that because Japan
has no law in its civil or criminal code against
racial discrimination. Actually, the legal scholar
Colin Jones wrote in the Japan Times on November
1, 2011, that "the Japanese Constitution speaks of
defining equality and "fundamental human rights"
as being conditioned on nationality rather than
being human." [4]
VF: When
you hit that wall, you went to court ... and what
happened?
AD: Before that,
we spent more than a year negotiating with
everyone trying to find extra-legal solutions. But
we ultimately took that one bathhouse and the City
of Otaru to court for failing to abide by the
terms of the United Nations Convention on the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination [UNCERD] that
Japan signed in 1995. It took four years to wend
through Japan's judiciary, but the ultimate
conclusion was this: The bathhouse was wrong, but
the city was not bound to follow the UNCERD. That
last bit has triggered much international
criticism of how Japan ignores international
treaties.
VF: Why did the
court nail the bathhouse but absolve the city?
Didn't the international treaty cover both?
AD: Tokyo has repeatedly
claimed through explicit exceptions and caveats,
called "reservations", that it made when signing
that non-citizens in Japan do not qualify for
protection against racial discrimination or for
equal civil and political rights [5]. But the
judges exploited every loophole to exonerate the
government, including saying that the treaty is
only a guideline, not a legal map for the
political arena to enact legislation. Judges
rarely rule against the government in Japan.
VF: Overall, did you get a
fair trial?
AD: We were
heard, but our arguments were mostly rejected in
Japan's district and high courts, forcing us to go
all the way to the Supreme Court. Then they
stupefyingly dismissed it as "not a constitutional
issue". But ours is not the only case. As I said,
it's systematic. As I brought up in my Japan Times
articles of March 24, 2009, and August 14,
2007[6], there are different standards in both
Japan's civil and criminal courts if you're not a
citizen. A 2008 Supreme Court decision made it
clear that citizenship is essential to enjoying
constitutional and human rights in Japan.
So regarding "our day in court:, I feel
fortunate that I am a citizen - it wasn't a
loophole the courts could exploit. They split the
difference and the onsen was
punished.
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