Quote:
Originally Posted by RealJames
Xenophobia is fear or dislike of foreigners or others. Japanese people certainly don't have this. Japanese people are largely ignorant about the world outside Japan but not afraid of it, nor do they dislike it.
Japan's population is almost entirely ethnically Japanese, there are a few Brazilians which were originally from Japan here but they look as Japanese as Japanese people do, and their numbers are so minute in comparison to overall population we're talking like less than 0.2%, and that was in the 80's or something. The other foreigners are largely Korean and Chinese who are by and large born and raised in Japan. Leaving the non-asian population at an incredibly small number. Ergo, homogeneous population is a fair statement.
Resident visas are granted to people who stay in Japan for extended periods of time, they need a certain level of Japanese and any Japanese national to vouch for them. Naturalized I believe is the term.
For births, nationality of parents determines nationality of child, not place of birth. If a British or American couple have a kid in Japan it has no nationality, the parents need to declare it as an American with the embassy.
The concept of immigration to help the economy has been floating around a lot here. It's not well received by everyone for good reasons, language barrier being the biggest. The Brazilians set an example of why that fails.
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Yeah, it's definitely not that Japanese people are xenophobic. They just want to keep their country to themselves, and I find that a perfectly good choice considering immigrant problems with other countries.
It's good that Japan has strict requirements for long term visas with things like language, university degrees etc. What I'm also worried about is that if Japan does need more foreigners, they may relax those very requirements, and all sorts of under-qualified people will be flooding in and draining resources instead of contributing to society.
I'm with everyone that's worried about the language barrier if the laws are relaxed. If people want to move to Japan, they should at least know the language to a good extent. I'm not trying to be stereotypical here, but if the trial Brazilians with Japanese decent couldn't even learn the language (assuming they'd have access to better language learning from parents etc) then lord knows what would happen with other foreigners.
In my old Geography lessons we also had sources disputing whether immigrants actually help the economy or not, but as with everything there's good and bad points so there's no definite answer.