Apparently collecting fingerprints and photos of all "foreigners" coming into Japan hasn't been enough to quell neocon reactionist in Japan. Now it looks like Japan will consider making knowing Japanese a requirement to obtaining a long-term work visa.
Personally, I feel like I know enough Japanese to be able to pass whatever requirement that they would set up, so I'm personally not too concerned. Besides many of the jobs that I'd be interested in would require passing JLPT 2 anyway. In fact this may favor me because now if I were to work for a company that needs to send a guy to Japan, I'd be moved up to the shortlist of the employees that know Japanese. They couldn't just send anybody, they'd be required to send someone that knows Japanese.
To be honest the reason for this is to keep various people from entering Japan and taking up resources, space, and pension money. This is mostly those from South America, Philippines, Guam and other members of the working poor in Japan. However, the reaction from nerds on the internet is mostly "Oh noes, now I'll never get to work in a manga shop in Tokyo" I've gotta say that honestly in the grand scheme of things, this is hardly the case. I find this particular bit interesting.
"Japanese language ability is important to increase the quality of foreigners' own lifestyles, and is also important for Japanese society," he said. "It will be a very good thing if this builds momentum for people to say, 'I'm going to study Japanese in order to go to Japan.'"Japan is far from being an international language. The only way one would need Japanese is if anyone is doing business with the Japanese. Languages like Spanish, Chinese, and French are far more useful for general worldwide appeal, also there are far more "obscure niche" languages to delve into, and Japanese is not one of them. (But Vietnamese is!) So this is really a way for Japan to increase the value of the Japanese language. Perfectly reasonable actions for a language that is already in linguistic decline. (ie: being slowly replaced by foreign words.)
I mostly wonder how this will affect jobs like JET and Nova. JET doesn't have a Japanese language requirement to be able to do the job, this has been their greatest recruiting tool for those fresh out of college. This also has widened the type of people that apply for JET giving them a large diversity of applicants to chose from. If JET must comply to these new language requirements, this will narrow down the applicant pool to only East Asian Studies majors and those that just happen to have learned Japanese.
In the end this will restrict the number of incoming workers in Japan and possibly even tourism. (Many tourist come to Japan because they know a friend who lives in Japan, if there are less foreigners living in Japan, then there will be less of those connections to incite tourism.) By no means does this stop anyone from getting their Japanese wife fantasy. Although actual life in Japan is quite different from perceived life in Japan.
3 comments:
Neoconservatives are, by definition, not reactionaries. Reactionaries are "turn back the clock" types who wish to return to old social standards. Neoconservatives wish to embrace or promote traditional outcomes (or values) but accept that current realities and social science may require a different approach.
Basically, neoconservatives tend to buy into much of Marxist class struggle theory while rejecting Marx's economic arguments. Reactionaries don't.
My apologies, what would you call this type of action by the Neoconservatives in the LDP?
To get to this years later, let me state:
Neoconservativism is a philosophy of applying liberal theories of social change to conservative mores, including empirical social research. Neoconservatives are, in fact, not "conservative" at all, but merely liberals with different values.
If you're saying that something comes from some baseline of old, pure xenophobic fear, that's not neoconservative. Certainly, under the American experience, most neoconservatives are strong believers of the basic sameness of people (i.e., everyone loves American democracy) and therefore there's no fear of the other driving them.
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