The First Step to Accept Immigrants in Japan

"For many decades, Japan was the only advanced industrial country in the world that did not rely on unskilled foreign labor" (Tsuda 687). However, because the shrinking and aging population is an upcoming serious problem for Japan, the demand for foreign workers has increased. The U.S. is a great example of how to take the immigrants’ help to drive an economy. Primarily, the U.S. is a nation of immigrants, and it is known to be the multiracial and multicultural successful country. One of their ideologies is no discrimination against any groups. Neither legal nor illegal immigrants are discriminated against. Their children are given U.S. citizenship, and they can assimilate better in the multicultural society. On the other hand, Japan has a fundamentally different structure of society and has different ideologies from the U.S. Japan is highly known for “the country’s economic miracle to its “one ethnic group, one language society” (Solinger 457). This miracle has structured Japan with "a strong, historically-derived ideology emphasized racial homogeneity, which shores up the national bias against outsiders” (Solinger 457). Therefore, Japan is afraid that the foreign workers, "those who work in a foreign country without initially intending to settle there", will become immigrants, "one who comes to another country for the purpose of permanent residence" (Webster dictionary). Japan will be one of the "[m]any countries [that] can’t live without foreign workers—but don’t want to live with them. The message to unskilled migrants is almost always: get the job done and get lost" (Silverman 60). In this paper, with my hope to lessen the discrimination against outsiders in the near future, I will examine why Japanese hesitate to accept imm...

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...panese starts seeing that foreign workers will not settle in Japan illegally, not cause educational issues, and will not hold animosity toward to Japanese, I believe their negative perspectives of outsiders will change to positive. On top of this positive foundation between Japanese and outsiders, they should finally be able to build on multiracial and multicultural successful society. With this achievement, it is the time for Japan to loosen the restriction on foreign workers and to live with immigrants peacefully. Therefore, after examining why Japanese hesitate to accept immigrants and also how they can manage numbers of upcoming foreign workers, my conclusion is to make restrictions on acceptance of foreign workers. The restrictions like Hirata's two suggestions is the first step to open their homogeneous society to the multiracial and multicultural success.