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Japanese Radiation Refugees in Malaysia

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
Shiori Shakuto

Editors’ note: This is the sixth and final piece of the series “In and Out of Japan.”

The Japan Club, formerly a Japanese school in central KL, has 4000 members. It hosts more than 20 activity groups for young Japanese families and retirees. Shiori Shakuto

On March 11, 2011, the great Tohoku earthquake shook Japan. A few days later, nuclear reactors on the northeastern coast experienced meltdowns. Since then, a growing number of so-called houshanou nanmin (“radiation refugees”) have fled their homes to live in the countryside or overseas. Their activities and challenges once in their new homes are seldom discussed in public reports or the media. Here, I write about a gendered aspect of the experiences faced by those who have fled to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

I met a woman in her mid-30s in Kuala Lumpur in May 2014. She ran a web design company in Tokyo when the radiation crisis hit Fukushima in 2011. She and her husband immediately evacuated with their two children to her natal home in Kumamoto Prefecture in Southern Japan. But in Japan, she told me, it was difficult to obtain accurate information about the levels of nuclear pollution. The explicit discussion and publication of such material was considered taboo in the context of a national campaign emphasizing solidarity in times of national crisis. Any anxious voices were considered insensitive, if not, hikokumin (unpatriotic). She felt that it was no longer safe to live in Japan. After living in Kumamoto for only half a year, her family decided to move to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.

While this woman relocated to Kuala Lumpur with her husband and their children, most radiation refugees in Malaysia were young mothers and their children. Their husbands typically stayed in Japan to work. These husbands tended to keep their jobs in the Kanto or the Tohoku area for issues of financial stability. They sent monthly allowances and visited their wives and their children occasionally during the holiday seasons.

Sometimes when both parents could not leave their jobs in Japan, the grandparents relocated to Malaysia. One couple in their mid-50s with doubts about the accuracy of Japanese reports regarding radiation decided to take an early retirement and move to Kuala Lumpur. They were ready to host their children and grandchildren in Malaysia if another natural disaster hits Japan. “By living in Kuala Lumpur, we are creating a safe haven for our children and their family,” they said.

Most radiation refugees I met regarded their move as a permanent one. Although they had moved there initially to escape the effects of radiation, many were hopeful about the educational opportunities for their children in Malaysia. One of the young Japanese mothers I met in Penang decided to enroll her daughter in a Chinese-medium school. She told me, “In Japan, children would grow up monolingual. But here in Malaysia, my daughter would grow up to speak Japanese, Chinese and English.”

In a nation that prizes productive labor, housewives and retirees were typically seen as belonging to the domains of the household. It was men who used to be mobile. But the narratives of radiation refugees suggest that when the state fails to protect its own citizens, the opposite becomes the case. It is the fathers who stay in Japan to work while the supposedly “unproductive” are transformed into valuable mobile subjects. In and beyond Japan, women and the elderly have emerged as critically-thinking members of the global community for guarding the safety and future of their own families. They shed lights on the emerging forms and possibilities of reproductive labor in the increasingly connected Asian countries.

Shiori Shakuto has just completed her PhD program in Anthropology at the Australian National University. Her interests focus on the emerging forms of labor and gender relations among Japanese people who move in and out of Japan. Her PhD thesis was on the Japanese retirement migrants in Malaysia.

Please send news items, contributions and comments to SEAA contributing editors Heidi K. Lam(heidi.lam@yale.edu), Priscilla Song (priscillasong@wustl.edu), or Yi Zhou (yizhou@ucdavis.edu).

Digital Outsourcing and Japanese Call Center Workers in Dalian, China

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Society for East Asian Anthropology

Kumiko Kawashima

May 16, 2017

Editors’ note: This is the fifth piece of the series “In and Out of Japan.”

 

The Dalian Software Park, which opened in 1999 as the city’s first IT park. Kumiko Kawashima

In 2003, the first Japanese-staffed call center opened in Dalian, a north-eastern city of six million people dubbed China’s “Green Silicon Valley.” Thousands of Japanese workers have served consumers across Sino-Japanese borders, alongside their bilingual Chinese colleagues. They are recruited in Japan and sent to Dalian’s IT parks in one of the country’s oldest and largest high-tech zones. Due to their status as employees of local subsidiaries, they are paid in the local currency at, or even below, the Japanese minimum wage level. But their experience complicates the image of offshore call center workers as “cyber coolies” in the “new colonialism” of digital outsourcing.

Commuters hurry to their offices in the Dalian Software Park, the city’s oldest and largest IT park. Mirrorka

The offshoring of Japanese workers to Dalian has evolved into an innovative response to raising cost pressures in deflationary Japan. The Japanese “local hires” are tasked with setting up a new call center, training the local workforce, and liaising with headquarters and subsidiaries elsewhere—all of which were previously the responsibility of expensive yen-earning expatriates on rotational transfers. As the workers gain knowledge and experience, they can be sent back to Japan on short-term “overseas” assignments.

For the workers themselves, the jobs in Dalian provide a chance to work abroad without special qualifications or foreign language proficiency. Underlying the decision to go to Dalian, a city they’d barely heard of, was their deep dissatisfaction with the tightening labor market conditions under long-term recession. One 35-year-old male worker who quit his property sales job to work in China said, “Back then, 95 percent of my life was work, and I wanted more time for myself.” He and other Japanese workers I spoke with during my fieldwork enjoy a higher economic and social status in Dalian than the average local worker.

Japanese call center workers enjoy beer and lamb skewers on a weekend. Sébastien Le Corre

They are particularly proud of their employment at large multinational companies, many of which are on Fortune’s Global 500 list. The Japanese migrant community is well catered to by the strong presence of bilingual Chinese service providers, a legacy of the city’s history as a major commercial powerhouse under imperial Japan’s colonial rule. For the call center workers, Dalian is a refuge from the confines of the Japanese workplaces where hard work reaps neither adequate material nor psychological rewards.

In the globalizing digital economy, things change rapidly, and Dalian’s success in digital outsourcing might be causing its own demise. The rising wage levels of the local workforce are causing foreign investors to look elsewhere, including South East Asia and notably, Japan. The Chinese government is also introducing measures to curb the entry of skilled migrants to provide jobs for its own growing middle classes. Such changes are heightening the sense among the Japanese that their relative privilege in Dalian is fundamentally unstable. Some return to Japan, others try their luck in emerging outsourcing hubs such as the Philippines, yet others stay put for the moment. Their experiences provide us snapshots of the tug of war between global capital and digital labor, and its impact on mobility in and out of Japan.

Kumiko Kawashima is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Macquarie University. Her research interests include labour and consumption in post-industrial society, identity, and social change. Her recent publications include “Service Outsourcing and Labour Mobility in a Digital Age: Transnational Linkages between Japan and Dalian, China,” Global Networks.

Please send news items, contributions and comments to SEAA contributing editors Heidi K. Lam (heidi.lam@yale.edu) or Yi Zhou (yizhou@ucdavis.edu).

English Teaching in, out, and through Japan

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
Raluca Nagy
Editors’ note: This is the fourth piece of the series “In and Out of Japan.”

Film director Takeshi Kitano advertising the ECC Foreign Language Institute, one of the largest language schools in Japan. Eric F.

Various life courses emerge from teaching English in Japan: short-term and long-term stays, transformation into other professions or increasing precarity among a cohort of mostly uncontracted freelance workers. In this piece, I highlight those who move in and (then) out of Japan, taking our curated series from a focus on people coming to Japan to people who choose to leave.

Tyrone, an Australian now in his late 30s, worked as a school teacher back home before deciding to venture abroad. After a three-month challenging experience in India in autumn 2005, he joined a friend working at Nova, one of the biggest suppliers of ALTs (assistant language teachers) in Japan, and taught English for two years in a small town in Mie Prefecture. Life was, in his own words, “the good old times when a salaryman would see you in the train and come and ask you to teach him English for 5000 yen an hour.”

In 2007, Nova went notoriously bankrupt. Tyrone made do with hectic freelance work and eventually found a stable teaching position in Tokyo. When I met him, in the autumn of 2012, he was at the start of his fourth year with the school but had decided it would be his last. He was tired of a general deterioration of the ALT situation, a recurrent complaint during my research.

Tyrone also experienced an “exodus” of peers after 3/11 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and felt isolated. Even though he loved Japan and had started to feel at home, he was not as immersed as he thought he should be, despite his now proficient in Japanese and membership of a local union. Governmental improvements in July 2012 concerning the residency system failed to cure his general discontent. Tyrone started applying for jobs in Korea and Taiwan, where at the time the English teaching industry seemed more dynamic. By December 2013 he had found his “most stable contract so far” in Taiwan, where he still currently lives and works.

As Tyrone’s story illustrates, teaching English in Japan flourished up until the best part of the 2000s; but constant economic decline, panics spurred by tragedies such as 3/11, and competition from markets in neighboring countries have made English teaching a precarious form of employment. With less incentive for native speakers coming from well-off countries (US, UK, Australia, Canada), in recent years this industry has attracted different labor pools, such as well-educated young people from the Philippines, either based in Japan or teaching by correspondence.

In August 2016 MEXT (The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) promised to bring JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) numbers back to their 2002 peak levels. These promises are coupled with other measures to increase English proficiency by the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. How such incentives will affect a volatile industry remains to be seen. As it stands, the precaritization of English teaching in Japan challenges the assumed trajectories and power differentials of mobilities East-West and North-South.

Raluca Nagy is research associate at the University of Sussex and the Free University of Brussels. Her overarching interests are healthcare and mobility. It is from this perspective that she has been following the livelihoods of English teachers in Tokyo.

Please send news items, contributions and comments to SEAA contributing editors Heidi K. Lam (heidi.lam@yale.edu) or Yi Zhou (yizhou@ucdavis.edu).

Bakugai! Explosive Shopping and Entangled Sino-Japanese Mobilities

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By Martina Bofulin and Jamie Coates

Editors’ note: This is the third piece of the series “In and Out of Japan.”

This poster parodies revolutionary slogans to promote Daigou. It says: “Intermediary shopping for the masses! Add a brick to the building of socialism, struggle until the end for the great pot of socialism.” Jamie Coates

Chinese mobile subjects and their practices occupy an ambivalent role in contemporary Japanese society. They are the saviors of Japan’s sluggish economy but seen as the instigators of social problems: mass tourism, intensive shopping and crime. Chinese “newcomer” migrants are the largest minority in Japan (since 2006), and as tourists are the most numerous visitors (4.2 million in 2015). The complex intertwining of these various types of mobilities—human, material, financial—between China and Japan increasingly point to the emergence of a transnational field that blurs the distinction between migration, tourism, and trade. This trend is exemplified in the recent phenomena of “explosive buying” (bakugai/baomai) and “shopping through intermediaries” (daigou).

The neologism bakugai emerged in the Japanese media as a response to reports of intensive shopping by Chinese tourists. It has since filtered into Chinese as baomai and spurred the employment of native Chinese speakers in all large department and drug stores throughout Japan. Chinese consumers spent roughly 12.2 billion USD, or around 41 % of all international tourism consumption, in Japan in 2015 (JTA). The most desirable items were cosmetics and health products (baby formula, skin whitening products), followed by electronics (washlet toilets, rice cookers), and high-end designer brands. Many of these products are not bought for personal consumption, but as gifts or personal favors.

The popularity of bakugai/baomai has given rise to Japanese media reports about unruly Chinese tourists and their excessive shopping habits, fueling the ongoing global image of the “ugly Chinese tourist.” Representations range from concerns about over-crowding to worries there will be no stock left for domestic customers (e.g., a particular concern in relation to milk formula). Tourist behavior has also caught the attention of the Japanese media, such as in September 2015 when a pair of Chinese honeymooners assaulted a convenience store worker in Hokkaido.

Migrants living in Japan with excellent knowledge of Japanese products and brands have increasingly acted as informal tour guides for bakugai, as well as buying items as “intermediate shoppers” through networks on social media and then shipping them to customers (daigou). Ling, for example, a Chinese student at one of Japan’s prestigious universities, is always running around department stores, comparing prices, taking product photos and uploading them onto her Wechat account. Ling knew that her success depended on the authenticity she derives from studying in Japan—her contacts trust that she has access to original products and is familiar with new Japanese trends.

Despite the presence of strong anti-Japanese sentiments in China, products from Japan are in high demand, and Japan is still seen as a desirable and modern location. Cross-border trade relies heavily on favorable currency and taxation rates, the price politics of international brands, consumer trust in foreign goods, and media images. These everyday mobilities generate new cultural forms, such as bakugai and daigou, and discursive trends, such as media panics, suggesting new levels of connectivity, simultaneity, and volatility in the Sino-Japanese context.

Martina Bofulin has been interested in different types of mobilities from PRC through the lens of family life and everyday practices and has done extensive fieldwork in southeast Europe and Japan. She is currently a researcher at Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Jamie Coates works on Sino-Japanese mobilities and their effect on young Chinese identities. In particular he is interested in the role migration and media play in young Chinese efforts to re-imagine co-ethnic and regional ideas of commonality. He is currently a visiting fellow at Sophia University.

Please send news items, contributions and comments to SEAA contributing editors Heidi K. Lam (heidi.lam@yale.edu) or Yi Zhou (yizhou@ucdavis.edu).

Japan’s Diminishing Korean Minority

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Markus Bell

Editors’s note: This is the second piece of the series “In and Out of Japan.” 

The gate to Koreatown. Tsuruhashi, Osaka. Photo Courtesy Markus Bell

From the end of the war until 2007, Koreans represented Japan’s largest ethnic minority group. There are currently around half a million individuals in Japan who identify as Korean. This is only surpassed by the number of Chinese.

The number of Koreans in Japan, however, has been shrinking over the last 20 years.Turbulent international relations have played a part in the diminishing number of Koreans arriving in Japan and the number of Zainichi Koreans (ethnic Koreans in Japan) identifying as Korean. During the administration of Park Geun-hye, relations between South Korea and Japan reached a low not seen in many years. This is due to the deepening “comfort woman issue,” the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute, South Korean fears of a remilitarised Japan, and the effect of the 2011 “Triple disaster” in eroding trust between the two neighbors.

North Korea also factors into issues of identity and belonging for Koreans in Japan. Following ten years of nuclear tests and sporadic missile launches, North Korea, from a Japanese perspective, is considered a significant threat. The catalyst for the low point in North Korea–Japan relations was Kim Jong-il’s admission that North Korea had been kidnapping Japanese citizens. Reflecting the broader Japanese public opinion, during an interview with a Japanese policymaker in Tokyo he told me that North Korea had sent spies to Japan via the Zainichi community. All the bouncy K-pop in Seoul does not compensate for North Korean military posturing and state abduction projects. The specter of North Korea contributes to the rise in anti-Korean sentiment in Japan.