Nipponica

After a string of operational incidents attributed to pilot error, the transport ministry issued a stern warning to ANA Wings Co., an ANA Group member, on Friday. The ministry has ordered the airline to submit a report on preventive measures by Sept. 19.

Genuinely don’t know how integrated the Wings pilot training is with ANA proper. If they have the same training program, shouldn’t this warning go to the parent company and have all training reviewed?

The government will begin considering whether to set a cap on the number of foreign nationals accepted into Japan, Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki said on Friday. A project team was established within the Immigration Services Agency that day to start full-fledged discussions on the matter.

According to a list of issues presented by Suzuki on Friday, Japan has traditionally lacked a consistent policy on accepting foreign nationals. “The time has come to begin detailed discussions on how to address the impact and challenges that foreigners will have on society in the medium to long term,” Suzuki said.

It was only a matter of time until something like this would happen but I have serious doubts that any substantial change will come of it or any reform of the immigration system. This is only to play to the base. Japan can’t survive without immigration.

The city assembly of Ito, Shizuoka Prefecture, on Monday unanimously passed a no-confidence motion against Mayor Maki Takubo, 55, who is alleged to have falsified her academic record.

The mayor had claimed to have graduated from Toyo University, but in July, she admitted that she had, in fact, been expelled from the university.

The fact she stayed on as long as she did is kinda crazy but happy to see a legislature taking on a chief executive and winning.

"The call to limit concentrations of foreign residents is discriminatory. This is typical of ethnonationalists who dog-whistle about immigration while denying that it's their intent," he says.

"What Sanseito has done is politicize immigration and push it into the public discourse, forcing other parties to clarify their stance on the issue. Now, the genie is out of the bottle. From now on, this will be up for debate, and extreme parties will try to play the anti-foreign card."

Believe it or not, views are negative.

The mayor of this west Japan city has urged for a calm and unbiased response over numerous complaints received after his city and three other municipalities were designated as "hometowns" for African countries as part of a new initiative by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

The "JICA Africa Hometown" program aims to foster talent serving as a bridge between Japan and Africa. The Japanese government-sponsored agency on Aug. 21 designated four cities, including Imabari, as 'hometowns' for African nations. This has led to the spread of false claims on social media, saying it will "increase immigration," and protest calls to these cities. In response, Imabari Mayor Shigeki Tokunaga clarified during an Aug. 26 press conference, "This is purely a project for international exchange, with no intention of promoting immigration policies."

I knew this would happen when the original stories on this conference were published. Everyone knows how sensitive the subject of immigration is in Japan and especially from the global south. All comms and stories should have been fact checked and proofread both in Japanese and in the languages where these stories are published. Total cluster.

Japan is considering allowing foreigners under its revamped trainee program to change jobs after two years at their first workplace, provided they remain in the same industry, in seven of the program's 17 sectors, a government source said Monday.

Foreign workers are, in principle, not allowed to change jobs under the current training scheme, which has been criticized for labor rights violations such as long hours and low wages, leading some to desert their workplaces.

Translation is that you come to Japan as an indentured servant for two years rather than permanently. An improvement over the current system, sure. But maybe we should treat people with dignity rather than mistrust as a start and see what happens.

The agency is recommending replacing the government’s long-standing Kunrei system with more widely used Hepburn-style spellings. The changes are expected to be approved within the current fiscal year and gradually rolled out in textbooks and other materials.

Under the Kunrei system, codified by Cabinet notification in 1954, phonemes for ち and ふ are written as ti and hu. Most Japanese schools still teach the style in romanization studies.

But the Hepburn system, which renders them as chi and fu, has become dominant both in Japan and abroad, making the impact of the change likely most evident in educational materials such as school textbooks.

The council’s recommendation also adopts Hepburn spellings for し, じ and つ as shi, ji, and tsu, compared to the Kunrei spellings of si, zi and tu. It specifies that double consonants, as in てっぱん, should be written by repeating the consonant, while long vowels such as in かあさん can be indicated with either a macron (kāsan) or doubled letters (kaasan).

It is about a century too late but in Japanese time scales, pretty speedy. On a conceptual level I understand why Kunrei did what it did, but practically it only led to confusion for non-Japanese readers. Hepburn über alles.

A policy proposal on coexistence with foreign residents in Japan has drawn a strong response after it was compiled by Shizuoka Gov. Yasutomo Suzuki at a meeting of the National Governors’ Association held in Aomori Prefecture in July.

The proposal calls on the central government to establish a comprehensive basic law and set up a central coordinating body for multicultural coexistence policies.

According to the prefectural government, as of Monday morning, it had received approximately 200 emails and phone calls. Many were critical, with comments such as, “It is unreasonable to use tax money to support foreigners,” or “This is inhospitable toward Japanese people.”

A friendly reminder that racism is everywhere.

The Japan International Cooperation Agency is set to designate at least four cities in the country as “hometowns” for certain nations in Africa at the 2025 Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), scheduled to begin on Wednesday.

The agency, which assists with implementing development assistance in developing countries, will assign the city of Nagai in Yamagata Prefecture to Tanzania, Kisarazu in Chiba Prefecture to Nigeria, Sanjo in Niigata Prefecture to Ghana and Imabari in Ehime Prefecture to Mozambique.

The purpose stated in the article is that it will promote two-way dialog and bring more population to these cities in Japan. But with an immigration system like it is now, is it realistic to expect that Africans could immigrate to Japan?

Japan's immigration authority is intensifying efforts to crack down on suspected abuse of the business manager visa program, which is intended to help foreign entrepreneurs start businesses in the country.

The heightened scrutiny follows the recent arrest of a Sri Lankan national accused of assisting compatriots in illegally obtaining business manager visas through the use of fictitious companies and falsified documents.

Many experts argue that Japan's business manager visa is prone to abuse because it is subject to less oversight than other residency categories, enabling individuals to set up shell companies to help others obtain or extend visas.

Yes, people abusing the system should be found and removed from the country. But the infographic in this article shows that people on this visa are a mere fraction of the total of foreigners in the country. Good to stop the misuse of the system but I hope that these people aren't the designated scapegoats for the anti-immigrant wave.