Back in the late 80’s, when the economy in Japan was still booming and Japan was still poised to take over the world, there was a lot more building going on and a lot more workers were needed. But Japan didn’t want to let in just any old foreigners. They wanted a better class of foreigners. So they got an idea: Japan sent a lot of its people over to South America about a century before, and there are still a lot of them down there that are still pure Japanese, or close enough. Let’s bring in the Japanese foreigners!

Even that surprised me. I remember when I first traveled in Japan. It was in a group led by my Japanese language teacher, Mrs. Hiramatsu. She was born and raised in Japan, even worked as a newscaster in the Kansai region. She moved to America with her husband (also Japanese), and they both became U.S. citizens. Speaking to her in Japanese, there was no mistaking her native language proficiency. And her name is very easy to “spell” in Japanese, the kanji well-known and easily drawn. And yet, whenever I saw her name in print prepared by people we visited in Japan, it was spelled out in katakana–an alphabetic script reserved for foreign words and for spelling out other sounds which were not Japanese words. Simply because she was no longer a Japanese citizen. That bit of exclusivity struck me back then.

Well, it seems like Japan has remembered that exclusivity, as it is now looking at changing the immigration laws that allowed these foreign Japanese into the country since 1989. After a decade and a half of having South American Japanese in Japan, it’s not working out. For one thing, Japan discovered that these ex-Japanese can’t speak Japanese. Hell, they could have asked me–or anyone familiar with sansei on down–and we could have told them that the language doesn’t survive overseas past the third generation. So now Japan has all these South Americans living in Japan. What’s worse, they look Japanese. Hard to deal with that one!

The problem for me is, I don’t know if I’m going to be caught up in this. The changes would affect “long-term visa renewals,” which, for all I know, might include anyone looking for permanent residence–something I’m thinking of, once I qualify in three years. Apparently, applicants would have to pass a Japanese language proficiency test. I can get by just fine in everyday conversation, but I’m pretty sure that I’d do badly on a formal test. Despite having lived in Japan for some years, I teach in English–which would make such a Japanese language provision rather ironic in my case.

I might be worrying for nothing; the measure seems aimed to effectively reverse Japan’s allowing South American Japanese permission to live in Japan long-term as unskilled laborers. But things are getting more and more anti-foreigners around here lately. Not as bad as the 80’s, but it’s as if the government is working really hard on getting back to that mindset. Every year or so, good ol’ Ultranationalist Tokyo Guv Shintaro Ishihara drags out the artificially inflated gaijin crime stats and beats his chest about the dangerous foreigners. And the federal government is using terrorism as a reason to re-institute the old fingerprinting laws for foreigners, which was abolished just six years ago, but is now back.

Fortunately, it’s still just the government, I haven’t noticed this filtering down to the personal level, or even to the local police. Let’s hope it stays that way.