 | Ethnic issues in Japan: Encyclopedia II - Ethnic issues in Japan - Media
Ethnic issues in Japan - Media
The media often portrays foreigners as trouble-makers or so deeply entrenched in their cultural backgrounds that they regard the Japanese culture and its people as curious barbarians. In addition, the Japanese media frequently reports that unidentified and unapprehended criminals are "foreign" or sometimes from a particular country, based on linguistic and methodical clues provided by witnesses or victims supplied from the local police agency.
While the recent rise in crime committed by foreigners, especially Chinese and South Korean, is reported in Japan in what some describe as a 'racially discriminating way', the fact that thousands of Chinese and Koreans are arrested each year is rarely reported in China and Korea. Until the late 1990s, Japanese media never reported on crimes committed by foreigners except for those committed by American military servicemen.
What makes this issue so problematic is that, in principle, Japanese often do not accept non-Japanese as workers unless it can be demonstrated that the person has certain skills which cannot be provided by locals. At the same time, many of the Japanese younger generation are no longer prepared to do harsh manual labour, described in a Japanese acronym as '3K', (kitsui, kitanai and kiken, which mean tiring, dirty and dangerous respectively). This gap provides large economic incentive to enter Japan illegally to gain work. Economically, like in many other developed countries, there is a perceived 'necessity' for cheap labour by businesses, and in cases where these illegal immigrants are caught and prosecuted, it is common for the media to heavily report on them.
The number of foreign criminals convicted in Japan was 12,467 in 1993 but increased to 16,212 in 2002 and is well over 20,000 in 2003. During the same time period, the number of crimes committed by foreign criminals increased from 19,671 to 34,746 and topped 40,000 in 2003. In 10 years, the number of criminals and cases doubled. Thus, some claim that racism is justified by these statistics (even though the number of foreigners in Japan as well as the number of Japanese committing crimes has also risen). The Japanese police agencies lump visa violations into their reports on foreigner crime which inflate foreign crime figures and makes determination of more important crime rates (violent crime, etc.) impossible.
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 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Media", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
