New Fingerprinting Measure October 30, 2007

I updated Breaking News today.

Xenophobia strikes again! I could just stop there, but I really need to write a whole paragraph about this, so I guess I should elaborate. While I do agree that this measure could help stop terrorists, the information given by the Minister of Justice involving terrorists entering Japan strikes me as vague enough to be suspicious. And on top of that, while Japan may support the US’s invasion of Iraq, they are constitutionally not able to go to war, which would seem to place them at the bottom of the list of countries terrorists would want to attack. And while I do agree that the US has somewhat similar policies regarding foreigners, we actually allow foreigners to become citizens. In Japan there is no way for people who are not at least part ethnically Japanese (or OK,  I’m pretty sure Hokkaido Ainu have Japanese citizenship, but other than them) to become citizens. So even if a person was born in Japan, their parents were born in Japan, and their grandparents were born in Japan, if they are Korean, Chinese, Brazilian or anything other than Japanese by ethnicity, they are disqualified from becoming Japanese citizens. You’d think with their labor shortage and declining population they would be welcoming foreigners, but no. The fact is Japan is a very ethnically insular country (I should know, I lived there for a year), and as a country it will probably be a very long time before that changes. And the upsurge of terrorism in the world is really not helping matters. There’s not much use complaining about what can’t be fixed, but still, it’s kind of sad that the small steps forward that have been made recently are being erased.