JAPAN
TIMES ON THE GOVERNMENT'S BENDING
THE LAW TO TARGET FOREIGNERS
ILLEGAL
HOTEL PASSPORT CHECKS OF "ALL
FOREIGNERS IN JAPAN" SANCTIONED BY MINISTRIES
(What
follows is the deluxe version, with full
annotations and links, of a Japan Times Community Page article of
October 18,
2005.
The
more abridged Japan Times article is available
at
http://www.japantimes.com/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fl20051018zg.htm
)
CHECKPOINT
AT CHECK-IN
Laws
are still being bent by
authorities to target "foreigners".
Arudou Debito watches the watchers.
By
Arudou Debito
Column
25 for the Japan
Times Community Page
October
13, 2005
Between
October 7 and 11,
the Japan Association for
Language Teaching
(JALT), Japan's largest convocation of language educators, held its
annual
meeting in Shizuoka, a pleasant city between Tokyo and Osaka.
Having
hosted JALT before,
Shizuoka is quite accustomed to taking in thousands of English-speaking
foreigners.
This
time around, however,
Shizuoka decided to accommodate their guests with another lovely
service: ID checks before
bedtime.
When
we arrived, our hotel
served us with two laminated documents regarding new check-in
procedures. Rendered in
Japanese, English, Chinese, and
Korean (but tellingly not Portuguese—even though the majority
of
foreigners in Shizuoka Prefecture are Brazilian), one document read,
quote:
"MAY
WE SEE YOUR
PASSPORT? Japanese law
requires that we
ask every foreign guest to present their passport, a photocopy of which
we will
keep on file during their stay…"
(If
the above graphic doesn't come out, click here: www.debito.org/shizuokahotelcheckpoint002.jpg)
The
clerks played Checkpoint
Charlie with verve: "Show us
your
passports. Sorry, it's the
law. Shikata wa
gozaimasen."
I
asked with equal verve
what law they were citing. Not
to be
thwarted, they brandished the second multilingual document, clearly
designed
for cocksure people like me. Entitled
(in Japanese) "For use in dealing with questions and complaints", it
read:
"Effective
April
1, 2005, Japanese legislation makes it mandatory that you, as a
'non-resident
foreign guest', present your passport and have it
photocopied…"
(If
the above graphic doesn't come out, click here www.debito.org/newhotelpassportlaw.jpg)
The
original Japanese of the
legal text was even clearer, stating that these passport checks apply
to
"foreigners without addresses in Japan". Not
"every foreign guest".
Admittedly,
recording
tourists' passport numbers is not unreasonable.
In fact, it's standard practice at hotels in Europe, for
example.
But
foreign residents of
Japan are not tourists. Neither
are
they legally obliged to carry their passports around (that's why the
Gaijin
Card exists), nor to divulge their passport numbers upon request to
anyone but
police or Immigration.
When
I read back the
sections of the second document and asked the staff to resolve the
discrepancies, we got bent necks and hissing teeth.
"Well, anyway, um… please cooperate."
We
didn't. "Shouldn't we be
asked whether we have
domestic addresses first? Won't
we be
writing them down on the sign-in form anyway, like everyone else who
checks
in? There are better ways of
doing this
than by just looking at our faces."
Undeterred,
they still
demanded my passport until I told them I am a citizen.
I then called the manager to tell the hotel
to kindly follow the law properly (which they did for future check-ins).
Still,
I can't fault the
hotel staff overmuch. They
were just
following orders. When I
asked them who
issued these directives, they said the government.
So I decided to track down what agency was responsible.
I
first suspected police
involvement, as their singling out of foreigners is nothing new or even
unusual
these days: random ID
checks, signs in
public places warning against foreign criminals, and cooked statistics
to
highlight and exaggerate foreign crime.
These are well-established tactics which have even been
discussed in
this column.
Now
police have another
means at their disposal. The
Ryokan
Gyouhou
(Hotel Management Law)
amendment cited in the abovementioned directives now allows them to
deputize
hotels. They wasted no time. As the
Community Page
reported on March 8, 2005, the police were asking hotels to
checkpoint all
foreign-looking guests (which ultimately included your correspondent,
of
course) months before the law even took effect!
Moreover,
these are not just
any police. The Shizuoka
Prefectural
Police have an egregious history of targeting foreigners, best embodied
by one
of their handbooks, Rainichi Gaikokujin Hanzai no Tokuchou (Characteristics of Crimes by
Foreigners Coming to
Japan).
Published
in February 2000
(and available at www.debito.org/TheCommunity/shizuokakeisatsuhandbook.html), it was distributed to
shopkeepers and other
private businesses with tips on dealing with "bad foreigner" (furyou
gaikokujin)
crime.
It's
quite sensational. Not only inter
alia
do they depict Chinese as indolent and Brazilians as
scary, they also gloss over inconvenient facts.
Such as how in some of the criminal cases they cite,
Japanese
crooks are in cahoots with the foreigners.
(page 22)
The
handbook's biggest
gemstone of advice: "If a
group of
foreigners comes into your shop, write down their car license plate
numbers and
report them to the police." (page 21)
A good way to ruin an evening's beer run if you have the
wrong skin
color.
So
I phoned the Shizuoka Police
HQ at 054-271-0110, and talked to Ms Anno in the "Foreign Crimes Policy
Section" (Gaikokujin Hanzai Taisaku Ka). They
denied any involvement. "We
checked all our divisions. We
didn't
write the darn thing."
So
then I called the
Shizuoka Prefectural Government at 054-221-2455.
They too have a pretty lousy record of treating
foreigners,
despite having one of the most internationalized labor forces in the
country.
Shizuoka
is one prefecture
which denied National Health Insurance (Kokumin Kenkou Hoken) to its South American
population because they were
deemed technically not "kokumin" (citizens).
Few things engender cynicism as effectively
as watching a government refuse its taxpayers, moreover saviors of its
local
industries, a safety net.
However,
the prefecture said
they were not responsible either. In
fact, Mr Tabayashi at the Tourism Communications Desk (Kankou
Koryuu Shitsu)
told me they got the directive from the Ministry of
Health, Labour, and Welfare in Tokyo.
That
fit the profile nicely,
given MHLW's recent activities. In
March, they issued multilingual announcements regarding the change in
hotel
laws, justifying it in the name of, quote, "effective
prevention of infectious diseases and terrorism". Then they said erroneously that all
foreigners must have their passports copied upon check-in.
However,
the American
State
Department, eagle-eyed readers of this column, called the MLHW in April
for
clarification. Yes,
the MHLW
admitted, this applied to infectious or terroristic tourists only. Corrections were promised.
So
I phoned the MHLW
(03-5253-1111), and got connected to Mr Miura in the Environmental
Health
Division (Seikatsu Eisei Ka-- an
odd department to have "foreigner hotel matters" delegated to).
At
first the EHD tried to
pass the buck back down: "The
local governments must have printed it."
I didn't bite. It
was clearly a
very professional job, done by somebody with high-quality multilingual
translation services at their disposal.
Moreover, the contents of the directives were practically
copies of old
MHLW websites.
MHLW
then admitted they
created the documents, and yes, sent them to every hotel in Japan. But they had long since realized
their
error, and promulgated corrections to reflect the true letter of the
law.
I
strongly doubted that,
given our treatment in Shizuoka. I
demanded they redouble their efforts to resolve the confusion and
repair the
social damage they had wrought in every hotel nationwide.
They
said they would take it
under advisement. As if
enforcing the
law correctly was something needing further consideration.
Anyway,
since the
authorities are not properly enforcing their own laws, readers are
advised to
help themselves. Download
your own
personal copy of the pertinent sections of the hotel laws here:
http://www.debito.org/newhotelpassportlaw.jpg
Courtesy
of your local
health ministry hotel deputizer. Print
it up and show the next hotel clerk who tries to treat you like a
tourist. Or a terrorist. Or someone with infectious diseases.
ENDS
Copyright
2005 Arudou Debito, Sapporo, Japan