There are lots of Nikkei people and also there are many problem related to them in Japanese society. I do clearly remember a certain sentence written by a girl whose parents are Nikkei 2nd or 3rd generation. Judging from her sentence, most of children like her feel that they are “nationless” people. In other words, they have mental conflict in finding their identity.
Through imaging and thinking and know their feeling and problems they are facing now, I found one of the essence of these problem. This is my opinion, but it might be fact that they cannot take “Japan” as a place which is comfortable for them to live and there are social structures which make them live with uncomfortable in Japanese society.
I want to mention that there is definitely non-decent society for them to live in japan.
I encountered a documentary video which described about the absurd situation happened among the Nikkei people and their children. In 2009, economy crisis emerged remarkably and huge number of Nikkei people who had worked as non-regular worker hired. Of course, that has not been happened within Nikkei people, but it is obvious that the first target to be fired were almost Nikkei people.
And what I saw on the video was that enormous children whose parents were fired could not go to school because their parents cannot pay for school expenses.
There are just one of the problem but I want to argue the essence of this problem had been rooted in Japanese society, and moreover there was already problem when Japanese government decided 入管法改正 in 1990. After this amendment, Japan accepted many Nikkei people from Brazil and Peru, and there was government’s intention in order to get a lot of labor to supplement the shortage of labor in Japan at that time.
However, it seems that Japanese government has treated them as mere “labor”. Japan didn’t prepare that how we Japan accept Nikkei people and their children to Japanese society. For example, most of their children cannot speak Japanese at first, so they go to Brazilian or Peruvian school. However, this kind of school is not admitted as public school, so these schools cannot get grants. Needless to say, it is quite hard for them to manage and maintain school and the school expense naturally goes expensive.
There are many reasons of problem Nikkei people face right now. The reality that I said above through seeing the video is also it is true that Japanese society has neglecting its duty to think and face sincerely these issues, as a result of it, there is a non-decent society for Nikkei People and their children.
This is what I think through this issue.
By Misa Kono
JAPANsociology 