by Koichi Sugimoto

There are so many refugees in the world, and they are abandoned by their own government. They are getting a lot of troubles such as living, eating, working and raising children, so they have to find a place which they can be alive. In my opinion, Japan should accept refugees. In this blog, I am going to argue how refugees in Japan spend their lives by using things I learned in the class in terms of Japan’s policy, and how much benefits Japan can get.

Now, refugees in Japan are facing harsh reality because the government of Japan has taken a restricted approach to the protection of refugees. For example, when refugees apply for refugee status, they have to be approved by the Ministry of Justice within 6 months of entering Japan with effective evidence. It’s very hard for them because they escaped from their homeland to Japan for requiring more comfortable conditions, so they had have no time to organize evidence. In practice, when they are interviewed to get refugee status, the interviewer often says that is your country such a desperate circumstance? I don’t think so. You can back to there. Therefore, people who are approved as refugee in Japan are very less compared with other developed countries. Moreover, they need a visa to live in Japan, but it’s also difficult. If they cannot get it, they are regarded as illegal resident by the government. If that is exposed, they will be taken to a prison by the police, that is, they are arrested.

By the way, the present Japan’s economic conditions is not so good, and also the government is required to improve this condition, but now actually the Democratic Party of Japan is going to go out of power with declining of an approval rating. What is the way out of the present situation? That’s related to refugees. That’s why I think admitting refugees can be a key to improve economic situation. Refugees are surely not good at speaking Japanese, and also their cultures are different from Japan. They have different values, so that sounds like it is difficult to fit in Japanese society. However, they can be good workers in Japan. Recently people tend to change the job from the upper class to the lower class, that is, they try to get good working conditions such as treatment and pay. On the other hand, people gradually leave a severe working, and then refugees can be an important factor for improving that. They may become workers who can do a job which Japanese people don’t like. If so, this condition will be improved. This is my argument, but some people may think a bad point that refugees have a possibility to cause a crime, or it’s hard to study Japanese and raise children, but first actually all refugees have no possibility to cause a crime. That is Japanese prejudice, and Japanese tend to have that image. It’s a mere guess. Second, Japanese may be difficult for them, but the time will be able to solve this problem, and about their children, the government should take care of them in the beginning.

For the above reasons, the government of Japan should admit refugees, but to do that, they need to make a system to make this problem going well.