Japan gets tough on visa violators: 1-day overstay can bring time in cell, 5-year banishment
Catherine Makino, Chronicle Foreign Service, Monday, May 10, 2004

Tokyo -- When Bay Area students Angela Luna and Richard Nishizawa tried to board a plane bound for San Francisco in March, airport authorities threw them in a small holding cell and held them incommunicado for several days before banishing them from Japan for five years.

Luna and Nishizawa, who had studied Japanese for a year at Reitaku University about 20 miles northeast of Tokyo, were not arrested for committing a serious crime. They had merely stayed in the country two weeks longer than their visas permitted.

"We had valid 5-year visas, so we didn't bother to look at our immigration stamps," Luna, 27, said by telephone from her home in Lafayette. "The guards made me change my clothes because they had drawstrings. They thought I might use it has a weapon, or strangle someone. We were treated like criminals."

Nishizawa, 31, who lives in Martinez, says he was handcuffed, strip- searched, placed in a 20-by-20-foot cell with four other foreigners and given a mat to sleep on.

Christopher Mockford, a student from Ellensburg, Wash., was handcuffed and detained for three days after finishing a yearlong scholarship program at Shimane University in western Japan. He, too, was banished from Japan for five years, for staying one day longer than his visa allowed.

"My major is Japanese, and now I will have to probably change it," Mockford said.

Luna, Nishizawa and Mockford were victims of an intense crackdown in the past year that punishes foreigners who stay in Japan longer than they are legally allowed. The campaign has been harshly criticized by human rights groups, who say politicians and the government are cynically blaming foreigners for Japan's depressed economy and rising crime rate -- even if innocent tourists and students get caught up in the dragnet.

"There is racial profiling going on, and no one is questioning it," said Makoto Teranaka, secretary general of Amnesty International in Japan. "The police are using foreigners as scapegoats for an increase in crime."

Known locally as "overstayers," foreigners are subject to being jailed for three to four days, fined up to $3,000 and banned from Japan for five years for staying a single day longer than their visa permits. Some are even charged $600 for each day in detention and denied the right to call their family or embassy unless they appeal their cases, a three- to five-week process that few overstayers opt for.

The Justice Ministry argues that the crackdown is warranted because some 220,000 foreigners violated their visas last year -- mostly Koreans, Filipinos and Chinese who want to hang on to jobs that pay higher wages than jobs in their own countries. An additional 30,000 foreigners were smuggled illegally into Japan, mainly from China.

Tatsuro Kitazono, an immigration officer in Tokyo, says the crackdown is linked to a 17 percent jump in crime by foreigners in the past year. In 2003, police say foreigners committed 40,615 criminal acts -- mostly theft, fraud and forgery, but also the high-profile murders of a family of four in Fukuoka by three Chinese students.

Earl Kinmoth, a professor of sociology at Tokyo's Taisho University who has lived in Japan for some 30 years, also sees a historical tie to the campaign against overstayers.

"The crackdown is probably a combination of things: an increase in crime by Chinese, 9/11, unthinking officials and fear of foreigners," he said. "And certainly there is xenophobia here, based on history."

Japan was closed to the world for 250 years until U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew Perry forced the shogunate to open Japan's borders in 1854. The nation remains homogeneous, with only 0.2 percent of its population foreign-born. Sociologists say many Japanese remain deeply distrustful of gaijin, as foreigners are known -- a sentiment that has increased in recent years because of a decade-long economic recession and rising unemployment.

Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara, a nationalist who is one of Japan's most popular politicians, has promised additional manpower to help immigration agents root out visa violators in Tokyo and surrounding areas. In 2000, Ishihara told members of Japan's Self-Defense Forces that foreigners had committed "atrocious crimes" in the past and "could be expected to riot in the event of a disastrous earthquake."

The Immigration Bureau has also jumped on the nationalist bandwagon by creating a Web site (www.immi-moj.go.jp/zyouhou/index.html) in February that Amnesty International has described as "cyber xenophobia." The site asks Japanese to turn in suspicious foreigners who are "taking your jobs" and received more than 780 tips in the first month, according to bureau spokesman Mamoru Fukudaki.

Michael Boyle, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, says he does not know how many Americans have been detained in recent months because most detainees choose to leave Japan after paying fines and accepting the five-year banishment.

"The anecdotal evidence suggests that there has been an uptick in the number of Americans detained," Boyle said. "Our opinion is that when traveling abroad, Americans are subject to the laws of the country they are visiting."

An aging population and a low birth rate -- Japan's population is expected to drop from 125 million in 2004 to 100 million by 2056, in a projection by the National Institute of Population and Social Security -- have caused the government to grudgingly open its doors to foreign workers, who often take jobs shunned by most Japanese as falling within the "3Ds" -- dirty, dangerous and difficult. Such jobs, including work at construction sites and in restaurant kitchens, typically offer low wages and few or no benefits.

Tony Lazlo, director of Issho Kikaku ("Together Project"), a nonprofit organization formed by Tokyo-based foreigners to support multicultural issues, says foreigners previously avoided punishment for expired visas by writing a letter of apology. Kinmoth says immigration officials used to "bend over backward to handle it."

A special commission has been set up to review the nation's immigration laws.

Gregory Clark, a former Australian diplomat and the only foreigner on the panel, says his colleagues are "impervious to bad publicity" and are unlikely to ease up on overstayers. The Justice Ministry, which launched a special 200- member unit to find illegal residents last month, may increase the maximum fine from $3,000 to $30,000 and increase the banishment from five to 10 years.

In the Bay Area, Luna and Nishizawa say they plan on returning to Japan after their five-year banishment ends. But both are still fuming about being caught up in Japanese politics.

"I am upset about the way it was handled, especially since a lot of it is political and not a glitch in the bureaucratic system," said Luna. "The punishment certainly didn't fit the crime."

"A friend of mine overstayed his visa by a few days by the time he was heading to the airport to go visit home. When he showed them his expired visa, they put handcuffs on him and took him up to one of those top floors which is apparently the worst... they held him there for two weeks, and I know about all of this because he called all of us, his friends, begging us to collect his stuff and bring it to him where he was being held." - Paul Sutcliffe, my professor at Tokyo International University, talking to me after I explained to him why I would be leaving halfway through a semester. This friend of his had a life established in Japan, and was thrown out for five years without even a chance to go take care of business. Try that for insane.