No Longer Japanese?

No Longer Japanese?

In 1990, Japan created a visa for descendants of Japanese emigrants. The justification was DNA. If your grandparents left Japan for Brazil, you were Japanese enough to come work in the factories.

By 2008, 312,000 Brazilians were living in Japan. They filled the jobs Japanese workers wouldn’t take: auto parts, electronics assembly, food processing. The 3K jobs: difficult, dirty, dangerous.

Then Lehman collapsed. Japanese exports fell 46 percent. And in March 2009, the government printed a double-sided form in Portuguese offering 300,000 yen per worker and 200,000 per family member to board a plane back to Brazil. The condition: you and your children could never return on that visa.

A worker in a Hamamatsu employment office stood up and asked: are you saying even our children cannot come back? A government official named Masahiro Watai answered calmly: that is correct, they will not be able to come back. These were people whose grandparents had left from the port of Kobe. Some had grandmothers still alive in Japanese villages.

Close to 20,000 took the money. Japan’s Brazilian population dropped from roughly 300,000 to about 200,000. A former health minister named Jiro Kawasaki called it humanitarian assistance. A sociologist named Angelo Ishi called it an insult.

The same bloodline doctrine that opened the door in 1990 closed it in 2009. The doctrine didn’t change. The economy did. And that tells you what the doctrine was actually for.