Regarding the June 21 article "Fukuda gets report on boosting immigrants": Most wealthy advanced countries have a long, open history of allowing immigration because they accept it as their international duty. Although the trend has more recently been to try to curtail this, the percentage of immigration in Europe and America has generally been very high. It is only Japan, among the leading democratic nations, that has adamantly blocked an honest immigration policy.
Now that Japan is choking on its own consumerism, as indicated by the disgracefully high suicide rate and low birthrate, its leaders are ostensibly rethinking their antiforeign outlook. But the underlying attitude will never change. When the prime minister talks of immigrants as a resource, he displays the core of this attitude. It seems he only wants to view non-Japanese in the same way as the country views oil or any other natural resource that Japan imports to profit from.
Consider the recent changes in laws that affect those who have been here legally and have long contributed to Japanese society: All non-Japanese, regardless of their prior commitments and contributions to living here, have been lumped into a single xenophobic category, and must now be photographed and fingerprinted at ports of entry like common criminals in a country where the only real security threat comes from within. Homegrown gangsters, terrorists and homicidal maniacs apparently walk the streets freely.
Before thinking of letting 10 percent of the population become non-Japanese, the government must first re-evaluate its own perspective on humanity instead of seemingly sorting the world into two classes: Japanese who are automatically treated as first-class human beings and non-Japanese who seem to be increasingly shoved out of the picture.
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