Chasing the Japanese Dream

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Barriers to Understanding
It's easy to think that, at their heart, Japanese instincts don't change. Japanese officialdom tends to treat foreigners who live in Japan as temporary residents, not potential immigrants. This predicament isn't confined to Chinese. Koreans, Brazilians and Peruvians who have lived in Japan for decades have a hard time gaining citizenship. But for highly skilled Chinese workers who could just as easily have emigrated to the U.S. or Europe, such restrictions are particularly galling.

After all, if you're Chinese, the attractions of moving to Japan are multiple: Tokyo is only a short flight away from the Asian mainland, and since Mandarin and Japanese share a common writing system, it's easier for Chinese to gain fluency in Japanese than in Western languages. Still, no amount of linguistic proficiency makes up for potentially abusive immigration policies. Take Tokyo's practice of attracting foreign labor under so-called practical-training visas, which allow for three-year internships. In 2005, more than 55,000 Chinese entered Japan under this scheme. But last year alone, the program, by the government's own count, suffered from 4,639 cases of worker-rights abuse in which unscrupulous employers took advantage of uninformed immigrants. Hikaru Morita, a senior consultant for Temp Staff, a temp agency that began offering Japanese companies highly skilled Chinese office workers in 2004, acknowledges: "Chinese are seen as working harder than Japanese, but the visa situation does make things difficult."

Even Chinese CEOs in Japan aren't shielded. Song Wenzhou, who moved to Japan as a university student in 1985, founded a software business that made headlines in 2000 when it became the first company helmed by a foreigner who arrived in Japan as an adult to be listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's NASDAQ equivalent. He's now rich and dines with Japanese Prime Ministers. But Song recounts how he was recently stopped on the subway by police who suspected he was an illegal immigrant. "It's not just the Japanese government," Song says. "It's in the air, this anti-foreigner feeling. Even if Japan loosens immigration, it'll be because of economic necessity, not because of a real change of attitude."

Is that too gloomy a conclusion? Maybe. Younger Japanese have lived just as long with an economically powerful China as an impoverished one. Catering to this crowd, Morning Musume, a Japanese version of the Spice Girls, added two new singers to its nine-woman line-up this year. Both are Chinese. The move was no doubt geared toward attracting a Chinese audience, but the group's producer is equally keen on maintaining a Japanese fan base. "I had older relatives who told me not to come to Japan because of what it did to China during the war," says Li Chun, 19, one of Morning Musume's Chinese additions. "But I told them, music is universal. It doesn't matter where I sing: China or Japan or outer space."

That idea of a borderless world makes sense to Kuang Yinghuan, who arrived in Japan in 2002 as part of a high-school exchange program that each year brings 200 top students from China's northeast to Japan. Five years on, Kuang's Japanese is impeccable and he's a first-year graduate student at the University of Tokyo. "When I first came here, people made fun of me because I didn't speak Japanese well," he says with a grimace. "But now, when I tell them I'm a University of Tokyo student, they think of me as that, not just as a Chinese." Kuang then breaks into a Chinese-style, open-mouth guffaw — followed quickly with the head-bob of a discreet Japanese bow. At just 23, he's already the perfect embodiment of a new East Asia based not on rivalry but opportunity.