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Text of the flier holding journalist Mika Tsutsumi accountable for her endorsement of the racist/xenophobic agenda in Japan

Date: April 14, 2011

Note: Following is the text of a flier I made in preparations for Japanese journalist Mika Tsutsumi’s scheduled talk at Portland State University on April 14, 2011. I found out on the day of the talk that it had been canceled, so the fliers were never handed out.

For those of you who don’t know: Ms. Tsutsumi is the author of “United States: Poverty Superpower” and other books that expose social and economic problems within the U.S. for the Japanese audience, and is considered very liberal/progressive. However, in this particular case she aligned herself with the racist/xenophobic nationalist camp that target immigrants and migrant workers.

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Until 2008, Japanese law did not grant birthright citizenship to children born to a Japanese father and a non-Japanese mother unless they are legally married.

This “loophole” mostly affected children of temporary migrant Filippina women who work as “hostesses” serving alcohol to Japanese men at clubs. The legal situation was convenient for Japanese men who seek extramarital affairs with these women without taking any responsibility for the consequences: both the women and their children disappear from Japanese men’s lives as they are forced to go back to the Philippines or wherever the women came from. Children are sent back to an unfamiliar country with unfamiliar culture and language without any financial or other support from their Japanese father.

In 2008, the Supreme Court of Japan ruled this part of the citizenship law unconstitutional, and demanded that the legislature fix the problem. All major parties endorsed the change to the citizenship law, while a small but vocal group of right-wing nationalists (mostly organizing in the social media) argued that granting citizenship to children born to foreign mothers would result in massive citizenship fraud and the foreign (often claimed as “Chinese”) “takeover” of Japan.

Journalist Mika Tsutsumi, along with her husband and member of the Parliament Ryuhei Kawada, joined with the right-wing nationalists to lead the opposition to amending the unconstitutional citizenship law. Tsutsumi warned of the “dangers” of historic proportion eroding Japan’s sovereignty if the law were to be changed, while Kawada specifically insisted that the immigration law’s impact on Japanese unemployment must be addressed before proceeding with protecting the rights of the children whose citizenship rights are unconstitutionally denied.

By the end of 2008, the change to the citizenship law passed both houses of Parliament by overwhelming majority (with Kawada and a few right-wing politicians opposing it). Contrary to the racist/xenophobic arguments in opposition to the change, there have been no report of massive citizenship fraud, or foreign “invasion” of Japanese homeland in the three years since the change.

Ask Ms. Tsutsumi to investigate and report how her own claims regarding the citizenship law hold up with the reality. And if they don’t–which, they don’t–demand that she make a public statement regarding her endorsement of the racist/xenophobic nationalist agenda in Japan. That is her responsibility as a journalist.

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