Category: Kawasaki
-
2019 Survey of Foreigners in Kawasaki
About ten years ago, I applied to join the Kawasaki City Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents. My goal was to get the city to carry out a survey of its foreign residents, to find about the problems they were experiencing, in particular the experience of racism. At that point, there was no good data on…
-
Experiences of Racism in Japan
It has recently been reported that the Ministry of Justice is to survey 18,500 foreign residents to ask about their experiences of racism and discrimination. A lot of the reports are describing this as “unprecedented”, but while it is larger scale than the Kawasaki survey, and apparently focused on racism, the Kawasaki survey is a…
-
Racism in Japan
Actually, the content of this post would be more accurately described as “reflections on the results of a survey of experiences of discrimination on grounds of foreign nationality in the municipality of Kawasaki”, but that isn’t snappy enough for a blog title, and quite a lot of what I say will be directly relevant to…
-
Results of the Kawasaki Survey of Foreign Residents
The results of the questionnaire-based survey of foreign residents of Kawasaki were published yesterday. Most of the results are, of course, published in Japanese, but there is an English summary. (I had nothing to do with the English part of the English summary. I feel the need to make that clear.) I’ve been working on…
-
Proposals on Surveys and Pensions
Oh dear, it really has been too long since I posted to this blog. I’ve just started a new job, at the Japan Institute of Logic, so I’ve been extremely busy. I may have to start tweeting, since they’re supposed to be really short. Anyway, today we had another meeting of the Kawasaki Representative Assembly…
-
Thinking About the Report
This session of the Kawasaki Foreigners’ Assembly is coming to an end. We still have about six months to go, but that’s only four normal meetings, so we have to get started on deciding our final report and suggestions to the city government. In Sunday’s session, the Life and Society Subcommittee did manage to get…
-
Pensions
Last Sunday was the first meeting of the Kawasaki Representative Assembly of Foreign Residents of this fiscal year. The first meeting should have been in April, but after the earthquake quite a few of the representatives were temporarily out of Japan, and the city authorities had a lot of other things to organise, so it…
-
End of the Year
The Representative Assembly works by the Japanese fiscal year, which means that, just as our term began in April last year, so the first year ends at the end of March. However, we don’t have a meeting in March, so the meeting on Sunday was the last of the first year. In the Society and…
-
Progress Report
There was another meeting of the Kawasaki Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents on Sunday. Because the Open Meeting has a completely different format, this was the first normal meeting for over two months, with the result that most of us had more-or-less forgotten what we had been talking about. Fortunately, the secretariat had a summary…
-
Open Meeting
The Kawasaki Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents holds an Open Meeting every year, and this year’s meeting was held on Sunday. Anyone may attend any meeting of the Assembly, so the Open Meeting isn’t particularly open in that sense. The difference is that, at the normal meetings, only the representatives are allowed to speak, whereas…