Discrimination inside and outside of the workplace

Four years back I was looking for a new apartment in Osaka and visited my local agency. The agent asked me where I wanted to live and how much I wanted to spend and then pulled out a catalogue of pictures and floor plans. I picked half a dozen locations that looked reasonable and showed this chap my selection. The next thing the agent did gave me a bit of a wake up call. He called the landlord for every location I'd selected and began to ask if they accepted foreigners. My pick of half a dozen suddenly became one and the agent went into a speech about why they don't accept foreigners. It turns out that we're all noisy, untrustworthy individuals who forget to pay our bills and can't keep our door mats clean.

That's the only time I've experienced such direct discrimination outside of the workplace although there's more subtle forms of discrimination everywhere we go.

In the workplace it stares me in the face everyday. I work at Berlitz who love to advertise the fact that they are a global company with 125 years experience. Berlitz discriminate quite openly and have got so used to it that they don't realise they're doing it. It's become institutionalised discrimination.

As a long term resident I wanted to get on the National Social Security system to give me and my family more welfare protection. Would the bastards let me on it? No way. I had to involve my union and bring the topic up in collective bargaining before they backed down and enrolled me. When the enrollment acceptance form came back I read the details and found a section that stated the reason for acceptance; Has a Japanese family. Ha, if I was on my own then it would have been an even bigger merry-go-round.

This pissed me off no end and motivated me to see what could be done about it. I contacted a lady in Fukuoka who has been researching discrimination in the universities and told her I'd like to help out researching the eikaiwa industries. Debito's having a good crack, and a few other organisations are giving it their best, too. I decided to focus on workplace discrimination as I'm active with the General Union and the workplace is any area that has hardly been touched. We're pretty much starting from scratch.

There's a few steps we have to take before we can start tackling workplace discrimination which include:

• Getting consultative status with the economic and social council (ECOSOC). This is a United Nations organisation. We've already started the application process with the help of issho.org (Tony). This will allow us to submit reports to the UN's watchdog organisations who slap the government's wrist when discriminatory practices are being allowed to remain unchecked. In 1995, the Japanese government ratified the UN's 1995 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination so we should make sure they understand what ratification really means. In addition, the Japanese government is desperate for a permanent seat on the security council so this UN targeted approach will be influential.
• Locating workplace discrimination. This is where I'd like to ask for your help. We're collecting examples of workplace discrimination so that we can submit our reports. It'll take time to tackle deep rooted workplace issues but we've got to start somewhere. If anyone has any examples of wokplace discrimination and would like to let us know then please fill in a questionnaire that we've set up here.
  http://www.generalunion.org/worker
  We'd really appreciate your help.

Once we've got consultative status and collected our material we can start making some noise. In addition to the UN's monitoring arm there a number of Japanse governmental and non-governmental organisations that have been far too underused that we'd like to awaken from their slumber. We know it'll take some years to get fully organised and don't expect overnight changes but we're making a start. If you have time to spare and would like to get involved then send us an e-mail at

thanks.