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 this survey in one way or another since 2009, and I’m still not finished, because we are currently planning the interview survey that will follow up on the results of the questionnaire.
2009 was when I applied to become a member of the Foreign Residents’ Assembly (FRA). My general purpose was to contribute to the city and my community, but my specific goal was to get the city to carry out a survey like this. I thought, and still think, that having actual data on the situation of foreign residents would be very useful. Fortunately for me, the other representatives agreed, and provided a broader base of opinions on what should go into the survey. We formally requested that the city carry out such a survey in 2012.
The city moved quite quickly, agreeing to investigate the possibility of doing a survey, and setting aside budget for it for the 2013 fiscal year. At the beginning of that fiscal year, a team was established to work on it, mostly composed of Japanese social scientists. I was added to the committee as the token minority member. We spent a year working out the details of the survey, so that we could make a concrete budget proposal to the city.
The city agreed to supply the budget, so the survey was carried out in 2014. The survey was sent out, and the results tabulated, by a contractor, but we, on the team, did the data analysis and wrote the report. I only wrote a small part of the report: the section on experiences of discrimination. In the near future, I plan to translate that section into English and post it here, along with some more commentary. I’m also going to read the whole report, because I only read it bit by bit as it was being written, and I don’t think I’ve read the whole thing yet. I’ve certainly not read the final version of some parts. I expect that there will be other things that I want to say as a result of that.
One interesting fact, that is in the summary, is that half of the children of foreigners in Kawasaki have Japanese citizenship. (That is probably because the other parent is Japanese.) Before we did the survey, we (on the FRA, I think) had asked the city how many children with foreign roots there were, and they had no idea. They knew how many had foreign citizenship, but the children with foreign parents and Japanese citizenship were invisible. We now know that there are as many Japanese children with foreign roots as there are foreign children, which has implications for educational provision.
None of the survey results specify actions that the city should take. That’s not their purpose. They are supposed to inform decision making. I expect that the FRA will make use of the results, as will the Multicultural Coexistence Promotion Policy Assessment Committee (which I am on). That’s the next step.
The publication of the report marks the success of a long project for me, but the real work starts now.
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