David Chart's Blog

Category: Foreigners’ Assembly

  • Finally, Real Discussions

    I’m afraid this post is a week or so late, but on the 26th September we had another meeting of the Kawasaki City Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents. This was the fifth meeting of the assembly, and we finally got on to actually discussing issues, at least in the Life and Society subcommittee. As you…

  • Yet More Preliminaries

    Today we had another meeting of the Kawasaki Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents. We are still working on the preliminaries, but we have, at least nearly finished. Today’s job was to choose the topics we will discuss in detail over the rest of our term. My goal for my subcommittee was to have the whole…

  • Still More Preliminary Discussions

    On Sunday, we had another meeting of the representative assembly. This week, the main task was to establish sub-committees, and decide on the general topics they would discuss. The first question was whether we would have any sub-committees at all. As the full committee has 26 members, I said that I thought it would be…

  • Discussing What To Discuss

    It’s nearly two weeks since we had the second meeting of the Foreigners’ Assembly, and I’ve still not written about it. So, I’d better rectify that. (There are quite a few things I ought to write about on this blog but haven’t yet, I’m afraid.) As I predicted last time, we did not finish early.…

  • Formally Representative

    On Sunday, we had the first formal meeting of the Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents. The program was simple, but all of it was important, and all of it got done. First, we all received our formal notices of appointment from the deputy mayor of Kawasaki. This was when we officially became representatives, with a…

  • Preliminary Training Session

    Yesterday, there was a preliminary training session for the eighth Kawasaki Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents. As one of the new representatives, I naturally went along. The session was held in Kawasaki City Hall, in a meeting room on the fifteenth floor, which had quite a good view of the city. There were name badges…

  • Becoming a Civil Servant

    Yesterday I received a letter from the mayor of Kawasaki, informing me that I had been selected to serve as a representative on the eighth session of the Kawasaki Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents. My term of office starts in April, and runs for two years, until March 2012. Apparently, while I am a representative,…

  • Interview

    On Sunday, I was interviewed for the Kawasaki City Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents. In the past, the normal situation has apparently been that they have had trouble finding enough people, but this time they had around fifty applicants, and the assembly has a maximum membership of about twenty five. Thus, I suppose, the need…

  • Multicultural Social Workers

    Yesterday I went to the meeting of the Kawasaki City Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents (the home page is mostly in Japanese, but there are links to some English resources as well). This body was established by city ordinance about 15 years ago, and it sits for two years at a time, reporting to the…