BY NAOKO IWASA

There are lots foreigners who live in Japan. Among them there are people who have permanent residents status. They are divided into two groups;

(1) general permanent residents, those who are allowed to reside in Japan permanently by permission after staying in Japan for ten years.

(2) extraordinary permanent residents, those who lost their Japanese nationality (according to the treaty of the San Francisco Peace Parley) after they were taken from the Korean Peninsula or Taiwan to Japan before and during World War II, and their descendants who were born in Japan.

They are living and working and performing their legal obligation to pay their taxes just as Japanese. It is extremely different from the general public in Japan that they don't have the right to vote. The Supreme Court gave a decision that Japan's Constitution doesn't prohibit permanent residents from having the right to vote in February, 1995. Nevertheless, Japan's government hasn't given it to them. A bill stating, however, that the Japanese government should give them the vote was finally being discussed in the Diet in November, 2000. This happened because the South Koreans in Japan and all the parties concerned in both Japan and South Korea buckled down tenaciously to the difficult task for many years. This problem attracked lots of people's attention. Though the bill was not carried out in the Diet, we can expect the realization of the bill in the near future.

More than two-thirds of local assemblies throughout Japan approved the demand for local voting rights that was presented by a group of South Koreans in Japan in November, 2000. It was only Kagawa prefecture that disapproved it in its prefectural assembly under deliberation of the Diet. The Kagawa prefectural assembly did so for a definite reason; the local assembly should consider this problem since the voting rights is a local issue, and it shouldn't give the right to vote to foreign residents.

If we think about it, Japan is the homeland for second and third-generation Koreans with the extraordinary permanent residents status. They work and receive their education in Japan but they don't have the vote. When I was a child in my elementary school, I had a friend who was a third-generation Korean living in Japan. After I learned she was a third-generation Korean in Japan, there was no change in our friendship. This is because she thinks and views things the as same as an ordinary Japanese does.

The reason why people with the extraordinary permanent residents status participate in the voting rights movement is to get rid of legal and social discrimination in Japanese society, and to remove prejudice against them. In other words, there are still many closed minds which don't try to recognize them. We must abolish discrimination, and make an open Japan and to accept them into Japanese society.

On the other hand, there are about twenty countries which give the right to vote to foreigners. Most of them are members of EU (European Union). Each country in the EU grants the vote only to people who were born in an EU country. In Germany and France, they amend the constitutions to grant the right to vote conditionally. In the US, foreigners with general permanent residents status don't have the vote. Only US nationals that have citizenship can vote. In Australia, if foreigners pay the estate tax, they can get the right to the vote in cities.

Some Japanese suggest that foreigners should be naturalized in Japan in order to get the vote. But the extraordinary permanent residents have unilaterally been denied the vote after the war. They were on very uncertain grounds. Sometimes they were foreigners and at other times Japanese. It is the law that people can not have two nationalities in Japan. The extraordinary permanent residents must abandon their homeland if they are naturalized in Japan. Acquisition of nationality is a problem for the extraordinary residents having a unique historical background. There are many reasons why they choose not to be naturalized in Japan. For example, one unreasonable condition says that they must have Japanese names and abandon their original names. At present, Japan doesn't have a stand which tries to meet them half-way if they want to be naturalized in Japan.

We Japanese have preached internationalization toward the 21st century. However, at first, we must achieve internationalization in Japan, not having our eyes only abroad. We must acknowledge the present condition in Japan. Second and the third-generation residents who were born and raised in Japan have not been given the vote or basic human rights for a long time, to say nothing of the first-generation. We must accept the rights of Japan-born Koreans as fellow humans who have been discriminated against and who have been persecuted after the war. Japan must continue developing in the international community. By giving permanent residents local voting rights, our own consciousness of internationalization and human rights will improve. The bill to give Permanent Residents local voting rights is a problem which will help raise Japanese consciousness in the 21st century.