Mie Prefecture asked about 10,000 residents whether the local government should keep hiring foreign nationals. The people the question was about were not asked. An advisory panel has now ruled that the question itself was discriminatory, which is a polite way of saying it was designed to produce the answer the governor wanted.
The background is a familiar one in Japan. Governor Katsuyuki Ichimi said the prefecture would consider reinstating a Japanese citizenship requirement for its employees, citing the need to prevent information leaks abroad. The survey, conducted in January and February, was the evidentiary instrument: ask a sample of residents whether the prefecture should continue hiring foreigners, exclude foreigners from the sample, and use the result to justify the policy. The panel of experts that advises the governor concluded that the very act of asking the question could encourage further discrimination and mislead respondents. It is expected to recommend next week that the survey results never be released.
The mechanics of the survey are worth examining, because they show how a loaded question works. The exclusion of foreign residents is the tell. A survey about whether a group should enjoy a right, administered entirely to people outside that group, is not a consultation. It is a poll of the majority about the minority, dressed up as evidence gathering. The panel, working under Mie’s anti-discrimination ordinance, saw through it. The petition that triggered the review came in April from a third-generation ethnic Korean man living in the prefecture, who asked that the results not be disclosed.
The stakes in Mie are small and the pattern is large. Japan is running out of workers. The population is shrinking, the workforce is aging, and the country has turned, reluctantly, to foreign labor: technical trainees, students, skilled workers, a growing number of permanent residents. Record numbers of foreigners now live and work in Japan, and every prefecture from Hokkaido to Okinawa depends on them in hospitals, farms, factories and care homes. Yet the political reflex in parts of the country still treats the foreign worker as a security risk first and a colleague second. The citizenship requirement is that reflex given administrative form: a rule that says only Japanese citizens may hold certain public jobs, justified not by qualifications but by nationality.
The “information leaks abroad” rationale deserves particular attention, because it is the same language that has been used to justify restrictions on foreign researchers, foreign students and foreign employees across the developed world. It sounds technical. It is not. It assumes that a foreign national is more likely to leak secrets than a Japanese national with the same access, which is an assumption about loyalty based on birthplace, and it is exactly the kind of assumption the panel in Mie has now called discriminatory.
Ichimi has said he will make his final decision after weighing the survey results and other factors. The panel’s recommendation does not bind him. He could proceed with the citizenship requirement anyway, citing the survey despite the ruling. The outcome in Mie will tell other prefectures whether the method works: ask a tilted question, cite the majority, ignore the panel.
Japan’s real question is not whether foreigners should be allowed to work in the public sector of one prefecture. It is whether a country that needs millions of foreign workers can keep treating them as a temporary inconvenience and a security concern. The survey in Mie was an attempt to answer that question without asking anyone it concerned. The panel just said the question was rigged. The governor still holds the pencil, and the rest of Japan is watching what he writes.