Change does not excite most people. Growing up in San
Francisco, I remember my grandmother's concern about Asian
immigration: "They are buying up the neighborhood." I
remember a working-class friend when I was a teenager:
"When I was a little kid, this entire neighborhood was
white." I was never quite sure how to respond to such fear
of change with a tinge of racism.
Ethnic restaurants help us to unscientifically track trends
in immigration. Mexican food aficionados who traveled
around the United States in the 1960 and 1970s could find
delectable Mexican food in California and from Texas across
through the Southwest. Naturally, Mexican food was
available in major cities, but you could not find Mexican
food everywhere the way you could find Italian food.
Chinese food was spreading across the United States in the
1960s and 1970s as Chinese immigration continued and the
immigrants moved outside areas where Chinese immigrants had
traditionally lived. Fast forward to 2009 and you can find
Mexican food almost everywhere in the United States.
Move across the globe to Japan and you will find Indian
restaurants, run by Indians, starting to pop up in medium
size cities across Japan. Given that India and Japan do not
share a land border, the Indian presence and number of
Indian restaurants in Japan will probably not rival the
Mexican presence and number of restaurants in the United
States. Still, using our unscientific ethnic restaurant
information, we can see that Indian immigration to Japan is
increasing, showing us what the future holds.
When most Japanese speak of immigration they are caught
between what they think they need and what they think they
want. Japanese think they need immigrants to replace the
Japanese babies who are not being born. They think they
need immigrants to manufacture products in the factories
and in health care to help care for the aged. Japan has 120
million people in an area approximately the size of
California. Japan has greatly underused human resources in
the form of senior citizens and women who are unemployed or
underemployed because the system does not recognize their
value. Were Japan to better utilize the current human
resources, Japan might not need immigrants.
Many Japanese think that they do not want immigrants. Many
Japanese would like to keep their "homogenous" society. Yet
Japan is stagnating, stuck in the same rut since the bubble
burst in the 1980s. Some fresh blood may be what Japan
needs to become reinvigorated. Whenever I drive past a new
Indian restaurant, I see the future coming. When we look
back in 20 or 30 years, we will see changes. Maybe new
immigrants will make Japan a more vibrant and open society.
Or maybe we will see a Japan of haves and have-nots with an
ever-growing underclass of Japanese and immigrants left
behind to grow poorer and more hostile. I hope we see the
latter - a new open Japan - with a landscape of Indian,
Thai, Vietnamese, Brazilian and Chinese restaurants. For
ethnic restaurants show us the future.
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You can find Aaron Language Services on the Web at
http://www.aaronlanguage.com/ . We provide translation from
Japanese to other European languages and back to Japanese,
edit English and other European languages, and offer online
English coaching to a primarily Japanese client base. If
you can't read Japanese, you can always reach us via our
personnel page.
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