RIGHTS-JAPAN: Migrant Workers Bear Brunt of ‘Unjust’ System

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Apr 18 2001 (IPS) - Rosal Manalili was 14 when she left the Philippines for Japan in 1986, embarking on her first overseas trip that, she hoped, would help her to become a professional singer.

But things did not turn out that way. Today, the petite, soft- spoken woman is held in a tiny unheated cell at Kochisho, Tokyo’s largest detention centre that is also a venue for executions of death-row prisoners.

Rosal has been here there since 1999, when the Chiba district court handed down to a eight-year prison term with hard labour after her conviction for the murder of her Japanese boyfriend in 1998.

At that time, Rosal was also ordered to leave her daughter with her estranged husband’s family, a sentence so heart-breaking that she has never spoken about her only child since she entered the detention centre.

Rosal maintained her innocence right through the trial. But her lawyers say the judges based their verdict on what was considered a key factor in the court trial — her confession to the police during her detention.

“Rosal told police during the interrogation that she stabbed her boyfriend, a Japanese man, with whom she was living with. This confession was after 120 hours of interrogation during the 10 days she was held in the police cell,” says her lawyer, Masako Shinna.

The case of someone like Rosal being in prison is not rare among migration workers in Japan — the most popular destination for unskilled labour from Asia.

The Japanese police report that 12,711 foreigners were arrested for crimes in 2000. While 54 percent were held for overstaying visas, those who were arrested for crimes such as murder and theft soared 53 percent to 674 during the same year.

Statistics complied by the Asian Migrant Centre, a non- governmental organisation based in Hong Kong, indicate there are currently more than 250,000 undocumented workers in Japan. Almost 90 percent of that number are from Asia.

Lured by the strength of the Japanese yen that allow them to earn almost 10 times what they would at blue-collar jobs at home, many of these people stay beyond their usual three-month tourist visas or enter on false passports to work in the lucrative entertainment industry, in factories, construction sites or farms.

A study by the centre reveals that while domestic workers comprise the biggest group of Filipino and Thai women workers in other Asian destinations, entertainers are at the top of the list in Japan.

One reason is that Japanese immigration laws grant six-month entertainment visas, mostly for Filipino women from the age of 18 years and older.

But there are others who enter without proper visas and also look for jobs in this sector. Often, however, many of these women discover they are cheated when they arrive in Japan.

Complaints of being forced into prostitution, being subjected to physical abuse and not being paid salaries by Japanese gangsters who control the bars and brothels are rampant.

Data compiled by the Coalition Against the Trafficking of Women Asia-Pacific, based in Manila, show that Japan has the largest sex industry for Asian women, with more than 150,000 non-Japanese women working in the sex trade.

A coalition study says, for instance, that “one sex zone” in Tokyo, only 0.34 sq km in area, has 3,500 sex “facilities” that include “strip theatres, peep shows, soaplands, porno shops, sex telephone clubs”.

Looking back, Rosal explains that she purposely lied about her age when she applied for her visa to Japan.

“I wanted to leave my poverty-stricken life in Manila. I was so excited because I was going to go in an airplane,” she recalled to her counselor during a recent visit to the detention centre.

When Rosal arrived in Tokyo, she easily found a job at a “snack”, the Japanese term for a cheap bar. She started work at 6 p.m. and continued until 2 a.m., working six days a week at a job that involved plying drinks and flirting with male customers.

She was paid 100,000 yen (833 U.S. dollars) per month. “That was so much more than I could even think of making in Manila,” she explained.

In 1993, Rosal married a Japanese man. But life became unbearable for her and she left because he continued to beat her even after their daughter was born.

Rosal insists that it was her ex-husband who killed her boyfriend — for whose death she is now in prison — because he was consumed with jealousy over her new relationship.

She has filed a damage lawsuit with the Chiba district court, alleging she was unjustly detained by Chiba police. She has also appealed her sentence, determined to prove her innocence and start her life again.

Rosal’s story has won the hearts of human rights groups in Japan.

The Rosal Ad Hoc Committee, comprised of local citizens, counselors for illegal labour and Christian social workers, is raising funds for Rosal. It has started a postcard campaign to ask judges to look at the case fairly, and provides emotional support for Rosal as well.

Charles Jilton, a supporter, explains that Rosal is a victim of Japan’s unjust criminal system that provides little protection of the human rights of illegal foreign workers.

A simmering bone of contention with human rights activists is Japan’s judicial system, which relies on confessions of detained suspects to hand down verdicts on them.

They accuse the police of forcing confessions out of desperate suspects who are often at breaking point, after being forced to answer questions for long hours without proper food or rest.

“The system is particularly cruel when it comes to young women like Rosal, who hardly speak Japanese and are frightened and confused during interrogation. It is an ugly form of torture that should be unheard of in an advanced country like Japan,” Jilton argued.

Critics add that illegal workers are easy targets for the Japanese police. For instance, without independent visas, they face the threat of constant deportation.

In order to escape deportation, many women workers resort to marrying Japanese men. While some marriages provide them security, in some cases further abuse continued to grow.

Indeed, HELP, a non-governmental organisation that offers shelter as well as other support to migrant women, reports full occupancy as a result of a steady flow of women who want to escape from abusive spouses or employers.

“Their legal vulnerability makes them targets of institutionalised gender and culture-based discrimination in Japan,” says Rosal’s lawyer Shinna.

Meantime, activists are demanding that the government change its system and provide legal visas for migrant workers. After all, they say, these workers play a vital role in the Japanese economy by providing cheap labour that local residents shun.