Immigration And Indian Restaurants: The Changing Face Of Japan

Major social change frightens many people. In San Francisco, I remember my grandmother being concerned about Chinese moving out of Chinatown, "They are buying up the neighborhood." A friend when I was in high school had similar views, "When I was a little kid, this entire neighborhood was white." Never sure of how to respond to such fear of change with undertones of racism, I was often speechless.

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. As Japan and India do not share a land border, the Indian presence and number of Indian restaurants in Japan will probably never 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, with an area approximately the size of California, has about 120 million people. 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. If Japan better utilized 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. When I go by 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.

About the Author:
Visit Aaron Language Services at http://www.aaronlanguage.com/ for translation from Japanese to English and back to Japanese, editing of English and other European languages, and 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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