Newsletter No. 458
News-Analysis
December 5, 2006

 

FACTORY DENIES MUSLIM BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS

The Daily Yomiuri has carried a rare article on Islam in Japan that focuses on a Japanese factory's mistreatment of Muslim workers. The case cited here is clearly extreme, but the Japanese allergy to public demonstrations of religious faith is much more common. In my own recent article for Harvard Asia Quarterly, I cited a similar case in Kitakyushu in which a devout Filipino Muslim was fired from his job at a Japanese factory for his prayers and fasting (see Shingetsu Newsletter No. 296 from June 2006).

One of the key problems that all foreigners face in Japan -- not only Muslims -- is that Tokyo has never enacted any domestic laws that ban racial or religious discrimination. Japan is thus one of the few major "democratic" countries in which discrimination may still be technically legal. These matters were strongly criticized this January by UN Special Rapporteur on Discrimination and Racism Doudou Diene, but conservative Japanese in the Liberal Democratic Party and elsewhere have managed to block any substantial progress in this field.

For more, see reports at the internet magazine Japan Focus like this one:

http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/1882

Or the website of the activist Debito Arudou:

http://www.debito.org

The Shingetsu Institute's mandate is limited to the issue of Muslims in Japan, but this is one case in which the broader issue of foreigners in Japan intersects with the issue of Islam in Japan.

Factory Denies Muslim Basic Human Rights
Yomiuri Shimbun

A sewing factory in eastern Japan required an Indonesian Muslim trainee to sign a note promising to forgo praying five times a day and Ramadan fasting as a condition of her employment, The Yomiuri Shimbun learned Monday. The firm also prohibited her from owning a cell phone and exchanging letters.

The Justice Ministry suspect the firm's practice infringes on the woman's human rights in violation of its guidelines for accepting trainees, which is based on the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

According to the note written both in Japanese and Indonesian, the factory prohibited the woman from worshipping on the firm's property and fasting while in Japan. She was also prohibited from exchanging letters domestically, sending money to her family or traveling in vehicles. In addition, she had a curfew of 9 p.m. at her dormitory and was not allowed to invite friends there.

According to the Advocacy Network for Foreign Trainees, a Tokyo-based support group, the factory asked the woman, who is in her 20s, to sign the note when she came to Japan three years ago. Although she was not notified about the conditions until she was asked to sign the note, she had no choice but to sign since she had paid a lot of money to come to Japan. About 10 Indonesian trainees are reportedly working at the plant.

Based on the Koran, Muslims pray five times a day facing Mecca, the Islamic holy place in Saudi Arabia, and refrain from eating, drinking and smoking from sunrise to sunset during Ramadan, which is in September in the Muslim calendar.

The woman trainee told the network that she was not allowed to worship even during breaks, and that the other trainees at her factory also signed similar promissory notes. "The prohibitions were likely enforced in the service of two aims: raising worker efficiency and prevent them from escaping," a person in the network said.

According to the ministry's guidelines, firms that infringe on the human rights of foreign trainees will be banned from accepting trainees.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights guarantee freedom of religion and expression, and freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds. Amnesty International Japan criticized the factory's lack of knowledge on human rights issues and said it was a prime example of the problems with the central government's foreign trainee program. Of about 83,000 foreign trainees who came to the nation last year, about 4,800 were Indonesians. In Indonesia, 87 percent of the population is Muslim.