Archive for March, 2009

Japanese government offers to pay travel expenses of unemployed foreigners who want to leave Japan

The Asahi reports (in Japanese) that the government has decided to provide travel expenses to unemployed foreigners of Japanese descent who want to leave Japan:

厚生労働省は３１日、失業した日系人に、母国への帰国旅費として１人３０万円（扶養家族には２０万円）を支給すると発表した。雇用情勢の悪化で仕事を失い、日本語が話せないために再就職が難しい日系人が急増しているため。４月１日から全国のハローワークなどで申請を受け付ける。

　失業手当の受給期間が３０日以上残っている人には１０万円（６０日以上なら２０万円）を上積みする。ただし、旅費を受け取って帰国した場合、日系人の身分に基づく在留資格での再入国はできない。

The offer will apparently only apply to foreigners living in the country on Nikkei visas who already live in Japan and became unemployed before April 1st. 300,000 yen will be paid to the head of the household (200,000 for each dependents) to cover the cost of purchasing plane tickets back to their home country. Those who are eligible for unemployment insurance benefits will be given lump sum payments before they leave. Those who accept the payments sacrifice their right to use their Japanese heritage as a means of obtaining visas when entering Japan in the future. It will be, in effect, a ban on re-entering Japan for those who lack the qualifications for other types of visas.

Jiji Press is reporting that unemployed foreigners who want to stay in Japan will be offered job training and Japanese language courses.

Further details are available on the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare website: 1, 2.

[hat tip to Darin]

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HOPE at the Hilton Week in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya

I should have included this in the Secret Ocean post, but it just wasn’t ready yet. Secret Ocean will be performing April 17th at the Hilton Tokyo in support of HOPE at the Hilton week from April 12 to 19.

Basically HOPE is a Japan-based NGO that works hard at getting clean water for families in places like Cambodia, Somalia, and the Philippines. And they are better than Bono at thinking up creative ways to raise funds for that purpose. Ok, so maybe they don’t have the reach of the RED campaign, but they do have their own celebrity sponsor band in Fatblueman, a band which has played on stages all over, um,  Aichi in front of crowds of literally dozens…

A highlight of HOPE at the Hilton Week is the auction, which features a lot of Hilton packages from exotic places all over the globe. Keep a close eye on those packages – every year there are a number that go for considerably less than their list price. And every time you bid your name is entered in a draw for a trip via United Airlines to the USA.

So yeah, you help poor people by buying stuff for yourself. Capitalism rocks, no? (discuss in the comments

There’s lots more to be had in the auction, and heaps more going on at the Hilton’s in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka during the week. Check it all out in the video below.

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ObamaOrNot.com: Rate Japanese Barack Obama lookalikes

A silly new site from Ken Y-N of WhatJapanThinks.com allows users to rate photos of Japanese Barack Obama lookalikes:

ObamaOrNot.com provides a fun way for you to view and rate President Obama and people and cartoons and other likenesses of our President. It is an absolutely free service with no hidden fees. Anyone can rate these photos on a scale of 1 to 10, (1 is CHANGE (no good), 10 is YES WE CAN (great)). Viewers can select all or specific photo categories based on their interest. After rating a photo, the system will randomly present another photo for further rating.

Head on over and start rating those Obamas!

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Indian restaurant in Hiroshima refused to give student discount to foreign students?

Darlo, a British student studying at Konan University in Kobe, blogged about an Indian restaurant in Hiroshima that apparently refused to give him its advertised student discount because he was a foreigner:

We flicked through the menu, as is customary despite knowing already what we were going to order, when a member of staff came over. We then (in Japanese) ordered the student deal for each of us, when he asked if we had student cards [issued by a Japanese University] which we then brandished. He then asked us to wait a moment for another staff member, at the time I thought it might have been because he wasn’t confident in using Japanese.

When his friend came over we did the same again, same order, same language, to which we were told that the student offer was only for Japanese students (as oppose to foreign students). Urm … what? Yes that’s right folks. Here is our first real receiving of racial discrimination in Japan … and it came from an Indian restaurant. Even if this were the actual case (something I didn’t buy for a second), how did he know that we weren’t in fact Japanese? Believe it or not there are people who are of non-Japanese origin that are born in Japan, or even people who have been naturalised as Japanese. But it seems not in the eyes of Ganesh, where only 100% pure-blood seems to count.

Darlo left the restaurant, preferring to spend his money at an udon place that didn’t have special “Japanese only” prices.

The reported reaction by the restaurant staff is quite odd, considering that the restaurant in question is owned by a foreigner has its menu written in both English and Japanese.

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