Survey Confirms Post-3/11 “Flyjin” Phenomenon / 25 Percent of Tokyo’s Foreign Residents Fled

The Mainichi reports that the Tokyo metropolitan government conducted a survey of foreign residents and found that 25% had temporarily fled the country after the March 11th disaster:

According to the survey, among those who had briefly returned to their home countries following the disasters, nearly half were foreigners who have lived in Japan for less than three years, hinting at the tendency that the shorter a foreigner had lived in Tokyo, the more likely they were to leave after the disasters.

Among the most common reasons for those who had briefly left Japan were, “Strongly urged by families abroad,” and “Following embassies or employers’ instructions to leave temporarily.”

A further 5% fled to Kansai, on the other side of Japan.

Because the survey was conducted in Tokyo, it does not include information about foreigners who permanently fled. Other sources have reported that Tokyo’s foreign population dropped by as much as 10,000.

The survey results deal a major blow to certain bloggers who have claimed that the “flyjin” phenomenon was a myth.

—

Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
Dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)

22 comments - What do you think? Posted by James - May 2, 2012 at 9:21 am

Categories: Foreigners in Japan Tags:

http://www.feitclub.com feitclub

169 respondents is an awfully small sample size.
Ponta

A Chinese mother I know made her child go to China after the disaster. She said there were frequent phone calls from Chinese relatives in China worried about the family in Japan . Now the child is back in Japan and goes to Japanese school as before.
Though it is great that many foreigners stayed or came to Japan and worked together with the Japanese people in times of great disaster, it is not surprising that some foreigners who have less connections with Japan and who have a place to go abroad leave the host country.
Japan was economically affected by the foreigners who left the job in Japan or who stopped coming to Japan, but it does not mean that those foreigners were morally to blame: It is just that Japan needed to recognize the new situation that came out of the disaster and needed a new strategy to deal with it.It was regrettable some English blogs promoted persecution complex by misinforming as if the Japanese people created the word “flyjin” and were blaming them.Read Japan Probe for balanced posts. (^_^.).
- flowby
  
  Hi Ponta –
  
  I agree with your sentiments. And as the linked article suggests, finding ways to improve the news situation is important in disaster prone Japan.
  
  And as you indicated, in times of disaster, it is not surprising at all, that mis / ill-informed people esp foreigners would choose to leave rather than stay. I think examples of this abound worldwide and in many cases people act impulsively without meaning to cause suffering to others.
  
  On a sidetrack, I think the title “confirming” 25% of foreigners in Tokyo fled is questionable in value, except that perhaps it confirms that 25% of the 169 surveyed respondents left. Hardly a scientific approach.
Ochazuke

Important to point out that these figures are based on a survey and not information from, for example, immigration. Furthermore, as feitclub mentioned, 169 is a pretty piddling sample size, dare I say a bit half-assed even.

As an aside, I certainly don’t deny that more than a few foreign residents fled Tokyo in the wake of the disaster. I had a handful of friends and acquaintances that did. Surveys like this border on anecdotal evidence, though, and as far as I can tell don’t serve much of a purpose (except perhaps achieving a certain narrative/political agenda). Too tin-foil hatted of me?
- http://www.japanprobe.com James
  
  Surveys like this border on anecdotal evidence, though, and as far as I can tell don’t serve much of a purpose (except perhaps achieving a certain narrative/political agenda). Too tin-foil hatted of me?
  
  –
  Political agenda? The only “agenda” I see in the linked article is the government’s desire to improve services for foreign residents by making information more readily available in an emergency (for example, it is hinted that using simpler Japanese will help non-fluent foreign residents better understand announcements).Those of us who were here in March know what happened. We all saw friends and colleagues fleeing in fear or caving in to the fear expressed by overseas relatives. The sample size in this survey is not huge, but I don’t think the results should surprise any of us.
  
  Nevertheless, there are some expat (and former expat) internet users who are desperately trying to pretend that a significant number of foreigners did not flee the country after 3/11. Some cling to a fantasy about the Japanese media inventing the whole thing to denigrate foreigners. Almost all negative attention towards “flyjin” has taken place on English speaking blogs. The resentment from Japanese is imaginary. The Mainichi report is about a government trying to help the foreign community cope with disasters, not some anti-foreign agenda.
  - Ochazuke
    
    Fair enough. My remarks could have been worded better as I was making a weak attempt at sarcasm.
    
    That being said, and as I did actually say in my initial comment, I don’t deny that a good number of foreigners fled Tokyo and Japan at large. I was also here and bore witness to it firsthand. You would have to be brain dead to claim that it didn’t happen…or perhaps part of a political agenda! (wink wink, nod nod)
    
    I agree wholeheartedly that the resentment from Japanese is imaginary. My main point was (supposed to be) that a survey with 169 respondents being used to represent a community of multiple 100,000s is not particularly prudent, even if the results are similar or even identical to those of a survey with a proper sample (fair shake: it doesn’t mention to how many people the surveys were disseminated).
http://thehopefulmonster.wordpress.com/ Sublight

My son’s school lost many of their teachers following the earthquake. While most of them at least waited until June for the school year to end (they use a western schedule), several (including the assistant in my son’s class) cut and ran with no advance notice, never to return. He ended up essentially losing the last three months of the school year (not a severe blow at his age, but for the older kids going through the college application process, it was a much bigger deal).

Despite another blogger’s contention that living in Japan means being a ‘perpetual subordinate,’ many here actually hold jobs and have responsibilities that others depend on. So when those people decide to drop everything and run, they put a bigger burden on those who choose to stay, and they shouldn’t be surprised or act hurt and offended when those of us who’ve been picking up the slack (and the pieces) aren’t welcoming them back with open arms.
- Hamachiman
  
  I concur with your last statement. Some people will simply never get it, content to blame others.
Rob-bot

If someone wants to foot the bill for me, I’d be more than happy to move there and teach something.
Ponta

This is the actual statistics by the ministry of justice.
http://www.moj.go.jp/nyuukokukanri/kouhou/nyuukokukanri04_00015.html （１）外国人登録者総数の傾向　－第４表，第５表及び第６表，第４図－東日本大震災後における外国人登録者数の短期的推移については，東日本大震災直後の３月末に大きく減少した後，６月末には一旦増加に転じたが，その後微減が続いており,平成２３年９月末の数から同年１２月末への変化は，１万３９２人（０．５％）の減少となっている。
http://www.moj.go.jp/content/000095037.pdf

If you look at the figure 4, it is clear that the population of registered foreigners dropped sharply after March, 2011.
- flowby
  
  Hi Ponta –
  
  Interesting links. What the data does convey to me is,
  
  -The pop. of foreigners has been declining for 3 years.
  – There was a 1.9% decline in foreign pop from Dec 2010 ~ Mar 2011
  – There is no data(from what I can see) about the months of Jan & Feb
  (ie – what was the decline for 3months pre-disaster?)
  – There doesn’t seem to be a confirming of the 25% quoted in title by these statistics.
  
  In addition to the assumption that people left because of fear or uncertainty re safety, we really need to know if people were planning to leave Japan anyway over the next few months(March~April is a big moving time) due to economic, social, work, study, family etc reasons, and the disaster just hastened their plans.
http://www.japanprobe.com James

“infinitesimally small sample size”

Not infinitesimally small. 169 would be a small sample size, one with a pretty wide margin of error, but even if the true percentage that fled was around 10% or 5%, it would still be a noteworthy.

small, unscientific survey

The article does not contain details about how they obtained their sample. I don’t see how you can conclude that their methods were unscientific.

l; not a single person I know locally, Japanese or 外人, has left the country because of disaster hysteria. 100% of my anecdotal sample stayed!

Your definition of “disaster hysteria” is either very narrow, or you don’t know many people. I do not have a huge number of friends, but I knew of plenty of people who fled. I went to the immigration office to renew a visa in mid March of 2011 and I saw ludicrously long lines of foreigners applying for re-entry permits. Many foreigners were leaving because of the disaster. Get your head out of the sand.

–

Data on residence registrations already showed that Tokyo’s foreign population dropped by about 10,000 in 2011. That data doesn’t even cover those that temporarily fled, a number that was certainly more.
- Ken Yasumoto-Nicolson
  
  Using this calculator http://www.raosoft.com/samplesize.html it says you’ll have a 7.5% margin of error with a sample size of 171, keeping all other values at defaults and using a Tokyo foreigner population of 400,000. Of course, the flyjin who never returned will not show up on the survey, so the 25% +/-7,5% figure is a conservative estimate.
- Jason
  
  Erhm, hum… I tend to assume that surveys are unscientific until exact methodology is released and proves to be up to snuff. Perhaps I’ll be shown to be wrong and a needless cynic.
  
  Ponta’s MOJ stats are compelling, it definitely shows a cumulative drop of 5,000 foreigners in Japan in the month following 3/11. Alas, their motivations aren’t so clearly illustrated by that downward spiking graph. One might speculate that the sudden loss of so many jobs prompted already transient, temporary workers to leave for greener pastures. Or maybe they were all freaked out. Or maybe fewer new registrations happened as people stayed away from a country in turmoil. I’m not sure about the purpose of such speculation, though.
  
  As for your hurtful refutation of my tongue-in-cheek anecdotal evidence with yet more anecdotes, should I list my family in Fukushima and my friends in Kanto/Tohoku in further response? They stayed, for whatever reason. If I wanted to stoop, I’d suggest that perhaps your friends that left are somewhat hysterical or somehow lacking in character — but that wouldn’t be nice or an argument particularly worth making.
  
  Japan is losing foreigners and has been since the economic kerfuffle in 2008. The numbers I’ve seen (but can’t bring to hand, just now) indicate 2011 wasn’t significantly, if any, worse than previous years. Hard numbers would be helpful in judging this more accurately.
  
  My primary point, though: The majority of people, citizens or otherwise, *do not live in Tokyo*. I do not live in Tokyo. Tokyo does not represent the whole of Japan, nor do ~42 survey respondents warrant a headline declaring the confirmation of a national trend.
Anonymous

They were smart to have done so. I’m curious about the number of Japanese who fled the area.
Ap

It’s understandable that you want to leave the area if you have another home (parents, other family e.g.) you can rely on.
I don’t know how I would have reacted with all the crap going down in Fukushima.

Well, hopefully this will lead to a more open and better immigration help for foreigners, especiall the ones with high qualifications that are needed in Japan.
VK

About the desire for better information – did anyone find that there were a lot of people complaining about a lack of information when it was there for them to find? Sometimes to me it felt like people were expecting to have Edano come round to their house and talk to them personally.

I’m surprised there is no mention of poor foreign reporting, given it was a big issue at the time. Perhaps the survey didn’t have open questions for that.
- Anonymous
  
  Yes, there is a lack of information… of questionable source or nature that perfectly aligns with said people’s views.
Torquemada

On the other hand, this probably makes some right-wing nutjobs happy. The ones who scream out “Japan for the Japanese” in their black vans. How frequently do they spout out xenophobic rhetoric now? Still the same?
RMilner

At the time of the earthquake, my daughter was enrolled at a major international school in Tokyo. The school was closed for two weeks to do structural surveys. When it re-opened, her class was combined with the other one in her year group due to about half the children having been temporarily withdrawn by their parents.
Guyjin

I’m a bit tired of the debate on the flyjin “phenomenon”…
What’s the point?

If you live in Japan and happen to have left the Tokyo area (or elsewhere), ask yourself this: how would the government know about it? As long as you don’t cross the border – for example, by taking a train towards Osaka – it can’t.

And the same goes for the Japanese. When I boarded the shinkansen on Tuesday, March 15, Tokyo station was PACKED with Japanese families and individuals making their way west (and to their credit, despite the worried look on their faces, they were all waiting in line at the ticket counters).

In my carriage I counted 3 foreigners plus myself, all the rest being Japanese.
And most of the people I interviewed had something in common: their “jikka” (hometown), or their in-laws, were somewhere between Osaka and Kyushu.

The way I see it is like this: some people had the option to go elsewhere (many foreigners qualify in that category, but so do many Japanese), and they took it. Others had the option but didn’t take it – and many others yet didn’t have any real choice but to stay.

What kills me is the over-simplified view relayed by the Japanese media (including the Asahi Shimbun) that all gaijins left irresponsibly while all the Japanese stayed put. We might prefer black and white, but social realities always come in shades of grey…
robt

The 5% that moved to Kansai think there going to be safer? They should move to Hokuriku area if they want to be safe.

Survey Confirms Post-3/11 “Flyjin” Phenomenon / 25 Percent of Tokyo’s Foreign Residents Fled

Recent Comments

Further Reading

Five Line sticker creators who deserve more attention

Turkish “refugees” arrested for rape in Japan + Some facts about refugee applicants in Japan

Russian political cartoon: Putin & the slant-eyed Japanese

Lone counter-protester disrupts pro-Sea Shepherd demonstration in London

Hundreds of copies of Anne Frank diaries vandalized around Tokyo / Western journalists imply connection to Shinzo Abe

Photos: Super cheap hotel in Osaka – 800 yen ($8) per night

New anime film highlights Soviet ethnic-cleansing of Kuril islands

Olympic figure skating: a Japan-Korea internet hate factory

Korean man fined after throwing feces at Japanese embassy in Seoul

NY State Senator Tony Avella’s pathetic pandering to Korean nationalists @TonyAvella

Categories

Subscribe

Japan Blogs

Korea Blogs

Linkroll

Other Asia Blogs