I have now officially met all the teachers who teach from Monday through Friday.
Apart from the fact that the classmates do not interact all that warmly with one another, the atmosphere and attitude toward studying seem quite satisfactory.
I do not know whether that has something to do with Japan tightening its visa policies.
The sort of situation in which someone is not genuinely there to study at language school does not seem to have appeared in our class.
Although the Bangladeshi student sitting beside me often seems to zone out during class, whenever I look at his textbook, he is frequently ahead of the class and has sometimes even finished all the homework in advance. At the same time, he is actively writing résumés and looking for work.
As for the Chinese classmate on the other side, to my right, whenever the teacher asks everyone to read a sentence aloud, his voice is always loud and clear. I heard that he used to teach mathematics in the cram-school sector, yet in class he generally concentrates on reviewing his own assignments and keeping to his own pace.
I suppose everyone simply has a way of learning that suits them.
When the teacher asks why we came to Japan, quite a few classmates say they hope to work in Japan someday, regardless of whether they are giving the official answer or the unofficial one, whether they mean it sincerely or are simply talking nonsense.
Wanting to live and work in Japan is an answer that becomes especially thought-provoking under Japan’s current visa policies.
The scale of Japan’s changes to visa-related fees and regulations is startling.
Yet compared with Germany, it still seems difficult to say that Japan has gone excessively far.
Of course, Germany, as far as I know, does not have a hard-and-fast rule that people who remain in the country and obtain a visa in order to establish a company must first reach a particular level of business profit and personal income before their visa can be renewed.
Perhaps that is because taxes are heavier in Germany, so the collapse of newly established companies is hardly rare? Perhaps using a business venture as a means of obtaining residence has therefore (not yet) been abused.
Could Japan’s comparatively low starting salaries also mean that the income threshold lies beyond the reach of many foreigners?
There are far too many details here that I do not understand, so I do not know whether the standard Japan has adopted is something like this: an ordinary median income in Taiwan is only around NT$40,000, yet the government decides that only people earning the equivalent of a TSMC engineer can qualify for residence status.
If that is the case, then of course it is unreasonable.
In online groups for foreigners from outside the Chinese-speaking world, I also frequently see people voicing their dissatisfaction with the Japanese government’s tightening of its policies.
But plenty of people defend those policies as well, saying that the Japanese government made these decisions in response to public opinion and to prevent the system from being abused.
In English-language groups, I have also seen posts that may have been trolling or satire, saying:
I am from Country X, usually somewhere in South or Central Asia, and I want very badly to remain in Japan, so I hope to find a Japanese girl to marry and obtain Japanese status.
The replies below such posts naturally become a whole series of attacks, defences, and arguments. I did not read every one of them closely.
There are many questions in all this that are worth examining and mulling over: gender, socioeconomic status, ideas about love and marriage, and much more.
It simply made me think of more than twenty years ago, when I had just arrived in Germany. At the time, the social news was fond of discussing “mail-order brides,” especially women from Ukraine, followed closely by Asian brides.
These women from countries of lower socioeconomic standing were “bought” by German men.
Now, however, the posts I see are written by men from countries of lower socioeconomic standing, “seeking” Japanese women willing to marry them.
Many men today criticise women for being materialistic. They think women pursue nothing but money and possessions and treat men like cash machines.
But I would also like to know: what exactly are the men offering? Or is it enough for a woman to refuse to follow a man who has nothing to his name for him to label her materialistic?
Anyway, to return to the subject, at the social night some time ago, I struck up conversations with several foreigners from outside the Chinese-speaking world in succession.
Most of them had already lived in Japan for more than ten years, or even longer.
One Indian man among them shared his own observations with me.
He said that closed social circles and exclusion exist in every country.
His own country, India, is like that. He had also been to Taiwan and did not feel Taiwan was particularly open. He believed the situation in Germany was similar as well.
When it comes to asking whether a country genuinely accepts outsiders, he thought the question was not worth pursuing too deeply.
In his view, no matter the country, networks built through personal connections are the real foundation for establishing oneself there.
I found it a very interesting observation and argument.
In truth, I still cannot clearly articulate the differences I have been sensing.
The way one country and another give different forms and methods to the same emotion.
Those fundamentally different reactions to the same thing—perhaps that is what we mean by “cultural bedrock”?
讀者留言