Yuki Hayasaka
Cherry blossoms in an April snow storm, Tokyo, Japan. Photo courtesy of Yuki Hayasaka.
It’s been three weeks since I left Yale and came back to my home in Tokyo, Japan. It’s sad this happened in the middle of my last semester at Yale, but I am grateful to have a home to go back to and family to stay with.
Japan is in a little bit unique situation compared to other countries, as the number of COVID-19 cases is still under 10k. Some say that’s because we are not testing enough. Others say Japan is successful in controlling the virus. In any way, Tokyo has declared an emergency call and asked us to stay home. As the Japanese constitution guarantees the freedom of movement of people, the emergency call does not have any legal or physical obligation — it is just a request from the government.
Similar to the situation around the world, the outbreak of coronavirus revealed discrimination and prejudice against certain populations in Japan, terming them as likely-to-be-infected populations. Japanese returnees from abroad are one of these groups. The Japanese government closed the border against non-Japanese travelers from most of Europe, Asia, and the US two weeks ago, and since then, some blamed Japanese who came back from these countries as the primary source of the virus and criticized those who came back. My family and I didn’t face that kind of direct criticism, but my parents were asked “Is your son back? Is he staying home?” at the shops we often go to. I had thought that I would always be a “majority” in Japan, but realized I am not. Anyone could be a minority as the society changes.
I learned in a social psychology class that it is the nature of humans to make groups and negatively see the groups that they do not belong to, and the most effective way to resolve the conflict between two groups is to make them cooperate. We, all the people in Japan and the world, are supposedly fighting with COVID-19 together, but it seems the gap between different groups is expanding, at least in Japan.
My senior thesis is somewhat relevant to the situation as well. Studying labor migrants to Japan, I learned that most of them borrow a lot of money to get the Japanese training and a job in Japan. On average, they need to work for a year to pay back their debts. That means those who came to Japan within a year cannot simply go back to their countries, like I did, even if they want to be with their family at this moment. Those who were planning to come to Japan from this March or April, on the other hand, are denied entry and cannot start working, while their debts are increasing with the interest.
I don’t have any answer to these issues I listed here. And I think that’s not a bad sign. I learned in ER&M classes that there is no simple solution to any social issue, as social problems have their own histories and are interrelated to each other. What I can do right now, I think, is to collect voices from various groups of people and keep thinking. The image included in this post is of cherry blossoms in an early April snow storm in Tokyo.
