Organizing support for foreign workers in contemporary Japan

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 460-481).Japan is a country known for its suspicion of foreigners, but Japanese citizens have established non-government organizations to support illegal foreign migrants. The problems and conditions of illegal foreign workers are rooted in Japanese government policies. The 1990 Immigration Control Law created a category of illegal foreign workers. Later, the Ministry of Health and Welfare excluded illegal foreigners from Japan's insurance system. Illegal foreign workers face challenges in dealing with employers, state officials, medical institutions, and family life. These problems range from unpaid wages and enormous medical cost to marriage/divorce registration and the forced break up of the families due to deportation. To solve these problems, Japanese engage in associative activism and institutional experimentation, which has transformed local politics in Japan. Illegal Asian workers in Japan rarely seek assistance from existing government organizations or ethnic associations. Government organizations provide mainly information and interpretation services and government officials lack the know-how to help illegal foreign workers with serious labor and immigration problems. Ethnic associations in Japan do not support their illegal compatriots. Illegal foreigners turn instead to Japanese NGOs, which have extensive experience in helping the underprivileged in Japanese society. Japanese activists, who found these NGOs, came from other social movement organizations. Christians, community workers unions organizers, women activists, labor lawyers, health workers, and civil rights activists have created separate support groups to help solve problems for illegal foreigners. Japanese activists created these groups in order to: a) acquire and accumulate knowledge on how best to help illegal foreigners; b) strengthen their bargaining power with employers and state officials; and, c) gain financial support for their activities. By working on behalf of illegal foreigners, these Japanese activists build a new community of action. Local governments have invited these activists to share their expertise and are increasingly relying on these support groups to provide public services to illegal foreigners. In some localities, local government officials have joined these groups and experimented with new institutions of governance. As a result, local governments are now breaking with national policies regarding illegal foreign workers. Japan has done quite a bit over the last two decades to open its borders and accommodate immigration. Associative activism by Japanese citizens impresses upon other industrialized societies that Japan's efforts to accommodate immigration are surprisingly humanitarian for a historically xenophobic culture.by Apichai W. Shipper.Ph.D

The JET programme as a manifestation of Kokusaika (internationalization) in Japan

ABSTRACT:\ud This thesis focuses on the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme, under which thousands of foreign graduates have been invited to work as language teaching assistants in Japanese schools, in the name of 'grassroots internationalization'. Although JET was launched in 1987 amid a wider government-sponsored campaign of internationalization (kokusaika), opinions have differed as regards the objectives and priorities of its creators, while the concept of kokusaika itself has also been subject to a wide variety of interpretations.\ud The thesis begins by offering five perspectives on kokusaika, as both a concept and a policy orientation. Two of these reflect common themes in 'Western' discourse on societal internationalization, namely ethnic/cultural diversity and globalization; while the remaining three pertain to more traditional Japanese policy concerns, i.e. the national economic interest, the 'national identity', and international prestige. Against this conceptual background, the Main Study assesses the characteristics of the JET Programme as an 'internationalization policy', both in te1ms of intended and de facto outcomes. Four aspects of the programme-'goals', 'operational policy', 'implementation' and 'perceived effects'-are examined, each in a separate chapter. \ud To reflect both 'official' and 'unofficial' positions, analysis is based on a combination of data from government sources (policy statements and documents) and first-hand accounts from 'ordinary' JET participants, i.e. 'grassroots discourses'.\ud The study detects a number of contradictions between the declared goals of the programme and the operational policy established for achieving them, and reveals a wide diversity of outcomes. Most fundamentally, the study finds that the 'internationalization' promoted by the JET Programme is geared less towards supporting systemic change within Japanese society than in furthering perceived overseas interests. \u

Proceedings of the 21st International Congress of Aesthetics, Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media

The Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade and the Society for Aesthetics of Architecture and Visual Arts of Serbia (DEAVUS) are proud to be able to organize the 21st ICA Congress on “Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics: Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media”. We are proud to announce that we received over 500 submissions from 56 countries, which makes this Congress the greatest gathering of aestheticians in this region in the last 40 years. The ICA 2019 Belgrade aims to map out contemporary aesthetics practices in a vivid dialogue of aestheticians, philosophers, art theorists, architecture theorists, culture theorists, media theorists, artists, media entrepreneurs, architects, cultural activists and researchers in the fields of humanities and social sciences. More precisely, the goal is to map the possible worlds of contemporary aesthetics in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and Australia. The idea is to show, interpret and map the unity and diverseness in aesthetic thought, expression, research, and philosophies on our shared planet. Our goal is to promote a dialogue concerning aesthetics in those parts of the world that have not been involved with the work of the International Association for Aesthetics to this day. Global dialogue, understanding and cooperation are what we aim to achieve. That said, the 21st ICA is the first Congress to highlight the aesthetic issues of marginalised regions that have not been fully involved in the work of the IAA. This will be accomplished, among others, via thematic round tables discussing contemporary aesthetics in East Africa and South America. Today, aesthetics is recognized as an important philosophical, theoretical and even scientific discipline that aims at interpreting the complexity of phenomena in our contemporary world. People rather talk about possible worlds or possible aesthetic regimes rather than a unique and consistent philosophical, scientific or theoretical discipline

Multimedia Development of English Vocabulary Learning in Primary School

In this paper, we describe a prototype of web-based intelligent handwriting education system for autonomous learning of Bengali characters. Bengali language is used by more than 211 million people of India and Bangladesh. Due to the socio-economical limitation, all of the population does not have the chance to go to school. This research project was aimed to develop an intelligent Bengali handwriting education system. As an intelligent tutor, the system can automatically check the handwriting errors, such as stroke production errors, stroke sequence errors, stroke relationship errors and immediately provide a feedback to the students to correct themselves. Our proposed system can be accessed from smartphone or iPhone that allows students to do practice their Bengali handwriting at anytime and anywhere. Bengali is a multi-stroke input characters with extremely long cursive shaped where it has stroke order variability and stroke direction variability. Due to this structural limitation, recognition speed is a crucial issue to apply traditional online handwriting recognition algorithm for Bengali language learning. In this work, we have adopted hierarchical recognition approach to improve the recognition speed that makes our system adaptable for web-based language learning. We applied writing speed free recognition methodology together with hierarchical recognition algorithm. It ensured the learning of all aged population, especially for children and older national. The experimental results showed that our proposed hierarchical recognition algorithm can provide higher accuracy than traditional multi-stroke recognition algorithm with more writing variability