Japan: Indian restaurants and Immigration trends - By: Tom Aaron

Major social change frightens many people. In San Francisco, I remember my grandmother being concerned about Chinese moving out of Chinatown, "They are buying up the neighborhood." A friend when I was in high school had similar views, "When I was a little kid, this entire neighborhood was white." Never sure of how to respond to such fear of change with undertones of racism, I was often speechless.

Ethnic restaurants help us to unscientifically track trends in immigration. Lovers of Mexican food who traveled around America in the 1960 and 1970s could find delicious Mexican food in California and from Texas across through the Southwest. Naturally, Mexican food was available in major cities, but you could not find Mexican food everywhere the way you could find Italian food. Chinese food was spreading across the United States in the 1960s and 1970s as Chinese immigration continued and the immigrants moved outside areas where Chinese immigrants had traditionally lived. Fast forward to 2009 and you can find Mexican food almost everywhere in the United States.

Move across the globe to Japan and you will find Indian restaurants, run by Indians, starting to pop up in medium size cities across Japan. Given that India and Japan do not share a land border, the Indian presence and number of Indian restaurants in Japan will probably not rival the Mexican presence and number of restaurants in the United States. Still, using our unscientific ethnic restaurant information, we can see that Indian immigration to Japan is increasing, showing us what the future holds.

Most Japanese speaking of immigration are caught between what they think they need and what they think they want. Japanese think they need immigrants to replace the Japanese babies who are not being born. They think they need immigrants to manufacture products in the factories and in health care to help care for the aged. Japan has 120 million people in an area approximately the size of California. Japan fails to take advantage of human resources in the form of senior citizens and women who are unemployed or underemployed because the system does not recognize their value. Were Japan to better utilize the current human resources, Japan might not need immigrants.

Many Japanese think that they do not want immigrants. A very high percentage of Japanese would like to keep their "homogenous" society. Yet Japan is stagnating, stuck in the same rut since the bubble burst in the 1980s. Some new genes and blood may be what Japan needs to become re-energized. When I go by a new Indian restaurant, I see the future coming. When we look back in 20 or 30 years, we will see changes. New immigrants may make Japan a more vibrant and open society. Or we may see a Japan of haves and have-nots with an ever-growing underclass of Japanese and immigrants left behind to grow poorer and more hostile. I hope we see the latter - a new open Japan - with a landscape of Indian, Brazilian, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese restaurants. For ethnic restaurants show us the future.

About the Author

Aaron Language Services (http://www.aaronlanguage.com ) provides translation, editing, and more for a primarily Japanese client base. If you are an experienced editor, specializing in medicine or the hard sciences, we are always looking for experienced editors. Click on the menu at our top page where it says personnel, in English, for more information about the work and how to contact us.

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