Japan - First Maid Kit

The widow Naoko no longer needs to care for her husband, but still looks after a son in his forties who lives at home. Naoko's son works as diligently as a Japanese male is expected to - he is no hikikomori - which means he has less, not more, capacity to help with chores. As Naoko ages, she has trouble keeping up with the laundry, cooking, and cleaning for the both of them to the exacting standards required of a Japanese housewife.

A once-off visit by a cleaning company like Duskin costs Y30,000 - Y40,000, no easy decision even for a family of means like hers.

If Naoko et fils lived in Singapore, I point out to her, a live-in maid from Myanmar, Indonesia, or the Philippines, would cost around Y80,000 a month. Many Singaporean families (including mine) would be lost without their aid in cleaning, childcare, and aged care. Would she be interested if maids were hypothetically available in Japan?

Naoko responds with worry rather than, as I had expected, enthusiasm.
"What about the language barrier?"
"What if we don't get along?"

In general, areas with low immigration are less keen on it. This as true for the U.S., the U.K., as it is for Japan, where only 1.9% of its 2015 population were foreign, compared with the U.S.' 14.3% and Germany's 14.9% . One explanation is that homogeneous populations hear of the disadvantages of immigration - cultural dilution, misunderstandings, wage undercutting - without experiencing the benefits, and are thus wary of the elites who promote it.

However, the Japanese enjoy - as do natives of other developed nations - other fruits of globalisation, of which immigration is but one example. They have embraced pastries from Europe, technology from the U.S., and lest we forget, written script from China. Their xenophobia is not broad-based.

Their fear of foreigners may be also overstated. A Nikkei Shimbun poll held on 26th February 2017 showed 42% of respondents in favour of immigration, and an equal number opposed. Furthermore, the increasing number of small businesses are so hungry for foreign labour, according to a February 2018 paper by the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, that they are anecdotally willing to offer Japanese wages and conditions to retain foreign trainees.

Business owners need no convincing of the benefits of immigration, but households do. However, a very limited number of private households in Japan have access to domestic services through commercial agencies, and cannot employ workers directly, leaving them oblivious to the margin between what maid companies charge for their product and what they pay their foreign labour.

Apart from Singapore's migrant history, and its government being very alert to critics of its immigration policy, it is the ease with which everyday Singaporeans hire maids (and pay the government a levy) that may make them amenable to immigration. Affordable imported domestic labour is now seen as ubiquitous and indispensable as affordable imported TVs.

It is not always a win-win situation. Foreign workers are vulnerable to abuse by ignorant or cruel employers. Mistakes by often poorly equipped maids can cost lives. That said, requiring corporate middlemen often masks wrongdoing rather than preventing it. Foreign interns, ostensibly in Japan for skills-transfer, have found themselves cleaning up radioactive waste in Fukushima after being hidden under layers of labour hire companies. Depending on whether Naoko's son has decided to cook for himself that evening, it is unlikely a maid will be working in as hazardous an environment.

Easier access to domestic workers would free up Japanese women to enter the labour force; a long-standing stated goal of the Abe government. However, the ease with which spouses of Japanese nationals can enter the country, and the willingness of rural municipalities to welcome foreign brides for their sons indicate that the government would rather domestic work remain the duty of housewives to provide as a 'saabisu' (service), that is, gratis. It makes cynical sense to prefer wives over workers because, to invert an equally cynical aphorism, why buy the milk - even at a discount - when you can get the cow for free?

The public will not change first either. Naoko frets that her son has not met a romantic partner yet, not that she can't get affordable home help, underscoring the assumption that it is more likely to find a daughter-in-law to take over household duties, than it would be for the government to modify immigration policy.

And so the government rests on the convenient belief that Japan cannot adapt to foreigners, despite its impressionable history, and despite evidence that direct experience with immigrants leads to tolerance as much as tolerance leads to immigration.

Attitude change may be inevitable. Even without direct access to foreign labour, Naoko must still come to terms with households run by foreigners: the ones that married her other children.