Every year thousands of foreign officials come to Tokyo to learn about all the little engineering dynamics of waste disposal. Now, don't get me wrong -- the Japanese have done very well at that, as they should, and as they really do need to.
But they've ignored something else that the Japanese could teach them: HOW TO SOLVE AN ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION PROBLEM.
When I first got to living in Japan, I noticed that seemingly every popular street corner that I went to meet friends, nearby there was an inevitable cluth of Iranians selling counterfeit phone cards (for the uninitiated, those are cards that enable you to make phone calls from public phones without the need to carry around a lot of change). They would stare, and leer, and jabber away in their very different-sounding language.
On and on they came. There were scads of them. Huge crowds of dangerous, quite obviously middle eastern men with no obviously legitimate way of earning a living. They were all over the place. If you'd go to Yoyogi Park in Harajuku on the weekend, you'd have thought you were in a Kazbah, and not in the middle of Asia.
Zip, zip, zip --that was the sound they'd prominently make, raking the stacks of counterfeit cars past their fingertips, like a flashy Las Vegas casino dealer. It was marketing. At other times, they would loudly call out what they were selling.
And it wasn't just cards. It was coccaine they were selling, and other drugs, too, as well, many times. They were doing all kinds of things in law-abiding, mostly mono-racial Japan that would earn them a death sentence in their own country.
I can remember the case of one Iranian fellow who raped 5 Japanese girls in his appartment, one right after another. They thought they would be killed if they didn't cooperate.
But years later, poof -- they're gone.
There's all kinds of freeps who will say, "Well, gaijin, that's cuz the Japanese bubble burst, and when the getting wasn't as good, they just went home."
But our bubble goes poof and they STAYED.
Why?
How did they solve their foreigner problem?
Nobody's asking a great question, and the Japanese probably don't want to get asked that.