Preparations for the March in March will begin in January in order to meet our goal of tripling last year’s attendance. Tell your friends, neighbours, drinking buddies, even your boss, to be in Shinjuku on March 5th at 1:30pm, ready to make a lot of noise. Next time you are in Shimbashi, drop by the Nambu office and pick up some flyers to distribute at your workplace or any gathering spots for foreigners that you know. If you live far away, send us an email with your postal address, and we’ll send you some flyers by post.

Thank you all for your hard work in 2005.
Enjoy the holidays, have a Happy New Year, and we’ll see you in 2006.

Many thanks to Nambu members who made it all the way out to Chitosekarasuyama at 7:40am on Christmas Eve to protest the non-renewal of a member at Kosei Gakuen Girls High School. The high school has only one entrance, which made it very easy to hand out leaflets to the students as they arrived. The student population is about 500, and we handed out over 400 leaflets, so the majority of the girls, and their parents, will now be aware of the administration’s arbitrary approach to hiring and firing.

A record high 198,380 foreigners were working in Japan as of June 1, up 10.2 percent from a year earlier, according to a recent survey by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry.

A total of 144,891 were indirectly-employed workers, including temporary or contract staff, an increase of 9.4 percent, the ministry said.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20051224a8.htm

The Supreme Court on Friday ruled that a public housing corporation should return the deposit it seized from a tenant to cover repairs in an apartment from normal wear and tear.

http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/national/news/20051216p2a00m0na021000c.html

Sunday, January 15, at 13:00, at the Shimbashi Fukushi Kaikan in Shimbashi (This is about two blocks from Nambu, so if you come to the office first, there will be an English map available there). On the agenda: planning for the MARCH in MARCH (Sunday, March 5, 2006). We are aiming to double, if not triple, last year’s attendance, so bring your organizational ideas, and be prepared to go home with an armful of flyers to distribute to all and sundry.

Maps:

http://www.ysd-jp.org/maps/shinbashi.html
Google Local (Japanese)

NCED - the National Coalition for Equality and Diversity - a network of unions and anti-discrimination activists who have joined forces to fight unfair discrimination in the workplace, in the housing market, at the onsens - wherever we find it - was established at the 5 Unions meeting held on December 4th at Nambu. This coalition links activists from Hokkaido to Kyushu, with members in Nagano, Iwate, Nagoya, Osaka, and the Tokyo area, and will enable us to organize events such as the March in March on a nation-wide scale, as well as to coordinate efforts to fight discrimination through the courts and other venues.