Japanese convenience store chain FamilyMart and other retailers are pulling copies of a book on ‘foreigner crime’ from their shelves after a wave of complaints, the stores said on Monday.
The front cover of ‘Shocking Foreigner Crime: The Undercover File’, published in Japanese, features caricatures of non-Japanese, alongside the question: ‘Is it all right to let foreigners devastate Japan?’

‘We are removing the book from our shelves today,’ said Takehiko Kigure of FamilyMart Co.’s public relations department.

‘We had complaints from customers, and when we checked the content of the magazine, we found that it contained some inappropriate language,’ he added.

Inside the glossy magazine-style book, photographs and illustrations show what the editors say are non-Japanese engaged in criminal or reprehensible behaviour.

‘We wanted to take this up as a contemporary problem,’ said Shigeki Saka of Tokyo-based publishers Eichi, which also publishes magazines on popular US and South Korean television dramas. ‘I think it would be good if this becomes a chance to broaden the debate,’ he added.

One caption in the magazine refers to a black man as ‘nigger.’

‘This is not a racist book, because it is based on established fact,’ Saka said. ‘If we wanted to be racist, we could write it in a much more racist way,’ he added, saying that the word ‘nigger’ was not considered offensive in Japan.

Details of well-known past crimes committed by foreigners are also given, such as last year’s kidnapping of the daughter of a wealthy plastic surgeon by a group including South Koreans and Chinese, and the 2003 murder of a family of four on the southern island of Kyushu by Chinese citizens.

The number of registered foreigners in Japan has swelled to more than two million, or 1.57 percent of the population, and some commentators recommend the country accept more immigrants to shore up its ageing and shrinking workforce.

Some in Japan, where crime rates are extremely low compared with Europe and the United States, are concerned about a possible increase in crime associated with an influx of foreigners, but mainstream media have not focussed on the issue in recent months.

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One-third of major firms in Japan employ workers who are putting in 100 hours or more of overtime work a month, a survey by the Central Labor Relations Commission has found.

The survey, which comes as the government is pushing for the introduction of a “white-collar exemption” system to exempt salaried workers from regular working hours and abolish overtime pay, puts the spotlight on long working hours at Japanese companies.

The commission conducts surveys on wages every year. Every other year, it conducts surveys on the amount of time employees spend working. The latest survey, conducted in 2006, is the first to ask companies if any of their employees are doing 100 hours or more of overtime work each month.

Questioned in the survey were 373 firms employing 1,000 or more workers and having capital of at least 500 million yen. Responses were received from 247 firms.

The results showed that as of June 2006, a total of 33.2 percent of firms employed at least one worker who put in 100 hours or more of overtime each month. The average amount of time each worker put in a year, excluding overtime, stood at 1,881 hours, 54 minutes — a figure that remained practically unchanged compared with the previous survey.

The average wage revision resulting from regular wage hikes and raises reached 6,275 yen, an increase of 280 yen compared with the previous year. The average monthly wage fell 1,500 yen compared with the previous survey to 377,300 yen. However, monthly overtime pay rose 6,300 yen to hit 69,500 yen.

Workers who do 80 hours or more of overtime a month are considered to be at risk of dying from overwork. A standard for paying workers’ compensation due to death from overwork is acknowledging that the worker has performed 100 hours or more of overtime in the month immediately prior to his or her death. Performing 80 hours or more over overtime a month is accepted as a standard for diagnosing depression caused by excessive work.

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