Chinese Woman With Japanese Citizenship Arrested For Not Carrying ID

[Mulboyne]

[floatl][/floatl]Yomiuri: Chinese-born Japanese wrongly held for not carrying passport
A Chinese-born woman with Japanese citizenship was wrongly arrested on suspicion of violating the Immigrant Control and Refugee Recognition Law by not carrying her passport with her in Tsurumi Ward, Yokohama, the Kanagawa prefectural police said Saturday. The 41-year old woman, who was born in Shanghai, came to Japan and married a Japanese man in 1999. She obtained Japanese citizenship in 2000. But the police station in Tsurumi Ward failed to go through the necessary procedures of inquiring the immigration authorities about her status before arresting her, the Kanagawa prefectural police's Foreign Affairs Division said. According to the prefectural police, the police station received a call Friday afternoon saying that the woman tried to steal a toothbrush worth 350 yen from a drugstore in the ward. The police then questioned the woman on a voluntary basis. The police officer who questioned her said he thought she must be a foreigner from the way she spoke and asked her to present her passport. As she told the officer that she had sent her Chinese passport back to Shanghai, the officer arrested her on suspicion of breaking the law. But after being arrested, she claimed she possessed a Japanese passport, so the police contacted the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau and were informed about her identity and her Japanese citizenship. She was released about five hours after the arrest.

It's worth noting that the Yomiuri reported this story, because the press could easily have ignored it. It also appeared in their Japanese edition as well as making it into the Nikkei and Mainichi. This suggests the media is increasingly alert to stories which show the implications of an increasing number of immigrants. They generally fault the police for getting it wrong but it may not be a slam dunk for the likes of Debito. The Mainichi suggests that the woman was uncooperative and may even have claimed at first to be Chinese, only later revealing she was Japanese. There's a hint that she may have been muddying the waters to clear herself from the shoplifting charge. If that allegation was actually without merit, then she was really having a bad day.

(N.B. I nicked the image above from Blah Pete's avatar)

[Cyka UchuuJin]

hmmm. i've been somewhat encouraged by friends to write to one of the media with the KIX debacle and i've resisted. after reading this though, i'm wondering if more attention shouldn't be drawn to what's going on lately.

[omae mona]

The Mainichi suggests that the woman was uncooperative and may even have claimed at first to be Chinese, only later revealing she was Japanese. There's a hint that she may have been muddying the waters to clear herself from the shoplifting charge. If that allegation was actually without merit, then she was really having a bad day.

I'd like to throw in a 3rd possibility: she was confused. I have actually talked to residents in Japan on several occasions that were confused to a degree about their own immigration status. I suspect that under the stress of being questioned by the police, she either was so frazzled that she couldn't simply say "I am Japanese", or she temporarily forgot that her citizenship protected her from immigration-related arrests.

It does sound like the shoplifting allegation was without merit; the toothbrush discussion was "voluntary", and I doubt the cops would have passed up a chance to charge her with two separate violations, if they thought it was valid.