Those Chinese And Their Fake Marriages

[Mulboyne]

The Asahi has a couple of articles on the Chinese community in Japan. This is the first:

Asahi: Fake marriages helping Chinese to 'sneak' into Japan
When a Chinese ramen shop operator in Tokyo was asked by a shop employee to marry her cousin in China, a woman he had never met, the decision was easy. He accepted the proposal so the cousin could live and work in Japan. Expecting his own permanent resident status to be granted soon, he figured the suggested payoff for the fake marriage--3.2 million yen--was satisfactory. "The payment is about the going rate. It's not a bad offer," he recalled thinking. Fake marriages used to be arranged mostly by Japanese and Chinese brokers linked to underground criminal organizations. As the Chinese community here has expanded, however, it is not uncommon for acquaintances to make their own deals, like the one at the ramen shop. "Their sense of guilt is less because of the lack of organizational involvement," said Norie Iwai, who operates the Asia Pacific International Administrative Solicitor's Office in Tokyo and is knowledgeable about the Chinese community. "Black is not always black, and white is not always white," the ramen shop operator said. "In a real marriage, too, gift money between families changes hands, doesn't it?"...more...

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[Mulboyne]

Continued

The man, in his 20s, came to Japan from China's Liaoning province at age 11. His father came here to work as a cook. When he obtains his permanent resident status, his wife will be treated just like the spouse of a Japanese national under the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law. It will enable the wife to work in Japan without restrictions on the line of work or work hours otherwise imposed on foreign nationals. The marriage would also pave the way for her to eventually obtain Japanese nationality. Registering a fake marriage is a criminal act, but the man's interpretation is different. "It's 'white' because it wouldn't give trouble to anyone," he says.

A sense of guilt wasn't much of a factor, either, when a woman from China arranged a fake marriage and a fake paternity acknowledgment between Chinese women and Japanese men. The 35-year-old woman broke down when the Tokyo District Court sentenced her to a year in prison in May for her role in the scam. In an interview at the Tokyo Detention House later, she asked: "Did I commit such a serious crime?" The woman was brought up in an affluent family in Inner Mongolia. Her parents both teach at a university and her brother is a businessman. Coming to Japan in 2000, she studied music education at Tokyo Gakugei University's graduate school. "She was a typical well-off girl," recalled a professor who taught her at the national university. "I certainly couldn't associate her with the image of a broker." The Chinese woman insists that falsifying marriage documents is not uncommon. "There were more fake marriages than real couples around me," she said.

Her downfall started within a network of acquaintances. One day she met a Japanese man in his 50s at a friend's home. She asked him to marry a Chinese woman who was living with her at the time. He readily accepted. She learned the required procedures from the Internet and administrative scriveners. She said it was easy. She said she was happy she was helping others and got some money, too. She felt as if she could do "anything." About a year after her arrest in October 2008, the woman finally began to acknowledge what she did was wrong, saying it was "an act that deprived the Japanese of their sense of security." After she expressed remorse for her crime, the Tokyo High Court on Oct. 7 handed her an 18-month prison sentence, suspended for five years. A Chinese friend who visited her in detention several times points to differences in values between Japanese and Chinese. "In China, people try to be of help to their family members or friends even if they have to go somewhat overboard or cheat others," he said. "They may go so far as to commit a crime in Japan because they are not aware that such values are not shared here."

A 38-year-old woman works at a snack bar in eastern Tokyo. A fake marriage also got her into the country. She calls herself Mika. She came from Shanghai after divorcing her husband, a restaurant operator. Her sister in China takes care of her son. She says she wanted to earn money so her son, who now attends a private school in Shanghai, can study in the United States. "Even though Shanghai has become an affluent city, there are not many jobs that pay a divorced woman past 30 enough to afford (her son's expenses)," she said. She said she didn't hesitate to accept a fake marriage arrangement offered by a relative in Japan. She pays 50,000 yen a month to her Japanese "husband" in his 40s. She also pays his resident taxes, afraid that their true relationship could be compromised if he were to fall into arrears with the tax authorities. Surviving on only 10,000 yen in food costs a month, she sends 170,000 yen to China. She justified her actions by reasoning that the arrangement could be condoned as "I am working hard for my son."

Fake relationships are not limited to marriages. Some take advantage of the paternity provision of the Nationality Law to get Japanese nationality for their children. As parents, this can improve their legal status in Japan, too. A 29-year-old woman from Heilongjiang province is one of them. She was also involved in a fake marriage, but was "divorced." She was working here to pay for her ailing father's medical care in China. But her visa was about to expire and she was pregnant. The father was Chinese. She had lost contact with the man and didn't know where he was. Then her part-time work colleague offered a tip about Japanese paternity. She visited a ward office in Tokyo last fall and said she was going to have a baby by a Japanese father. A Chinese-speaking clerk explained the legal procedure for paternity recognition for a child born out of wedlock. She also learned there would be no DNA test. Her friend from China introduced a 45-year-old Japanese man with a lot of debt. He agreed to acknowledge the false paternity for 1 million yen. The woman's baby, a girl, was born in November 2008. The baby automatically received Japanese nationality and, as the mother, the woman gained the right to stay in Japan, as well.

Law enforcement authorities consider these fake arrangements part of the "infrastructure" for illegal entry and criminal activities. In 2007 and 2008, police acted on 97 and 139 cases of fake marriages, respectively, arresting or referring to prosecutors 375 and 416 people. The largest group was Japanese. Of the foreign nationals, Chinese were at the top, 114 people in 49 cases in the two years. Similarly, of 18 people caught for fake paternity registration in the first half of this year, Chinese came second with five, only after six Peruvians.