Japan gets tough on visa violators
This appeared on the front page of today's San Francisco Chronicle:
1-day overstay can bring time in cell, 5-year banishment
by Catherine Makino, Chronicle Foreign Service
"Tokyo - When Bay Area students Angela Luna and Richard Nishizawa tried to board a plane bound for San Francisco in March, airport authorities threw them in a small holding cell and held them incommunicado for several days before banishing them from Japan for five years.
Luna and Nishizawa, who had studied Japanese for a year at Reitaku University about 20 miles northeast of Tokyo, were not arrested for committing a serious crime. They had merely stayed in the country two weeks longer than their visas permitted.
"We had valid 5-year visas, so we didn't bother to look at our immigration stamps," Luna, 27, said by telephone from her home in Lafayette. "The guards made me change my clothes because they had drawstrings. They thought I might use it as a weapon, or strangle someone. We were treated like criminals."
Nishizawa, 31 who lives in Martinez, says he was handcuffed, strip searched, placed in a 20-by-20 foot cell with four other foreigners and given a mat to sleep on.
The Justice Ministry argues that the crackdown is warranted because some 220,000 foreigners violated their visas last year....Tatsuro Kitazono, an immigration officer in Tokyo, says the crackdown is linked to a 17 percent jump in crime by foreigners in the past year. In 2003, police say foreigners committed 40,615 criminal acts - mostly theft, fraud and forgery...."
Be careful out there.
SF'd Gaijin
