I have been following a bit the story of Jerrod Lentz, who was featured on MSNBC last month, as someone who had left Tokyo after the big earthquake.
On the above YouTube clip, Lentz explained on March 16th that the company that runs Tokyo SeaWorld and Disneyland, OLC, had given employees the option of going home permanently, or temporarily. Lentz chose temporarily, and so returned to Hershey, Pennsylvania (right west of me a bit, in another county.) This month, he went back to Tokyo.
You can hardly consider Lentz to be Flyjin, since his company was shutting down for a stretch. If the job disappears–and it isn’t even in your real country–then what are you supposed to do?
Debito today has a post up about how one Japanese newspaper is blaming the shutdown of Tokyo Disneyland on foreigners, not because of power outages. But it seems to me that there must be a number of dedicated workers at Disney who are willing to make a go of it, and this is obvious from even a few days after the disaster.
[P.S. It’s likely that Mr. Lentz is keiyaku sha’in, or contract worker, not sei sha’in or permanent (or regular) employee. In Japan, the contract for a keiyaku sha’in worker binds both the employer and the employee. So if you watch the whole You Tube video, as I did, you see that management is basically saying, in so many words, that they are allowing people to break the contract without there being repercussions.
It may well be that at the time, Disneyland couldn’t function because of the rolling blackouts. But still, Disneyland had the right to these employees’ labor.]
[Update: H/T to Debito, added for effect:
Good. Might as well leave and decided later if want to return. Blaming the gaijin? Who gives a damn? If Debito wants to spend his life banging his head against a brick wall and getting upset at the pitfalls of being an “NJ” in Japan the best luck to him.
I don’t see Debito as controversial, and the rights and protection of NJ are his thing. You wouldn’t tell the ACLU to quit defending American freedom just because they keep emphasizing places and people that obstruct it.
I don’t think there were a lot of Flyjin. In places where the media is making like there were, if people want to say, no, there weren’t, that’s a good thing.
I don`t think Debito is controversial. I doubt the Japanese give a hoot what he thinks and many gaijins probably couldn`t care one way or the other. What I`ve always found strange is why become a citizen in a country which one clearly has many issues with. It`s as if he gets off on the drama while at the same time is upset because he`s not gotten the proper respect he feels he deserved.
There is a whole story to his taking Japanese citizenship. He does more for Americans in Japan than most Americans.
—-There is a whole story to his taking Japanese citizenship.—-
Right I watch one of his podcast where he was speaking at a university. He applied for J-citizenship not long after he was refused entry into the public bath. Debito could sense what the audience was thinking, “You mean you became a J-citizen to prove a point. To get into a bath house?” and so he went on to said he became Japanese because he wanted to get a loan to buy a house and that he`d been in Japan ten years and this was home. So it made sense right?
Sorry but no it didn`t make sense.
I`ll bet the audience felt the same as I did which was this buisess of becoming “Japanese” wasn`t about getting a loan or wanting to live in Japan forever. It was more about being refused entry into the public bath and returning a year later to again demand entry but this time armed with a J-passport.
You do realise the source of this article has a bit of a credibility issue, right?
Like the time they reported the existence of a kappa?
They were severely punked by NTV but you’d think they’d at least TRY to investigate the story rather than run a front page headline claiming the discovery….
Stop twisting the truth and report the article as really being from a tabloid with at least a translation of what the article is about.
. . . from the guy the other day who felt that Reconstruction was too strong on the Confederate South.
My understanding of the employment situation at TDL leads me to a different conclusion:
I was told recently by an insider that TDL dancers fall into the following 2 categories:
1) Japanese – are all day workers. Paid daily. Very easy to fire – just don’t have them back the next day.
2) Foreigners – 3 month contracts. Apparently this has something to do with immigration rules?
On the day of the earthquake/tsunami, TDL became an island – I believe this was covered on the news. People were trapped for days. Given the ‘temporary worker’ status of the foreigner dancers, and assuming they had no income to stick around for, I think leaving (to return later) was a natural choice.
These people never “made Japan their home” in the first place, did they?
* I always get a kick out of anti-Debito comments. Why one guy who took Japanese citizenship ignites such hostility among otherwise calm people always amazes me.
Ken44: Try to think positive, and assume others’ intentions are basically good. It will make you a lot more fun to hang with, brother.
Mr. Jenkins, thanks for your comments.
I didn’t know the specifics of the employment relationships at Tokyo Disneyland, but what you say sounds about right. The Japanese, then, are not really “employees” . This makes no sense, but I am sure someone has created an elaborate justification for why they are not sei sha’in. It could be that they are dispatch workers from another company, who are allegedly sent to TDL (or any other company, but frankly, always it’s TDL). It would be hard to say the individual workers were “gyomu itaku” (independent contractors), since TDL clearly has to control that kind of work. It’s a brand service of Walt Disney; you can’t just have people coming in and doing their own thing.
It is curious that the foreigners are under 3-month labor contracts. An entertainer visa can go for 3-months, and I wonder if that’s somehow connected. They work three months at a time, and if the contract is up, no more work and no more visa. The folks that they want around get a longer visa, maybe, but same 3-month contract.
I am also surprised about how some few people get all worked up about Debito. One small group to the extent that they set up a negative website. I have been using the internet to blog since 2003, so I have seen all different examples of weird behavior out of people who don’t want you to use the internet. In 2003, they could make the justification that bloggers were the eccentrics. Now, with Facebook and other microblogging, the majority of people doing this puts those who don’t use the technology in their own category. So I really don’t know what much else to say about the critics, either way.