開催報告⑴　「居ること」の阻害を超えて～外国人支援の現場から～（英語版）

2023年2月18日（土）、東京経済大学にて、「第１７回全国若者・ひきこもり協同実践交流会in東京三多摩」が開催され、分科会「『居ること』の阻害を超えて～外国人支援の現場から～」が行われました。

当日は、30名を超える参加者の方々にお越し頂きました。とくに、大学生、高校生の参加が多かったのが、印象的でした。

本記事では、２回にわたって、当日の模様をお伝えます。執筆は、上智大学の大学一年生、橋本果奈さんです。
分科会のテーマの特性をふまえ、この問題を広く知っていただくために、英語版と日本語版の２つを準備しました。日本語版も、追って公開しますので、ご期待ください。

February 18th, at the Tokyo Keizai University, gave birth to the beginning of an era, an era of citizens educating one another to empower the society into one that is fairly democratic and peaceful.

The first speaker was Miss Tanaka, an individual from an organization called YSC, a nonprofit language school for foreigners in Japan. She first starts to explain that yes, refugee acceptance rates and foreigner acceptance culture is low compared to other highly developed nations, but a wide view of statistics regarding refugee and immigrant acceptance rate since the 90s in Japan may promote an otherwise optimistic journey for the onwards. The graph depicts an upward right facing line, showing a slow but steady increase in the population of foreigners in Japan. Not only that, she leads us to a list of policy changes and implementations that could show efforts from the government side in accepting more foreigners under conditions such as the 2018 implementation of “specified skilled worker” in response to the circumstance of the serious labor shortages in japan, “comprehensive Measures for the Acceptance and Coexistence of Foreign Human Resources” enacted in 2018, "Japanese Language Education Promotion Act" which made it an obligation for the people of japan to educate Japanese to foreigners in need, set forward in 2019, and so on. She highlights that Japan is surely becoming a more diversified nation, with around 3 million foreigners currently registered to be living in Japan through different permits, with an expectation of 12% of the full population to be of diverse backgrounds in the year 2065. She ended her speech by voicing that not only should we aim for a diverse society through policies and systematical approaches, but as citizens, we must be wise and courageous enough to voice out any inequalities that may arise from a lack of respect for diversity in society.