Japan's greeting to foreign arrivals: fingerprinting and photographing

TOKYO — The kind of greeting a foreigner receives at immigration upon arrival at an international airport can be a good, if imperfect, indication of the country that waits on the other side of the barrier.

London's Heathrow? Long queues and lousy service.

New Delhi's Indira Gandhi International? Crumbling infrastructure and over-the-top bureaucracy.

Some Middle Eastern airports? Slow-moving lines that can be circumvented with the right connections and cash.

Now the Japanese government has created new immigration procedures for foreign visitors that critics say are all too revealing about official attitudes toward foreigners.

On Tuesday, Japan will begin fingerprinting and photographing non-Japanese travelers as they pass through immigration at air and sea ports. The government says the controls are a necessary security measure aimed at preventing a terrorist attack in Japan.

The new system is modeled on the U.S. program instituted in 2003 that requires most travelers coming to the United States to provide fingerprints and facial photos when they apply for visas. But the Japanese system goes further by requiring foreign residents — in addition to visitors — to be photographed and fingerprinted.

There are exceptions: diplomats, children younger than 16, U.S. military personnel serving in Japan, and long-term residents of Korean and Chinese descent whose presence in the country largely is owed to Imperial Japan's overseas conquests. But all other foreigners will be scanned each time upon entry.

Critics say the data collection is a dubious terrorism-fighting measure, instead reflecting the government's desire for closer surveillance of foreigners.

"The Japanese government has a long history of not wanting long-term foreign residents, and they really feel they need more control over foreigners," said Sonoko Kawakami, of the Japanese chapter of Amnesty International. "The government just wants to gather as much information as possible on people."

The only terrorist spectaculars in Japanese history have come from homegrown groups: Japanese Red Army radical leftists in the 1970s and '80s, and the Aum Shinrikyo religious fringe, which carried out the sarin-gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995.

But officials say Tokyo's support for the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan makes Japan a target, and taking so-called "biometric data" such as fingerprints and digital facial photos is the only way to nab terrorists traveling on fake passports.

At least that has been the contention of Japan's justice minister. He even offered a bizarre personal anecdote to explain how easy it was for non-Japanese to sneak into the country. "A friend of my friend is a member of al-Qaida," Kunio Hatoyama told foreign reporters in Tokyo, saying that the man had entered Japan numerous times using fake passports and disguises.

Hatoyama later backtracked slightly on his story, distancing himself from his connection to al-Qaida and raising suspicions that he had embellished his anecdote to press the case for fingerprinting foreigners. But the justice minister has long been among those senior public officials who believe Japan is too open to overseas workers. When he became justice minister in August, Hatoyama made clear he had no intention of proceeding with earlier plans to open the doors to more unskilled workers.

That, he warned, could lead to an increase in crime.

Statistics, however, show that crimes committed by foreign visitors are falling. And despite alarm about particularly sensational crimes that attract media attention, Japan's overall crime rate is declining or flat.

That hasn't stopped some senior Japanese politicians from stoking anti-immigrant fires by claiming that foreigners living in Japan are committing a higher proportion of crimes, sending bureaucrats in search of ways to weed out the "good" foreigners, presumably those with money to invest, from "bad" ones, such as the Chinese pickpocket gangs that get so much media attention here.

The new immigration system appears to be one answer. Fingerprinting is actually a resumption of a system that was abandoned in 2000 after strong protests by long-term Korean, Chinese and Taiwanese residents who resented being fingerprinted in their own country. A jittery, post-Sept. 11 America provided the initiative for the Japanese to revive it.

The law instituting the new regime passed Parliament last year with little outcry. The Federation of Japanese Bar Associations was a lonely critical voice, complaining that fingerprinting people who had been granted residency was an infringement on civil liberties. But the government avoided a repeat showdown with the Koreans and Chinese by exempting them from the new requirements.

The fingerprinting issue underscores the Japanese dilemma in dealing with foreigners. In this age of increased global mobility, the threat of terrorism, while remote, is plausible.

But the Japanese government needs more foreigners. Japan has low unemployment by global standards and faces a demographic crunch as its population ages and work force shrinks.

And Japan still is searching for ways to address its tourist deficit at a time when well-heeled travelers have a widening array of Asian destination choices.