Directions of Travel

"Sayonara" (Goodbye in Japanese) was a famous novel by James Michener, made into a film starring Marlon Brando. It tells of 2 American airmen who fall in love with Japanese women. Because of pressure by some American women they can't live together in the US if they marry. It ends with one couple committing suicide. In contrast to the UK, which had a lax approach to immigration until the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act, the US and Japan had very strict controls. President Johnson radically changed the US system in 1965. And Japan has been undergoing change. E.g., since 1983 foreign students have been allowed to work part-time; before then they couldn't. In 1977 I read in the Press the Conservatives' policy to stop foreign men using marriage to live in the UK would never succeed because it would be contested by the European Convention on Human Rights. I thought someone else would complain to the European Commission of Human Rights that foreign & Commonwealth men can live in the UK through marriage even though British men often cannot live in their countries through marriage. I didn't want to. But time passed & on 10 June, I did. There is nothing in the Convention about immigration. I cited Article 3, "cruel and inhuman treatment". My complaint was not investigated on the grounds I had not been the subject of a Government decision. This means, of course, that while everyone else in the world potentially has "rights" about living in the UK an Englishman doesn't. On 12 May 1982 (during the Falklands Conflict!) the ECHR determined in favour of 3 (non-British) women whose husbands weren't allowed to live in the UK. On 28 May 1985 the European Court of Human Rights endorsed this. In Japan the decision was taken in 1982 to allow foreign men to live & work in Japan through marriage. The law came into effect on 1 January 1985. Clearly Japan's activities in this area were in tandem with the Council of Europe's. Brexit shows that an enormous number of people in the UK are unhappy about immigration. Enabling people to have a choice of 2 countries in which to live does nothing to ease this unhappiness. On the contrary, the prospect of being able to live in 2 countries is an incentive for transnational marriages. So clearly applying pressure on Japan about this issue is counter-productive from a British perspective. Nor does it do any favour to Japan. The average Japanese woman has 1.4 babies. For many years, decades in fact, boys have substantially out-numbered girls....