Infrastructural Problems — Medical Care for Foreign Residents

Abstract

As the involvement of New Comers in Japanese society has been progressing continuously during the 1990s, the gap between the government’s treatment of them as temporary residents and their increasing preferences to settle in Japan as long-term residents has created a marked trend toward an increased incidence of social problems and concomitant costs. The main objective of this chapter, and of the following four chapters, is to investigate whether, and to what extent, foreign workers settle into Japanese society as ‘social beings’ and thus exert some influence on Japanese society. The longer the foreign workers stay in Japan, the more the impact of their economically driven migrations inevitably spills over into the social, cultural and political domains.