(2012-06-16, 4:15 pm)dizmox Wrote: Today I asked an experienced doctor from Japan about it. She said she's never seen or heard about a single foreign doctor there.
(2012-06-16, 1:01 am)kitakitsune Wrote: Even the foreign nurses have to get Japanese certifications after two (or three? )years in order to continue working and I think the current pass rate for those exams is under 1%...it's basically a racket to get ever rotating 2-3 years of near free labor.
These are the answers that I basically expected to hear, based on my experience on JET and reading about Japanese immigration policies on debito.org.
It seems like in Japan foreigners are welcome as English teachers, entertainment figures and sports figures. But breaking into the professions is a very different thing.
The irony is that as foreign language learners it's easy for us to assume that it's just about language, because that's our most pressing issue. But in fact it's not. For example, on debito.org a lot of long-term residents report that their haafu children, who are completely fluent in Japanese, encounter a lot of obstacles to launching successful careers due to their race.