Deported to the Philippines for Delinquency

I learned from Maria that she lost her father in 1990 and came to Japan on an entertainer visa to help support her mother, her two younger sisters, and a younger brother. Her two sisters attended college on her remittances from Japan. She worked initially in Japan at a Philippine bar and bore a son with a Japanese man that she met there. The man was in his 50s, and the two didn’t marry. Maria overstayed her visa and returned to the Philippines. When her son was two, she left him with a younger sister and traveled to Japan again. She found work at another bar and entered a relationship with a Japanese man employed as a construction worker.

Her partner’s mother, however, was opposed to their getting married, and she again ended up without legal residency qualifications. But the couple launched a business with her savings and entered a life of round-the-clock work.

Maria and her partner married when she became pregnant, at the age of 37, with her second son. She obtained a visa as the spouse of a Japanese and brought her first son, then 11, to Japan. Maria enrolled him in a junior high school, but he fell in with a crowd of local delinquents, ran away from home repeatedly, and was apprehended time and again for shoplifting and other misdemeanors. Maria would lose touch with the boy for extended periods, only to learn of his whereabouts via the police.

At the age of 17, Maria’s elder son fathered a child but fell out with the mother. An arrest for shoplifting earned him deportation to the Philippines just as his visa was up for renewal. Maria was also in the Philippines at that time with her second son. The business she had undertaken with her husband had collapsed in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008, and her husband had suggested enrolling the younger son in school in the Philippines to learn English. Maria opened a beauty parlor with her savings from Japan, and she put her older son to work in the business.

After five years of a back-and-forth existence between Japan and the Philippines, Maria returned to Japan with her younger son in 2014. She was eager for the boy to retain what he had learned of the Japanese language and Japanese customs. No sooner had she returned, however, than the recurrent violence inflicted by her husband prompted her to seek a divorce.

The Trauma of Witnessing Violence Against His Mother

Maria’s husband, I learned, had physically abused her daily for as long as they had been together. When the violence resumed on her returning to Japan, Maria’s 10-year-old son urged her to leave the man. His urging proved decisive. Maria’s elder son had also been eager for her to leave her violent husband. He had been appalled at the daily violence against his mother that he had witnessed on joining the couple, and he, too, had suffered beatings from his de facto stepfather.

Maria had not protected her sons from her husband’s wrath and had even raised her hands against them herself in the family’s apartment. Her suffering at the hands of her husband left her with little patience for any disobedience from the boys.

“My sister who cared for my older boy in the Philippines says that he was always friendly and straightforward with everyone there,” reported Maria. But the boy felt uncomfortable and out of place in his own home, and his reaction to the continuing violence was to shut out his family members. The people to whom he ultimately gave himself over were a local band of delinquents. Maria sensed the problem, but she had no one to turn to for help.

“People in the Philippines think that getting married to a Japanese means a life of happiness,” sighed Maria. “I didn’t have the heart to tell my mother or my sisters what I was going through.” Nor did Maria discuss her problems with her Filipina acquaintances in the neighborhood. They all had the same kinds of problems, and they preferred to talk about more pleasant subjects when they got together.

Kids Who Can’t Speak for Themselves

Violence begets violence, robbing both victim and perpetrator of self-esteem and engendering mutual feelings of shame. Victims frequently lack or lose the ability to interact with others and withdraw from the world. More often than not, those who have wrought appalling violence are individuals who have suffered or witnessed domestic violence. The ringleader in Ryōta’s murder reportedly waited outside the home whenever his parents started quarreling until the argument subsided.

Domestic violence is distressingly common between Japanese husbands and wives from other Asian nations. A lot of those men are blue-collar workers or substantially older than their brides, and a lot of them are social misfits. They tend to be from home environments where women are not regarded or treated as equals of men. Thus we find marriages infused with Japanese prejudice toward other Asians and with male contempt for women.

The relationships between husbands and wives affect, of course, the commitment to child rearing. They affect, too, the children’s acquisition of Japanese-language skills and of self-expression capabilities in general. Some children born to foreign mothers and raised in Japan might appear to be entirely fluent in Japanese, but even they require careful support in their language skills development.

Japanese men often do not take part actively in child rearing and the Japanese husbands of Filipina brides rarely speak Tagalog or English, so they ordinarily speak to their wives in Japanese. The wives, meanwhile, are rarely fluent in Japanese and are hardly in a position to help their children build vocabulary in that language.

On entering school, the children typically have a hard time keeping up with the schoolwork because of difficulty understanding what the teachers are saying. They tend to be reticent to discuss their problems frankly with their mothers. As for the teachers and the school administrators, they are prone to blame the students’ poor performance on insufficient effort or on a basic lack of aptitude. Few of them take the trouble to examine the possible role of home environment in the students’ academic performance.

The problems described above figured consistently in the stories of the children of Filipina mothers and Japanese fathers with whom I talked. One male child had closeted himself in his family’s apartment after finishing junior high school, refusing to engage with other people. He had never been able to express his innermost feelings in Japanese and had lost the ability to come to terms with his feelings even on his own. The young man had wanted to get a job but couldn’t stand the thought of dealing with people. He developed severe anxiety and, one day, erupted suddenly into violence.

Like Maria’s sons, the young man had seen his mother suffer violence repeatedly at the hands of her husband. He had succumbed to self-contempt on account of his inability to protect her. And he had suppressed the rage that he felt toward his father. The young man recalled experiencing discrimination at school, starting in elementary school. But he retained no memory of whatever had triggered his outburst of violence. He continues to agonize over his inability to verbalize his experiences.

Another young person with whom I talked was born in the Philippines. His mother divorced and moved with her then two-year-old son to Japan, where she married a Japanese man. The son described suffering violence inflicted by his stepfather and by members of the stepfather’s family. His mother was unable to prevent the violence, and the boy found himself unable to tell his mother about the bullying that he experienced at school.

The young Filipino engaged in serious delinquency in junior high school, but he got his life in order and completed high school. Now 24, he is holding down a job as a construction equipment operator. The young man evinced confidence in his skills with the construction equipment, but he confided to me that he struggles daily to conceal a consuming rage that lurks within. I asked him about the target of his anger, but he was unable to answer precisely.