Demographics and Distribution
Iranians in Japan reside mostly in the Greater Tokyo Area; 79% of legal Iranian residents are registered in the Kantō region, with 1,464 in Tokyo itself, 798 in Kanagawa, 740 in Chiba, 701 in Saitama, 472 in Ibaraki, 387 in Gunma, and 352 in Tochigi. A further 6% can be found in the Chūkyō Metropolitan Area, with 255 in Aichi, 72 in Mie, and 62 in Gifu; the others are scattered throughout the rest of the country in small numbers. 2,191 hold permanent residency visas, 195 are international students, and 2,858 hold short-term traineeship or employment visas, while the remainder of legal residents hold other kinds of visas. Iranians used to form Japan's largest population of illegal immigrants, with an estimated peak of 32,994 individuals in 1992 (based on cumulative analysis of entrance statistics), but due to aggressive deportations, that number fell by over 82% to just 5,821 in 2000.
Like other labour migrants from Muslim countries, most Iranians in Japan are middle-aged; 76% are between 30 and 40 years old, while only 6% are younger than 20 and less than 3% are older than 50. The overwhelming majority are male; most were single, in their 20s or 30s, and had never travelled abroad before at the time of their migration, and even the married ones typically came unaccompanied by family members. Most were urban residents in Iran prior to their migration; many came from the same neighbourhoods of southern Tehran. Both Persian-speakers and speakers of Turkic languages are represented among migrants. Iranian migrants to Japan were less educated compared to other Muslim groups, such as Bangladeshis; less than 2% of one sample of 120 former Iranian migrants in Japan who had returned to Iran had any university or college education; 73.1% had terminated their education at the pre-tertiary level. While in Japan, they remitted an average of US$712/month. Most worked in the construction industry; after the bursting of the bubble decreased opportunities for this kind of work, many became itinerant vendors near train stations; they became especially well-known and often stereotyped for selling illegal telephone cards.
Read more about this topic: Iranians In Japan
Famous quotes containing the word distribution:
“The question for the country now is how to secure a more equal distribution of property among the people. There can be no republican institutions with vast masses of property permanently in a few hands, and large masses of voters without property.... Let no man get by inheritance, or by will, more than will produce at four per cent interest an income ... of fifteen thousand dollars] per year, or an estate of five hundred thousand dollars.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)