On June 6, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper ran a feature on Japanese people's attitudes to non-Japanese colleagues at their places of work. The article included the results of a survey that explored those attitudes.
That survey illustrates some vital points about the way the Japanese relate to people of other nationalities living and working in Japan in 2010. But, before I get to these, let's look at the figures.
Of the firms polled in the wide-ranging survey, 34 percent reported having non-Japanese employees. The Japanese employees of those companies were asked: Do you consider the presence of non-Japanese employees a positive or a negative element for yourself?