Photo/Illutration Dinner at a group home for children in Mie Prefecture in January includes Korean dishes and mango jelly. Children as young as 2 up to high school age are registered. Some have mixed ancestry from South America and Southeast Asia. (Mari Fujisaki)

Nearly 4 percent of children living in group homes for youngsters across Japan have at least one parent with foreign roots, forcing staff members to confront issues they were not initially trained to handle, an Asahi Shimbun study shows.

The welfare ministry began a nationwide survey on children of foreign ancestry at children’s institutions last year due to a lack of official data on the subject.

In the study last autumn, The Asahi Shimbun sent questionnaires to about 600 homes for orphaned, neglected and abused children as well as 150 or so homes for infants up to the age of 1 to ascertain problems that arise due to nationality.

Valid responses were given by 60 percent of the facilities. Kayoko Ishii, a professor of sociology at Tokyo's Rikkyo University, assisted in analyzing the findings.

It emerged that 16,776 children were registered in about 450 such institutions as of Oct. 1.

Of that figure, both or one of the parents of 637 children had foreign nationality, accounting for 3.8 percent of the total.

Twenty-four of the 637 children were stateless or in limbo with regard to their nationality. The study found that there were more than 30 such cases in the past.

The ratio of children with mixed parentage was higher at facilities in urban centers in the Kanto, Chubu and Kansai regions than those in other regions.

At a home in Kawasaki, 10 of the 27 children had at least one parent who is not Japanese, making it the facility with the nation's highest ratio of such children.

The study revealed that the number of mixed parentage children is rising even in local regions. One facility in the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan responded that a child in this category had recently become its first case.

Respondents in the study voiced concerns about their ability to communicate with children with overseas roots.

“Since we are a small facility, we cannot meet their needs,” one facility responded. “Some children have difficulty communicating with their parents,” said another.

Stateless children are required to gain resident status to remain in Japan, a procedure that staff workers are unaccustomed to dealing with.

Several institutions complained about the “troublesome process of renewing the status” and “not very helpful civil servants at their local governments” in the study.

Staff at the institutions and child welfare centers said children of foreign ancestry are steadily increasing in tandem with the rise in recent years of workers from overseas.

A child welfare center in Tsu, Mie Prefecture, said its staff were expected to respond in Portuguese and Spanish due to the area's large community of Brazilians and Peruvians of Japanese ancestry.

Reflecting the increased diversity in the foreign population, staff members also need some knowledge of Chinese and Vietnamese to care for the children.

The study also found that staff members need to be aware of children’s religious backgrounds, an issue cited by the head of a facility in Mie Prefecture.

Some children can only have halal meals for religious reasons.

“Preparing such meals three times a day is not easy in the countryside,” the head said, reporting what he had been told by staff members at other facilities.

The Justice Ministry reports that the number of stateless children up to the age of 4 is increasing due in part to a rise in the number of foreign workers in Japan.

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