Ally yourself with zainichi Koreans and others and fight for full national voting rights. Zainich Koreans and other advocates of residents' rights have already made progress in municipal voting rights and raised political consciousness of people, so this is an issue that has legs, besides the fact that it will become a more and more important issue everywhere in the age of global migration.
<blockquote>There are about 635,000 ethnic Koreans who are permanent residents of Japan, born in Korea or the children of Koreans brought to Japan during Japan's 35-year occupation of the Korean peninsula between 1910 to 1945. In May 2000, the three-party governing coalition submitted a bill granting long-term Korean residents local voting rights. Korea, which advocates voting rights for Koreans in Japan, enacted legislation in 2000 to extend local voting rights to permanent foreign residents by 2002 in Korea.
Opposition to the bill has increased in Japan, with conservatives arguing that giving Koreans who do not become Japanese citizens the right to vote would increase pressure to give the vote to more of the 1.6 million foreigners in Japan. In 1995, the Japanese Supreme Court ruled that Japan's 3,302 local and regional governments could grant foreigners local voting rights without violating the constitution, and 15 percent have done so. A federal law would extend local voting rights to the foreigners living in areas where local and regional governments have not been granted local voting rights.
According to a public opinion poll conducted in September by a national newspaper, 58 percent of the Japanese polled said they supported granting resident Koreans voting rights in municipal elections. <http://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/more.php?id=2242_0_3_0></blockquote>
Read this article also if you have access to it:
<blockquote>Asian Survey Posted online on December 2, 2003. (doi:10.1525/as.2003.43.3.527)
Foreigners' Rights in Japan: Beneficiaries to Participants
Yasuo Takao
This article examines the impact of Japanese local government's initiatives for promoting the protection of foreigners' rights. Evident in this study is the premise that local government is the single most important factor for promoting foreigners' rights in Japan.
<http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/abs/10.1525/as.2003.43.3.527></blockquote>
Aside from the voting rights issue, the author ably summarizes the extension of welfare laws to non-nationals that began in the 1980s.
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>