TOKYO, Jan. 3, 2023—Over the past three decades, young foreigners aspiring to learn Japanese technologies and skills as trainees arrived by tens of thousands annually to be hired by Japanese companies pinched by low-skill worker shortages. Most early generations of trainees returned home as happy pros teaching what they had learned in Japan to their home country employers and for starting their own businesses.Trainee work conditions took turns for the worse dramatically over years saddling them with mounds of debts they cannot possibly pay with meager stipends given by employers and forcing thousands of them to escape from trainee workplaces.
The horrific work conditions of young foreigners who enter Japan under the country’s ‘Technical Intern Training Program have been known over many past years but the Japanese government had hardly taken any administrative action – until now – to ensure supplying virtual slave labor to Japanese companies that are struggling to stem labor costs. On Jan. 1, 2023, the Yomiuri national daily reported in its digital edition that the Ministry of Health Labor and Welfare will send investigators to foreign trainees’ home countries for the first time.
As of October 2021, approximately 350,000 foreign trainees were in Japan, of which 7,167 escaped their employers and believed living in Japan as undocumented aliens. The aggregate number has been growing steadily over years, totaling 228,000 in 2016, and seemed to have peaked in 2020 at about 400,000. Vietnamese accounted for the distant largest of the total, accounting for more than 40 percent, followed by Chinese as second largest and then Philippines.They worked in such labor-intensive fields as farming, fishery, construction, food processing, textile, and metal fabrication. Recent additions are elderly nursing care. (The data are based mostly on MHLW statistics.)
When the trainee program began formally in the early 1980s with the amendments of the Immigration Control Order to admit unskilled labor, the Japanese government’s policy was to accept such workers as exceptions and allow only skilled foreign workers. Trainees can stay in Japan for up to 3 years with a special trainee visas. Over years, though, that policy had been interpreted more generously, and now totally ignored to allow unskilled labor with priority to meet Japanese businesses’ appetite for cheap labor.
Trainees are hired by industry lobbies such as fishery gilds and chambers of commerce. Since those entities are not familiar with relevant labor laws and regulations, as well as languages, they assign hiring details to human resources agencies that take care of documentations in trainee home countries. Those agents would work with trainee home country HR agencies. Since trainees wanting to work in Japan must clear basic level Japanese language skills and other qualifications, they take loans and borrow other forms of money to work in Japan thinking that they can pay off their debts by working in Japan.
They are too optimistic: They stipends from Japanese employers often are a pittance, hardly enough for food and lodging in expensive Japan. According to the Japanese Immigration Control Agency, trainees paid an average of 540,000 yen ($4,1000) per capita, a big sum for many of them.
How their debts have amounted to such a sum is not clear but trainees have been speculating that deep kickbacks are being paid to Japanese agents from trainees’ home country agents, as well as to language schools and other intermediaries.
Whey the MHLW ministry decided to investigate now can be traced to the fact that Japanese businesses are experiencing an unprecedented acute shortage of workers that do manual work, which was formerly called the 3K work (Kitanai (dirty), Kitsui (physically demanding), and Kiken (dangerous) that young Japanese shun. The investigation is not for trainees for sure.
And the MHLW bureaucracy is not serious about the investigation. They want to extricate themselves from complicated labor issues such as this. So they’ll dispatch investigators to Vietnam, China, the Philippines and write up a report to show to businesses what they’ve learned but probably not much beyond that. Their reticence to the issue is underscored by the fact that the ministry budgeted only 33 million yen (#252,000) for the investigation.
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Insight Into the Future