With a failing birth rate, rapid demographic aging and a labor shortage, Japan should, logically, be in favor of welcoming foreign workers. However, on the contrary, the country is rather reluctant to accept the idea, even if it is beginning to welcome a growing number of immigrant apprentices.
On paper, everything is fine. The program called “technical apprentices” allows 350,000 foreigners to learn in Japan, in three years, a manual trade to then assert in their own country the skills acquired. But in Japan, they are considered second-class workers. Mitsugu Muto represents a union which, among other things, took in last year a 41-year-old Vietnamese apprentice, beaten up for two years by his Japanese colleagues in a construction firm.
“Foreign apprentices often face harassment, especially in the construction industry. This is partly because of a lack of human rights awareness and racist undercurrents in Japanese society.”
Mitsugu Muto, trade unionistat franceinfo
“In the present case, we must not see the problem as the violence suffered, but face the major flaws in the system through which this foreign worker was employed”, points out the trade unionist. These workers are selected by recruiters in their own country, they even pay huge processing fees, usually go into debt to come to Japan, and are then at the mercy of a supervising agent and the company that employs them.
The government pretends to look into the problem when the tragic cases are publicized, but in a cosmetic way. In fact, he refuses to scrap a program that offers many companies cheap workers for trades neglected by the Japanese themselves. However, between 2012 and 2019, no less than 269 foreign apprentices died in Japan by accident, illness or suicide. “These workers are deprived of a social life, many are housed within the company itself. They only live there, no one sees what is going on there.explains Oshimi Saito, a professor at Kobe University. The case of the beaten up Vietnamese apprentice is not isolated either, it is frequent. Their fear is that they cannot change employers.”
“Even if they are sexually harassed, their salary is not paid, they are silent.”
Oshimi Saito professor at Kobe Universityat franceinfo
“If they filed a complaint and won their case, they would have to stay in the same company and be even more mistreated there”, assures the professor. Most human rights defenders in Japan describe this system not only as liberticidal but also as serving, no more and no less, to “make slaves“.