Japan Needs Foreign Workers. It’s Just Not Sure It Wants Them to Stay.
Ngu Thazin wanted to leave her war-torn country for a better future. She set her sights on Japan.
In Myanmar, she studied Japanese and graduated with a chemistry degree from one of her country’s most prestigious universities. Yet she gladly took a job in Japan changing diapers and bathing residents at a nursing home in a midsize city.
“To be honest, I want to live in Japan because it is safe,” said Ms. Thazin, who hopes eventually to pass an exam that will allow her to work as a licensed caregiver. “And I want to send my family money.”
Japan desperately needs people like Ms. Thazin to fill jobs left open by a declining and aging population. The number of foreign workers has quadrupled since 2007, to more than two million, in a country of 125 million people. Many of these workers escaped low wages, political repression or armed conflict in their home countries.
But even as foreign employees become much more visible in Japan, working as convenience store cashiers, hotel clerks and restaurant servers, they are treated with ambivalence. Politicians remain reluctant to create pathways for foreign workers, especially those in low-skill jobs, to stay indefinitely. That may eventually cost Japan in its competition with neighbors like South Korea and Taiwan, or even places farther afield like Australia and Europe, that are also scrambling to find labor.
The political resistance to immigration in long-insular Japan, as well as a public that is sometimes wary of integrating newcomers, has led to a nebulous legal and support system that makes it difficult for foreigners to put down roots. Foreign-born workers are paid on average about 30 percent less than their Japanese counterparts, according to government data. Fearful of losing their right to stay in Japan, workers often have precarious relationships with their employers, and career advancement can be elusive.
Japan’s policies are designed for “people to work in Japan for preferably a short period of time,” said Yang Liu, a fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry in Tokyo. “If the system continues as it is, the probability that foreign workers will stop coming has become very high.”
In 2018, the government passed a law authorizing a sharp increase in the number of low-skilled “guest laborers” allowed into the country. Earlier this year, the government committed to more than doubling the number of such workers over the next five years, to 820,000. It also revised a technical internship program that employers had used as a source of cheap labor and that workers and labor activists had criticized as fostering abuses.
Still, politicians are far from flinging open the country’s borders. Japan has yet to experience the kind of significant migration that has convulsed Europe or the United States. The total number of foreign-born residents in Japan — including nonworking spouses and children — is 3.4 million, less than 3 percent of the population. The percentage in Germany and the United States, for instance, is close to five times that.
Japan has tightened some rules even as it has loosened others. This spring, the governing Liberal Democratic Party pushed through a revision to Japan’s immigration law that would allow permanent residency to be revoked if a person fails to pay taxes. Critics warned that the policy could make it easier to withdraw residency status for more minor infractions, such as failing to show a police officer an identification card upon request.
Such a threat “robs permanent residents of their sense of security” and “will undoubtedly encourage discrimination and prejudice,” Michihiro Ishibashi, a member of the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, said during a parliamentary discussion.
In a separate parliamentary committee, Ryuji Koizumi, the justice minister, said the revision was intended to “realize a society where we can coexist with foreigners,” by making sure they “abide by the minimum rules necessary for living in Japan.”
Long before foreigners can obtain permanent residency, they must navigate labyrinthine visa requirements, including language and skills tests. Unlike in Germany, where the government offers new foreign residents up to 400 hours of language courses at a subsidized rate of just over $2 per lesson, Japan has no organized language training for foreign workers.
While politicians say the country should do a better job of teaching Japanese, “they are not yet ready to go as far as pouring money into this from taxes,” said Toshinori Kawaguchi, director of the foreign workers affairs division at the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare.
That leaves individual municipalities and employers to decide whether and how often to provide language training. The nursing home operator that employs Ms. Thazin in Maebashi, the capital of Gunma Prefecture in central Japan, offers some of its caregivers one day of group Japanese lessons, as well as one more 45-minute lesson, each month. Workers who prepare meals receive just one 45-minute lesson a month.
Akira Higuchi, the president of the company, Hotaka Kai, said he gives workers an incentive to study Japanese on their own. Those who pass the second-highest level of a government Japanese language proficiency test, he said, “will be treated the same as Japanese people, with the same salary and bonuses.”
Particularly outside the largest cities, foreigners who don’t speak Japanese can struggle to communicate with local governments or schools. In health emergencies, few hospital workers will speak languages other than Japanese.
Hotaka Kai has taken other measures to support its staff, including housing newcomers in subsidized corporate apartments and offering skills training.
A dormitory kitchen shared by 33 women ranging in age from 18 to 31 offers a glimpse of the heritages that mingle together. Peeking out from plastic bins labeled with the residents’ names were sachets of Ladaku merica bubuk (an Indonesian white pepper powder) and packets of thit kho seasoning for making Vietnamese braised pork with eggs.
Across Gunma Prefecture, the reliance on foreign workers is unmistakable. In Oigami Onsen, a rundown mountainside village where many restaurants, shops and hotels are shuttered, half of the 20 full-time workers at Ginshotei Awashima, a traditional Japanese hot springs inn, are originally from Myanmar, Nepal or Vietnam.
With the inn’s deeply rural location, “there are no more Japanese people who want to work here,” said Wataru Tsutani, the owner.
Several of its foreign workers have educational backgrounds that would seem to qualify them for more than menial work. A 32-year-old with a degree in physics from a university in Myanmar serves food in the inn’s dining rooms. A 27-year-old who studied Japanese culture at a university in Vietnam is stationed at the reception desk. A 27-year-old Nepali who was studying agricultural history at a university in Ukraine before the Russian invasion now washes dishes and lays out futon, Japanese-style bedding, in guest rooms.
Most of the customers at Ginshotei Awashima are Japanese. Sakae Yoshizawa, 58, who had come for an overnight stay with her husband and was enjoying a cup of tea in the lobby before checking out, said she was impressed by the service. “Their Japanese is very good, and I have a good feeling about them,” she said. Ms. Yoshizawa said she works with foreign-born colleagues at a newspaper delivery service.
Ngun Nei Par, the inn’s general manager, graduated from a university in Myanmar with a degree in geography. She hopes that the Japanese government will smooth a path toward citizenship that would allow her to bring the rest of her family to Japan someday.
Mr. Tsutani, the owner, said that a public that had not caught up with reality might object if too many foreigners obtained citizenship.
“I hear a lot that Japan is a ‘unique country,’” Mr. Tsutani said. Ultimately, “there is no need to make it that difficult” for foreigners to stay in Japan, he said. “We want workers.”
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