RIGHTS-JAPAN: Tokyo Slow to Admit it Needs Foreign Workers

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Feb 12 2001 (IPS) - The recent arrest of a senior Japanese politician who accepted huge bribes in exchange for the promotion of cheap Asian labour in the country has revealed the dark side of Tokyo’s policy on foreign workers.

Takao Koyama, a 57-year-old member of the powerful Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), was arrested in January on suspicion of accepting up to 20 million yen (200,000 U.S. dollars) in bribes from a welfare cooperative called KSD, which provides support for small and medium companies.

Likewise, Koyama is accused of asking questions at the Japanese Diet or Parliament in 1995 and the following year — that urged the Labour Ministry to extend the period of stay for foreign workers invited into Japan as “trainees”.

The workers, mainly from Indonesia and China, were given three- year trainee visas that stipulate a year of training in Japan followed by on-the-job training for the rest of their stay.

“But in reality their experience turned out to be nightmare for them,” says Sonoko Kawakami, an activist with the Japan NGO Network on Indonesia (JANNI)

Documentation compiled by JANNI on the KSD scandal reveals a clear policy on the part of both Japanese officials and businessmen to recruit cheap labour from developing countries in a bid to go around Japan’s official policy of not accepting foreign workers.

“The government’s hypocritical stance has paved the way for Japanese companies to mistreat foreign labour and increase their profits and boost Japan’s economic performance,” points out Kawakami.

Japan’s labour market is officially closed to foreigners, but does have the mechanism of a “traineeship” to allow foreigners to come in and be “interns” for a short period of time. These trainees however do not have the usual work permits that other labour-receiving countries have.

There are hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in different sectors, including the entertainment industry that attracks women from Asian countries — and for which there is a another, special kind of visa.

Under the “trainee” policy, hundreds of young men wer recruited through Indonesian and Chinese labour brokerages and sent through KSD to small and medium sized companies in the country.

The workers signed contracts that outlined technical internships. However, the agreement also included requirements that blatantly abused their human rights, say activists.

For example, contracts had conditions that said workers must hand over their passports to their employers in Japan. They also made overtime work compulsory starting the second year of their “internships”.

The current scandal has revealed that more than 6,000 men were recruited under these conditions by KSD. Some men reported they had put in more 500 hours of unpaid overtime in the first year of their intership.

The workers were paid on an average of 80,000 yen per month (800 dollars) after deductions for taxes and health insurance — an amount less than half the pay of their Japanese counterparts.

In order a bid to exert control over their “trainees”, employers ordered trainees not to travel or forced them to “save” part of their salary.

The situation was so difficult that these men started escaping from their employers, preferring to live as illegal workers that to them was a better life, says Kawakami.

Ippei Torii, a trade unionist, says the demand for cheap labour is so high today that companies have resorted to bribing senior politicians to get workers in by any method.

“Koyama’s stance is a fitting illustration of the government’s attitude toward foreign workers,” says Torii, whose union includes Asian and African foreign labour.

Rather than ask questions about the situation of trainees, he says, businesses are urging longer trainee visas.

According to the Justice Ministry, 5.27 million foreigners entered Japan last year and 1.6 million are officially registered as living in the country.

The ministry estimates that there are 280,000 illegal workers in Japan, but activists say the number could be double that.

“Japanese workers shun small companies because of poor working conditions and low pay. Thus the demand for cheap foreign labour despite the economic slowdown,” explains Torii.

A report by the United Nations last year pointed out that Japan will need about 600,000 immigrants each year over the next 50 years to maintain its working population at its 1995 size.

A poll by the Cabinet Office conducted in November showed that 49.4 respondents do not condone the presence of illegal foreign workers. Many of the 3,000 respondents said they were worried about an increase in unemployment and the crime rate from the foreign population — which critics call unfair discrimination.

But experts explain that Japan’s ageing society means it soon has to address the question of foreign workers in this largely homogenous society — instead of dodging it or having categories like “traineeships” that do not give enough protection to foreign workers and in fact exploit them.

Analysts say Tokyo urgently needs to develop a foreign worker policy.

Jiro Nakamura, professor of economics at Tokyo Metropolitan University, says that workers from developing countries will continue to come because they can find jobs in Japan.

“There is no denying these workers a place in Japan. We must accept them legally and develop a system that treats them as equal to Japanese workers,” he says.