Stranger
in a Japanese land
By BILL
STONEHILL
Foreigners, particularly long-term
foreigners, are under no illusions that they are liked or even
particularly tolerated in Japan. The argument goes back and forth about
whether the Japanese are racist or merely intensely anti-foreign. The
consensus seems to be that race has little or nothing to do with it, and
that the Japanese are very anti-foreign. Still, the sum effect is exactly
the same as racism.
But the Japanese have a problem. Like
most other advanced industrialized nations, population growth in Japan has
leveled off to nearly nothing. In a few years it will be zero, and some
age groups, particularly the young, are becoming a distinct minority as
the pyramid gets top-heavy with the aged and aging.
In Europe and the USA, there are some
chances for immigration or for guest workers from other countries to come
in. The result is that countries like the USA and Holland, for example,
which also have aging populations, are spared the brunt of the problems
that Japan now faces.
Not only is each young worker being
called upon to, in effect, carry a number of elderly or retired workers,
but the supply of labor is drying up and there are fewer and fewer young
laborers entering the pool of workers every year.
Immigrating to Japan is difficult,
indeed, nearly impossible. Visas are not given for unskilled labor.
However, the government has set up a fiddle where some laborers are
allowed in for limited periods as "trainees." This is a program
designed to allow visas for trainees of Japanese companies operating
overseas, but has turned into a scheme to get cheap foreign labor in and
exploit it.
The way it works is this. A Japanese
company wants foreign "trainees." The company contacts one of
the semi-governmental organizations involved, and "refers" a
trainee to them. How companies come up with these trainees is a good
question. Perhaps they just pop into some convenient locked storage
through a process of transcontinental osmosis. The agency then
"dispatches" the laborer to the company, and the company pays
the semi-governmental agency $1,800 a month, of which $800 is given back
to the trainee to live on.
Japanese law says that you are not
allowed to hire a foreigner full time for less than $2,500 a month. But
the "trainee" label gets you out of this. The $1,000 that has
been deducted from the $1,800 pay, is kept for "instruction
fees," "pay for round-trip ticket," and other similarly
dubious charges reminiscent of nothing more than the company store. One
suspects that more than just a bit of this gets kicked back to the
companies.
Basically, if you are out in the deep
countryside, you can live on $800 a month, barely, particularly if you
sleep eight to a room. Forget about it in the big city. You can no more
live for $800 a month in Tokyo than you can in New York.
In justice to some employers, it
should be said that they provide company dormitories at nominal fees and
also offer subsidized meals in the cafeterias. And then some provide
nothing at all. Still, when you come from a country where the per capita
income is $300 a year, $800 a month is huge money, and not a few workers,
by becoming masters of frugality, manage to send home money every month.
Also, from the second year of the "trainee" contract, the amount
of money paid increases as the companies pay the laborers directly. So,
it’s on balance a good thing, with a harsh first year.
Whether or not any of the trainees
actually master a skill or not is open to debate. Mainly, what they manage
to learn during the first year is enough Japanese to function on a
Japanese work site. Then they have value for the next two years.
During this entire process, large
amounts of the money that should be going into the pockets of the
trainees, anywhere from 1/3 to 2/3 of their actual wage, sticks to the
fingers of the semi-governmental organization that arranges this whole
thing. This is one of the types of institutionalized robbery that the
Japanese are so happy with.
The money taken out of the pockets of
these "trainees" goes to support large numbers of ex-top-level
bureaucrats who "retire" and draw a full pension while working
for these semi-governmental organizations.
Unsurprisingly, these organizations
have become mired in scandal, with money washing up in odd corners of the
Japanese legislature, the Diet, and a Diet member being arrested for
bribery this week in connection with doing political work for one of these
organizations. Supposedly $20 million in bribes and gray money was spread
around the Diet to encourage the passage of key bits of legislation in
favor of "trainees."
The thought of perhaps making regular
work visas available and allowing even foreign laborers to sell their
labor freely on the open market is apparently too horrendous for the
government to contemplate. After all, what next? They might even want to
live here.
©Bill Stonehill 2001 All
rights reserved
Editor's note: Bill Stonehill hails from
Chicago, Illinois. Trained as an engineer and China specialist, he has now
been living in Tokyo for well over 20 years. He imports Swiss watches, is
expert at taking them apart, and if anyone knows what makes Japan tick too
then he does. From 1999 until 2001 he wrote a regular Japan column for the
Morrock News Service (sadly discontinued), which was enjoyed by
Web-surfers around the world. We greatly appreciate the author's allowing
us to republish some of his very best articles here in Eyes on Japan.
This page last updated 2008-06-16
Eyes on Japan compiled and edited by
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