This is the sixth article in our series “Racism in Corporate Japan” funded through the generosity of our SNA Patrons.

SNA (Tokyo) — A broken rib, a chipped tooth—a worker kicked and beaten frequently over a period of two years. This is not a horror story of a survivor of a Chinese labor camp in Xinjiang, but rather that of a Vietnamese “technical intern” in Okayama, Japan.

The government-sponsored Technical Intern Training Program was introduced in 1993 with the supposed aim of transferring advanced industrial skills from Japan to developing nations like Vietnam, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, and others.

The Japanese government has been forced to admit repeatedly that this program is riddled with abuses of various kinds, but it has not been abandoned nor even seriously reformed despite thirty years of shameful episodes.

The case of the Vietnamese technical intern in Okayama is admittedly an extreme one.

At a press conference he explained—with the help of a local labor union that took him under their protection—that he had specialized in scaffolding for a local Japanese construction company.

He began work at the firm in November 2019, hoping to financially support his wife and daughter back home in Vietnam. Within a month or so, his Japanese colleagues began to beat him. They said he deserved to be beaten because his Japanese language skills are poor.

He eventually complained to the supervising organization for the national intern program, but they were uninterested in helping him.

It wasn’t until October 2021 that he met another Vietnamese person on Facebook and was put in contact with the Fukuyama Union Tampopo, a labor union in Hiroshima Prefecture, where he received real help. The union gave him shelter and began to fight for his cause, leading to the national headlines this month.

The intern told the media, “Before coming to Japan, I thought Japanese people were kind and that it was a safe country with a good working environment. However, I had a very hard time because of the violence I was subjected to.”

This kind of abuse within the Technical Intern Training Program is unusual only in its severity. It is the predictable result of a labor system designed to place all power in the hands of Japanese employers, while leaving foreign interns isolated and vulnerable.

The US State Department’s annual reports on human trafficking routinely cite the abusive nature of the Technical Intern Training Program, which is particularly notable criticism as it comes from Japan’s primary international ally.

In its 2021 report, the State Department wrote:

Despite persistent reports of forced labor among labor migrants working in Japan under its auspices, authorities again did not proactively identify a single trafficking case or victim in the [program]. Within the Technical Intern Training Program, the government’s memoranda of cooperation with sending countries have been ineffective in preventing foreign-based labor recruitment agencies from charging excessive fees, a key driver of debt-based coercion among Technical Intern Training Program participants, and the government did not hold recruiters and employers accountable for abusive labor practices and forced labor crimes.

It added, “Interagency stakeholders continued to rely on disparate, ineffective identification and referral procedures, which did not cover all forms of trafficking, thereby preventing authorities from properly screening vulnerable populations for trafficking and protecting victims of all forms of trafficking.”

The US State Department is far from the only organization that routinely raises this issue with the Japanese government.

With ignorance therefore an impossible defense for the Japanese government to resort to, we must look elsewhere to explain how such an abusive, scandal-ridden, and notorious program is allowed to endure.

Part of the answer is obvious: The technical intern program provides Japanese businesses with a cheap and obedient source of manual labor, allowing some marginal small and medium-sized businesses to survive that otherwise couldn’t compete within Japan’s tight labor market.

Complaints from some Japanese business owners that the Covid travel restrictions are preventing them from receiving new technical interns, thus threatening the survival of their firms, gives the game away.

The program is not about transferring technical skills to developing countries, but rather to serve Japan’s own economic needs with bottom-end laborers who can be worked for brutally long hours, cheated of overtime pay and other basic labor protections, and ordered to take on the most undesirable of work tasks that Japanese employees would balk at.

This is where the racism comes in.

Much like US military bases can be concentrated in Okinawa because Ryukyu islanders aren’t regarded by main island Japanese as entirely their own people, so—to a much more serious degree—foreign technical interns can be exploited and abused without creating a general public outcry.

They are not Japanese. They usually cannot speak out publicly and make a fuss. They are invisible and they don’t count within the Japanese polity.

Some Japanese companies may need their Vietnamese, Filipino, or Indonesian “technical interns” to stay in business, but human rights, sadly enough, just don’t matter very much to a corporate Japan that relies on what approaches a system of foreign forced labor.

Racism in Corporate Japan Series

Article 1: Pachinko Mogul Accused of Racism by Own Daughter

Article 2: Anti-Korean Racism Blemishes Beauty Brand DHC

Article 3: Woodford & Ghosn: Foreign Executives Not In Charge

Article 4: APA Hotel Amenities Not Always Pleasant

Article 5: Anti-Chinese Techno-Racism in Japan

Research assistance for this article was provided by Tran Thi Tam Thanh

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