SNA (Tokyo) — News Item: video footage surfaced in 2020 of a Vietnamese “trainee” being physically abused by Japanese co-workers at a construction company in Okayama Prefecture, resulting in injuries including broken ribs and a broken tooth. Despite a criminal complaint, the Okayama Prefectural Police Prosecutor’s Office declined to prosecute the four Japanese co-workers involved.

Here is the video footage that started it all.

This Vietnamese trainee is not alone. Despite the strict Covid border controls, currently 280,000 foreigners toil as temporary low-wage workers in Japan’s farms and factories nationwide. Given Japan’s often nasty work environments, which generally combine exploitative work ethics with a normalized bullying culture, this means that more than a quarter of a million foreigners are here and in harm’s way under a system of unfettered abuse.

The Technical Intern Training Program officially launched in 1993 with the aim of easing widespread domestic labor shortages through the importing foreign workers.

However, calling these foreigners “trainees” is a misnomer. For obvious reasons, Japan’s industrial lobby wanted to keep the imported labor dirt cheap, meaning that if foreigners had been legally classified as “workers” (rodosha), they would be protected by labor laws governing minimum wages, social welfare benefits, etc., the same as any, more expensive, Japanese worker.

So instead the government classified these people as “trainees” and “researchers” to sidestep the law and make them exempt from labor protections. Ostensibly, “trainees” were here to be “trained” in advanced skills they would then “take home” to enrich their less-developed societies.

Of course, that didn’t happen. Thrust into “dirty, difficult, and dangerous” unskilled labor tasks, over the next quarter century hundreds of thousands of foreign laborers have been subjected to all the exploitation that laboring underclasses worldwide face in less-regulated Dickensian industrial societies.

Examples of dehumanizing conditions within the trainee system abound: insane work hours (one report of 22 hour workdays); wages far below minimum wages—in some cases near slavery after employer deductions for room and board; perpetual debt imprisonment under a broken labor brokerage system; uncompensated workplace injuries; confiscated passports; prison-like accommodations; workplace harassment; physical and sexual assaults; and contracts denying basic human rights such as freedom of association, consensual sexual activity, and marriage.

There have even been cases of unexplained workplace deaths, suicides, and even murder.

Abuse is so rife that labor union leader Ippei Torii has said that the non-abusive workplaces are “extremely rare.”

Human rights organizations, governments, and media worldwide have long criticized these government-sponsored practices as being tantamount to forced labor, sweatshops, and even human trafficking.

The United Nations in 2010 candidly stated that Japan trainee conditions “may well amount to slavery.”

Even Taro Kono, currently Minister of Digital Affairs, long ago called the programs “a swindle” (ikasama).

Just last month, then-Justice Minister Yoshihisa Furukawa acknowledged that “this is a system that makes it difficult for trainees to create a career path and is structurally prone to human rights violations.”

The problem is, foreign workers are by design prisoners of their workplaces. They have no guaranteed job mobility. If they are abused and try to quit, they can lose their work visas and become “illegal.” Those not immediately deported to face the debt retaliation of the brokers can find themselves thrown in one of Japan’s inhumane and deadly immigration detention centers (aka “gaijin tanks”), which we’ve talked about in other installments of this column.

In a properly administered system, workplaces would be carefully screened beforehand, with periodic official visits to monitor working conditions. If conditions are found to be substandard, there would be a way to report abuses to the authorities, and the foreign workers could, in substantiated cases, be transferred out to more compliant employers.

Fortunately, there are some stirrings that reforms might happen. Even the conservative Yomiuri Shinbun said in an August 20 editorial that reforming the system is “unavoidable.” Moreover, the government announced last month a full-scale review of the program, intending to “bring this long-standing issue to a historical conclusion.”

I am skeptical these reforms will achieve what is promised, which is basically to resolve the ongoing human rights abuses which have always characterized the trainee system.

One reason for my doubts is that the Japanese government has had nearly thirty years to reform this program and has consistently failed to do so. As recently as 2017, a law was passed to strengthen supervision over employers, and a review was scheduled for this year.

But the abuses simply continued, and under the Shinzo Abe government it was the position of the trainees that was weakened. Contract durations were lengthened then capped to ensure they couldn’t qualify for permanent residency visas.

The second reason is that the government doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to get this reform process underway. Kyodo News says that the plan is to establish a panel of experts by the end of this year to “study” the issue. This doesn’t reflect any sense of urgency. It looks very much like the real intention is just to kick the issue down the road for another couple years.

And, after all, with three decades of experience and multiple domestic and international organizations pointing out all the problems, there isn’t much “study” that needs to be conducted.

The solution is both obvious and simple: abolish the structurally abusive program and allow the trainees–vital for the Japanese economy–to become foreign workers with ordinary labor protections. This is what should have been done in 1993 rather than creating this monstrous system.

But the government is still prioritizing corporate interests to keep foreign labor artificially cheap.

The third spring of my skepticism relates to Japan’s overall work culture. Mistreatment and bullying in Japan is rife—for everyone.

This begins with the socialization offered in Japan’s public schools, with their draconian school rules (including hair and underwear color policing) in the name of “discipline,” plus arduous and all-consuming interpersonal school activities that make kids prioritize work over family. These stressors have contributed to the creation of a whole class of people psychologically unable to even leave their bedrooms (hikikomori).

Graduates who survive this ordeal as children face corporations, some of which work their employees to death (karoshi), but basically all of which have enforced hierarchies (such as the kohai-senpai relationships that override fairness) which create a bullying class and a bullied class.

Just about anyone who has worked for a Japanese company can recount the late-hour “make-work” that has nothing to do with workplace productivity, the enforced drinking, and even verbal abuse which sometimes turns physical—especially when it’s so normalized that people think they can get away with it.

This is a feature of the system, not a bug. It’s just how Japan “does business.”

The system is therefore rough enough on Japanese workers, but with foreigners, especially those made vulnerable due to their work status and economic condition, the scope for bullying becomes even worse, and the extreme abuses seen in the trainee system become predictable.

The Vietnamese trainee beaten in the video did receive some kind of monetary compensation, but no one was prosecuted. It was only because he found support from a labor union and because the abuse was captured on video that he was able to get any traction at all. Otherwise, he would have been just one among hundreds of others, his plight unknown to the public. And even in his case, he was subjected to physical violence for about two years.

Japan is still not a society which protects the bullied. For as long as the trainee system endures, overseas workers should avoid it. But if they are so financially desperate that they need to risk it, they should be prepared to spend a couple of years documenting the abuse they can expect to suffer, aiming to eventually make it public and hopefully force the Japanese government to stop dodging responsibility and start putting a few of the very worst employers in prison.

Reforms may be nigh. But I say just go someplace less Dickensian until they verifiably happen.

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