Immigration

Caregivers sent to Japan under EPA get hand to overcome language hurdle

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The Philippine government has begun language classes to help nurses wanting to go and work in Japan overcome the high language barrier, and even pays them to enroll.

The project is aimed at boosting the rate of Philippine applicants who pass Japan’s national nursing examination and increasing the number of nurses seeking a career in Japan under the economic partnership agreement (EPA) between the two countries.

During one recent Japanese class, a teacher held up a panel with kanji for difficult words, such as “roasha” [聾唖者] (the hearing impaired) and “nenza” [捻挫] (sprain), while the students read the words aloud in unison.

In February, 59 Philippine nurses made their first attempt at Japan’s national nursing exams; only one passed. If nurses on the EPA program fail to pass the exam for three straight years, they must return home.

Questions have been raised over the current EPA arrangement, which offers foreign nurses only six months of Japanese language lessons.

The EPA between Japan and the Philippines took effect in December 2008. In May last year, the Philippines began dispatching nurses and caregivers to Japan. Under the EPA deal, Japan accepts up to 1,000 such nurses and caregivers for two years, but only 436 have been sent so far.

In Japan, the high cost of getting foreign nurses up to speed because of the language hurdle has deterred some potential employers from hiring them. The EPA will be reviewed next year, and Tokyo likely will seek to tweak the current system.

Viveca Catalig, a deputy administrator at the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, acknowledged his country’s own effort has its limits, and said he hopes Japan will consider expanding its language training and easing requirements for nurses in order not to disappoint motivated Philippine applicants.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T100924005025.htm

Factory, employment agency in Japan must pay for exploiting interns

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Officially, they came to Japan for training, but in reality, they were forced to work long hours for little pay.

A Japanese court on Monday ordered a sewing company and an employment service to pay 4.4 million yen (52,250 dollars) in damages, ruling that the firms had exploited four Chinese interns.

The High Court in the south-western city of Fukuoka thereby confirmed a lower court ruling and also ordered the factory in Amakusa to pay an additional 12.8 million yen in unpaid wages.

The four interns went to work at the factory in 2006, and for a year, they were forced to work from 8:30 am to as late as 3 am the next morning. They had two or three days off each month.

The case put a spotlight on conditions for foreign interns in Japan and could lead to improvements in their working conditions.

The three-year training programme that the plaintiffs were involved in was introduced 20 years ago as a way to help workers from developing countries develop their skills in Japan and take them back to their home countries, but critics said many of the interns are unskilled labourers who are forced to work for low pay.

Many of their employers are struggling small firms who find few Japanese willing to work for the wages they offer. For them, the internship programme was a welcome one, allowing them to lower their wage costs.

But the programme has also had deadly consequences for workers. The Asahi Shimbun newspaper said that in the 2008-09 fiscal year, which ended March 31, 2009, 34 foreign interns died, 16 from heart attacks or strokes, an occurrence that critics said was the result of overwork.

As a result, a minimum wage for foreign interns was introduced in July and employers warned about exploiting such workers, but critics complained that the structure of the programme remained unchanged. The interns are protected by labour laws but many are still unfairly treated, they said.

Japan is seeing a demographic change at the moment. Its ageing, shrinking population has resulted in a shortage of workers in many areas. Immigration as a solution remains a taboo in Japan.

http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/asiapacific/news/article_1584119.php/Factory-employment-agency-in-Japan-must-pay-for-exploiting-interns

Gov’t to help foreign residents master Japanese language

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The government will help foreign residents master the Japanese language in order to improve their quality of life, its basic guideline on the issue showed Tuesday.

“Foreign residents in Japan have difficulties in finding jobs due to their insufficient language capabilities, and more people have faced hardships in their lives,” the guideline, compiled by a Cabinet Office panel, noted.

As solutions, the panel proposed improving the quality of Japanese-language teachers and providing vocational training in line with language capability.

It also called for continued provision of multiple-language counseling and information services for foreign residents in pension and medical fields.

Based on the guideline, government ministries and agencies will compile their own action programs during the current fiscal year through next March so they could be implemented in around 2012, officials said.

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20100831p2g00m0in055000c.html

New Dissent in Japan Is Loudly Anti-Foreign

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The demonstrators appeared one day in December, just as children at an elementary school for ethnic Koreans were cleaning up for lunch. The group of about a dozen Japanese men gathered in front of the school gate, using bullhorns to call the students cockroaches and Korean spies.

Inside, the panicked students and teachers huddled in their classrooms, singing loudly to drown out the insults, as parents and eventually police officers blocked the protesters’ entry.

The December episode was the first in a series of demonstrations at the Kyoto No. 1 Korean Elementary School that shocked conflict-averse Japan, where even political protesters on the radical fringes are expected to avoid embroiling regular citizens, much less children. Responding to public outrage, the police arrested four of the protesters this month on charges of damaging the school’s reputation.

More significantly, the protests also signaled the emergence here of a new type of ultranationalist group. The groups are openly anti-foreign in their message, and unafraid to win attention by holding unruly street demonstrations.

Since first appearing last year, their protests have been directed at not only Japan’s half million ethnic Koreans, but also Chinese and other Asian workers, Christian churchgoers and even Westerners in Halloween costumes. In the latter case, a few dozen angrily shouting demonstrators followed around revelers waving placards that said, “This is not a white country.”

Local news media have dubbed these groups the Net far right, because they are loosely organized via the Internet, and gather together only for demonstrations. At other times, they are a virtual community that maintains its own Web sites to announce the times and places of protests, swap information and post video recordings of their demonstrations.

While these groups remain a small if noisy fringe element here, they have won growing attention as an alarming side effect of Japan’s long economic and political decline. Most of their members appear to be young men, many of whom hold the low-paying part-time or contract jobs that have proliferated in Japan in recent years.

Though some here compare these groups to neo-Nazis, sociologists say that they are different because they lack an aggressive ideology of racial supremacy, and have so far been careful to draw the line at violence. There have been no reports of injuries, or violence beyond pushing and shouting. Rather, the Net right’s main purpose seems to be venting frustration, both about Japan’s diminished stature and in their own personal economic difficulties.

“These are men who feel disenfranchised in their own society,” said Kensuke Suzuki, a sociology professor at Kwansei Gakuin University. “They are looking for someone to blame, and foreigners are the most obvious target.”

They are also different from Japan’s existing ultranationalist groups, which are a common sight even today in Tokyo, wearing paramilitary uniforms and riding around in ominous black trucks with loudspeakers that blare martial music.

This traditional far right, which has roots going back to at least the 1930s rise of militarism in Japan, is now a tacitly accepted part of the conservative political establishment here. Sociologists describe them as serving as a sort of unofficial mechanism for enforcing conformity in postwar Japan, singling out Japanese who were seen as straying too far to the left, or other groups that anger them, such as embassies of countries with whom Japan has territorial disputes.

Members of these old-line rightist groups have been quick to distance themselves from the Net right, which they dismiss as amateurish rabble-rousers.

“These new groups are not patriots but attention-seekers,” said Kunio Suzuki, a senior adviser of the Issuikai, a well-known far-right group with 100 members and a fleet of sound trucks.

But in a sign of changing times here, Mr. Suzuki also admitted that the Net right has grown at a time when traditional ultranationalist groups like his own have been shrinking. Mr. Suzuki said the number of old-style rightists has fallen to about 12,000, one-tenth the size of their 1960s’ peak.

No such estimates exist for the size of the new Net right. However, the largest group appears to be the cumbersomely named Citizens Group That Will Not Forgive Special Privileges for Koreans in Japan, known here by its Japanese abbreviation, the Zaitokukai, which has some 9,000 members.

The Zaitokukai gained notoriety last year when it staged noisy protests at the home and junior high school of a 14-year-old Philippine girl, demanding her deportation after her parents were sent home for overstaying their visas. More recently, the Zaitokukai picketed theaters showing “The Cove,” an American documentary about dolphin hunting here that rightists branded as anti-Japanese.

In interviews, members of the Zaitokukai and other groups blamed foreigners, particularly Koreans and Chinese, for Japan’s growing crime and unemployment, and also for what they called their nation’s lack of respect on the world stage. Many seemed to embrace conspiracy theories taken from the Internet that China or the United States were plotting to undermine Japan.

“Japan has a shrinking pie,” said Masaru Ota, 37, a medical equipment salesman who headed the local chapter of the Zaitokukai in Omiya, a Tokyo suburb. “Should we be sharing it with foreigners at a time when Japanese are suffering?”

While the Zaitokukai has grown rapidly since it was started three and a half years ago with just 25 members, it is still largely run by its founder and president, a 38-year-old tax accountant who goes by the assumed name of Makoto Sakurai. Mr. Sakurai leads the group from his tiny office in Tokyo’s Akihabara electronics district, where he taps out announcements and other postings on his personal computer.

Mr. Sakurai says the group is not racist, and rejected the comparison with neo-Nazis. Instead, he said he had modeled his group after another overseas political movement, the Tea Party in the United States. He said he had studied videos of Tea Party protests, and shared with the Tea Party an angry sense that his nation had gone in the wrong direction because it had fallen into the hands of leftist politicians, liberal media as well as foreigners.

“They have made Japan powerless to stand up to China and Korea,” said Mr. Sakurai, who refused to give his real name.

Mr. Sakurai admitted that the group’s tactics had shocked many Japanese, but said they needed to win attention. He also defended the protests at the Korean school in Kyoto as justified to oppose the school’s use of a nearby public park, which he said rightfully belonged to Japanese children.

Teachers and parents at the school called that a flimsy excuse to vent what amounted to racist rage. They said the protests had left them and their children fearful.

“If Japan doesn’t do something to stop this hate language,” said Park Chung-ha, 43, who heads the school’s mothers association, “where will it lead to next?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/world/asia/29japan.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=all

Japan, Germany face less size and clout as anniversary nears

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Japan and Germany will celebrate the 150th anniversary of bilateral diplomatic ties in 2011.

Both countries were defeated in World War II but re-emerged strongly from the ashes of war. Over the decades that followed, they became the undisputed economic powerhouses of Asia and Europe.

But leaders in both countries may have less reason to celebrate when they realize the huge macro challenges they face in the future.

Both the Japanese and Germans are already aware they are aging societies. Birth rates in Japan and Germany are at an international low of 1.3 to 1.4 babies per woman, and there are few signs this will change any time soon.

Few in those countries, however, know that the actual size of their populations will shrink over the next 40 years, spanning just over one generation.

Japan’s population is about 127 million, but most forecasts say it will decline to less than 100 million by 2050.

Germany meanwhile is expected to shrink to 71.5 million by 2050 after losing 10 million people, according to the Population Reference Bureau in Washington.

Germany’s population decline is especially remarkable because it contradicts the trend seen by the EU, which is projecting the population will increase to 510 million by 2050. Countries like France and Britain are expected to grow by more than 10 percent, with Britain overtaking Germany as Europe’s most populated country long before 2050.

As previously mentioned, a rapid rise in the natural population does not seem to be in the cards for Germany or Japan. This leaves foreign workers and immigration as the only remedies available to prevent those figures from becoming reality.

The future remains quite dark. Germany was very successful decades ago in attracting foreign labor, but the flow of immigration has stopped and actually gone into reverse. Since 2003, more than 180,000 qualified Germans have left to work and live abroad on a net basis, even accounting for those who return after a few years.

In Japan, immigration policy has traditionally been very restrictive. It was only in April 2009 that former health minister Jiro Kawasaki said Japan should never become a multiethnic society.

The Democratic Party of Japan has so far taken a more open stance on immigration, although real change is occurring at a snail’s pace due to stubborn opposition to foreigners. The ongoing plight of health care workers from the Philippines and Indonesia shows how difficult it is to change perceptions and long-established practices in Japan.

The strongest proponents of a proactive immigration policy are to be found in the business sectors of both Germany and Japan. The Japan Association of Corporate Executives (Keizai Doyukai), for example, is pushing for an increase in immigration, and its committee on immigration policy is one of the most active in the country.

There is nothing wrong with having smaller populations in Germany or in overcrowded Japan. But in any country, there is a clear need to have a strong and skilled labor force with a size significant to the rest of the population.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nb20100830ve.html

Japan looks for answers as China surges past

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Japan’s GDP slump, and news that China’s economy is now bigger, will intensify the search for answers on turning around the economy.

To some, the answer lies offshore. Not in the traditional sense of exporting cars and televisions, but in bringing in new workers from Japan’s rapidly developing neighbours.

The Japanese are good at finding reasons why immigration won’t work, pointing to racial disharmony, problems with integration and culture shock among residents and immigrants. This public view is broadly reflected in government policy.

However, The Australian spoke this week to Hirohiko Nakamura, one of a minority of Japanese politicians who believe in dramatically increasing immigration.

Mr Nakamura, who hails from the conservative leaning Liberal Democratic Party, said Japan’s population was on track to drop from 127 million to just 90 million in the next 45 years, by which time almost 40 per cent would be aged over 65.

“We are already in a state of absolute manpower shortage. It is inevitable that we must take in immigrants to save such a critical situation,” he said.

“We should move towards a 21st-century Japan with a global and multicultural society.”

He believes immigration from Asia would be beneficial throughout the economy, not just in specific sectors. “What’s needed first for Japanese economic growth is securing an unparalleled amount of new labour. The Japanese youth need to learn from the youth of other parts of Asia about diligence and the motivation to live a wealthy life,” he said.

These are strong words in Japan where, according to Mr Nakamura, the many opponents of immigration fall into two camps: believers in Japan’s racial “purity”, and those with more basic concerns about integrating newcomers and perhaps safeguarding their own jobs.

Through the Diet (parliament) Members League to Promote the International Exchange of Human Resources, Mr Nakamura and about 80 other MPs are trying to shift attitudes to immigration.

With a low birth rate and a stalled economy plagued by deflation, immigration is becoming an economic issue as well as a social one.

Since assuming office in June, Prime Minister Naoto Kan has watched as his options for reviving the economy have disappeared.

Japan’s burgeoning public sector debt, and Mr Kan’s pledge for fiscal consolidation, probably rules out another large Keynesian stimulus package. Rates have been at near zero levels since the global financial crisis, but companies remain reluctant to borrow to expand capacity. And now the strong yen is reducing export earnings, applying a further brake on the economy, which grew by a dismal 0.4 per cent in the June quarter, compared to 4.4 per cent in the previous quarter.

Despite the economic gloom, the argument in Japan is not about how fast to grow the population, as in Australia, but whether to grow at all. The former head of the Tokyo Immigration Bureau, Sakanaka Hidenori, summed up the dilemma in a 2007 essay in which he says Japan must choose between big and small options.

The small option, he says, involves accepting a steep population decline to perhaps 80 million. The trade off for a peaceful and less environmentally damaging lifestyle would be accepting higher taxes and lower benefits.

Mr Hidenori is honest enough to concede that emotionally he favours the small option, but he argues Japan won’t be given the choice. An influx of immigration from China and other rapidly expanding Asian neighbours would prove difficult to control if Japan puts up the drawbridge, he says.

Implementing the big option, though, will not be easy. “The country would need to accept over 20 million immigrants during the next 50 years. Before welcoming such an unprecedented influx, Japan would need to build a national consensus that new arrivals would be welcomed as friends and contributors to Japanese society,” he says. He admits there would be social, environmental and energy costs, but concludes the tide of globalisation is irresistible.

To address labour shortages, Japan has introduced a short-term internship program for unskilled labourers and a scheme to attract foreign nurses. However, both have significant flaws. Under the first program, some trainees have been ruthlessly exploited and effectively worked to death, while the insistence on having nurses pass an arcane and complicated Japanese exam has crippled the effectiveness of the second.

Mr Nakamura said the failures of such schemes were often unjustly blamed on the workers, making his task even harder.

The process of integrating Japan’s Korean community — its most established migrant group — has also been difficult. The Korean-Japanese community, who were originally brought to Japan as forced labourers, cannot vote and must register as aliens unless they become naturalised Japanese, a process some resist because it involves relinquishing their Korean citizenship.

Moves to reintegrate Japan’s South American diaspora to provide extra factory workers have been similarly difficult, so perhaps a fresh approach is needed.

While the government resists meaningful change, cold economic reality may force its hand. Japan remains proud of its economic successes. Its relegation by China this week was too sensitive for some Japanese newspapers to report; several reported only a dry summary of the GDP numbers with scant reference to being usurped by the dragon on their doorstep. Many Japanese won’t be prepared to settle for the economic irrelevance of Hidenori’s small option, and using economic arguments to change people’s views might prove easier than expected.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/news/japan-looks-for-answers-as-china-surges-past/story-e6frg90o-1225907498533

Drop in number of Japan’s foreign workers amid economic crisis

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Brazilian community hard hit as jobs shrink and Japanese compete for vacancies

The samba vibes that filled the streets of Kawasaki City in July were suitably festive, but their feverish beat failed to conceal the fact that Japan’s Brazilian community – the third-largest group of foreigners after the Chinese and Koreans – has been hard hit by the economic crisis. The number of immigrants fell by 1.4% in 2009 to 2.2 million, for the first time since 1961. The drop was mainly due to the departure of Brazilians. In one year their number fell by 14.4%, down to 267,450.

Japan’s Brazilian community largely consists of poorly qualified workers and their families, packed into major industrial centres. Just over half of them are factory workers compared with 39% for immigrants as a whole, essentially on short-term contracts.

Most are nikkeijin, descendants of Japanese who moved to South America after 1908. They came to Japan when the law on immigration changed in 1989, allowing them to obtain a visa even without specific qualifications. This was intended to compensate for the decline in the active population that started in the 1980s. With less than 4,000 before 1990 their number exceeded 310,000 by the end of 2007.

When the crisis struck Japan in autumn 2008, firms started by laying off the nikkeijin. Unemployment in the group rocketed to 40%, against 5% before the crash. In the Hello Work job centres the sudden influx of so many unemployed, with few qualifications and a shaky grasp of the language, caused panic. The government even set up a scheme to help them return home, and some 11,300 nikkeijin took advantage of the deal.

The situation seems more stable now. In Hamamatsu, Shizuoka prefecture, home to Suzuki and Yamaha works, “the rate of unemployment has returned to traditional levels”, according to the local branch of the Foundation for International Exchanges (HICE). But it notes that the number of Brazilians has fallen from more than 20,000 18 months ago to 14,655 in June. No one is in any hurry to replace them. The five-year plan for immigration control, published in March, suggests a review of the conditions for granting visas to nikkeijin.

The crisis has brought “a deep realisation of the social and economic costs that come with accepting foreign workers”, writes Masahiko Yamada, minister of labour. The downturn has rekindled debate on immigration, despite the fact that the working population could decline to 55.8 million by 2030, as against 66.6 million in 2006. This would further dent the welfare budget, already running at a loss.

In 10 years the number of immigrants has increased by 40%, but they still only account for 1.7% of the population as a whole. Nor is there anything to suggest they will substantially increase. Existing policies aim to attract highly qualified workers and students suitable for top university courses – preferably from Asia to sustain trade in the already booming region.

Immigration is expected to compensate for real needs identified by the authorities. Economic partnerships agreed with the Philippines and Indonesia before the crisis provide for the arrival of dozens of medical orderlies to make up for staff shortages in hospitals. But the deals are already in doubt, because the crisis is encouraging Japanese to take such jobs.

All this suggests that before shipping in foreigners, Japan should encourage those with untapped abilities – young people, women and senior citizens – to enter the job market. Yamada believes that measures along these lines should stabilise the active population for the coming 10 years.

Japan is still reluctant to open its borders. Outsiders still have a negative image in a country that sees itself as ethnically homogeneous.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/03/japan-recession-foreign-workforce-decline

Govt must improve foreign intern program

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The revised Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law took effect in July, enhancing legal protection for foreign interns participating in a government-authorized training program.

However, some observers say the revision of the law merely puts off dealing with the real problems. The program is said to be occupational training in name only, with some going so far as to call it de facto slave labor.

It remains to be seen if the revisions will solve this issue. If the situation does not change, we believe it is meaningless to continue the program.

The current program was established in 1989 to provide foreign nationals with opportunities to learn advanced technology and skills in Japan, thereby becoming forces for development in their own countries.

It has accepted 50,000 to 70,000 young foreign nationals every year for training that can continue up to three years, in fields such as textiles, machinery, metal, food, construction, agriculture and fishing. Over 80 percent of the trainees are Chinese nationals.

Brutal hours, paltry wages

The program has two ways of accepting foreign interns: Companies bring over employees of their own subsidiaries in foreign countries, or organizations of small and midsize firms or agricultural groups accept interns and send them to member companies or farms for training. The overwhelming majority of problems occur in the latter segment.

Many irregularities in the program were pointed out during Diet deliberations to revise the law, such as foreign trainees working long hours and being paid below-minimum wages of about 300 yen per hour. Some trainees reportedly cannot quit the program midway through because the agencies in their countries that sent them to Japan will demand large penalty charges.

A majority of trainees are said to be unskilled laborers who only want to make money in this country.

The 31-year-old Chinese intern who died suddenly in 2008 while working at a metal plating company in Ibaraki Prefecture is a typical case. He was allegedly forced to work for low pay and to put in 100 to 150 hours of overtime every month. He was allowed only two days off per month.

A labor standards inspection office in the prefecture intends to recognize his death as the result of overwork.

In 2008, labor offices around the country instructed companies to improve labor conditions for foreign trainees in a total of 2,612 cases.

The reality is far from the program’s ideal of contributing to the international community. It seems industries that cannot hire Japanese workers have been taking advantage of it to quietly use foreign labor.

Wishful thinking

The revised law stipulates that the Labor Standards Law and the Minimum Wage Law apply to foreign trainees from their first year in the program; under the old law, they applied only from the second year. The revised law also requires industrial organizations to strengthen their instruction and supervision of member companies that accept foreign interns.

However, some of the companies using foreign interns have been ignoring labor-related regulations. Many industrial organizations and their member companies are like fraternities–can we really expect these organizations to strictly supervise their members?

Many trainees have to go home because the companies they work for suddenly go bankrupt. At the very least, the revised law should have included a measure to prohibit struggling companies from accepting interns.

The government-authorized program has become a legal loophole for hiring unskilled foreign laborers. The government must move forward with discussions on how this country should accept foreign workers in the future.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/editorial/20100721TDY02T01.htm

Meager pay keeps ranks of instructors in doldrums

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It may not be well-known, but [Japanese language instruction] has also been on the rise, with more people than ever trying to learn [the language]. But the number of Japanese who teach nonnative speakers isn’t growing, partly due to lack of interest among academic circles and the low pay at private language schools that derives in part from restrictions on management.

Some advocates stress the need to get the numbers up, as Japan is aging rapidly and reliance on an immigrant workforce is going to grow, thus it is important that newcomers be conversant in the language.

According to the education ministry, foreigners in the country studying Japanese increased to 170,858 in fiscal 2009 from 135,146 in fiscal 2003.

The number of Japanese-language teachers, excluding volunteers, dropped from 14,047 to 13,437 over the same period.

The trend is particularly noticeable at the nation’s universities. Foreign students studying Japanese at such institutions rose to 53,546 in fiscal 2009 from 34,880 four years earlier. Despite the jump, the number of teachers stayed almost unchanged, 4,250 last year versus 4,240 in fiscal 2003.

Satoshi Miyazaki, a professor at the graduate school of Japanese applied linguistics at Waseda University, said it is unfortunate teacher ranks are not growing. They should be boosted and put in positions of responsibility to enable a long-term commitment, otherwise, for example, universities would have a hard time improving their programs for international students.

The slow growth in Japanese teachers is shared by private language academies. Such commercial entities had 5,947 teachers and 50,479 students in fiscal 2003, compared with 5,959 teachers and 53,047 students in fiscal 2009.

“One reason for the lack of Japanese teachers is because it’s not a well-paid job,” said Nobuo Suzuki, who manages Arc Academy, a Japanese-language school with several branches in the Tokyo and Kansai areas.

Suzuki explained that about 80 percent of his teachers work part time and most are women.

The hourly wage is about ¥1,700 to ¥1,800 for new part-time teachers, who can only teach around three hours a week when they start out. Their hours can go up every three months and the part-time wage can rise to about ¥2,500.

An experienced teacher makes on average ¥7,000 to ¥8,000 a day.

Suzuki said full-time teachers with 10 years of experience earn about ¥4 million a year.

The meager pay means few young people, especially men, want to become Japanese-language teachers, people in the field say.

Yumiko Furukawa, a full-time teacher at Arc Academy who has been in the game for four years, said the high turnover rate — teachers last an average of only two years — is mainly because of wages.

“It is quite difficult to support an entire household by teaching Japanese, but there are many who love teaching Japanese, and I think Japanese-language teaching is supported by their passion,” said Furukawa, 41, whose husband also works so she doesn’t have to rely on just her wages.

[Makoto Murakami, head of the editorial department at the monthly magazine Gekkan Nihongo (Monthly Japanese)] Murakami likened Japanese-language teachers to nurses and caregivers.

“The number of people who will need caregivers will increase sharply, but the number of caregivers doesn’t grow because the job conditions aren’t very good,” and if the situation doesn’t change there won’t be enough Japanese teachers, even though the number of foreigners is likely to keep increasing, Murakami said.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20100820f3.html

Strict immigration rules may threaten Japan’s future

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Her new country needs her, her new employer adores her, and Joyce Anne Paulino, who landed here 14 months ago knowing not a word of the language, can now say in Japanese that she’d like very much to stay. But Paulino, 31, a nurse from the Philippines, worries about the odds. To stay in Japan long-term, she must pass a test that almost no foreigner passes.

For Japan, maintaining economic relevance in the next decades hinges on its ability — and its willingness — to grow by seeking outside help. Japan has long had deep misgivings about immigration and has tightly controlled the ability of foreigners to live and work here.

But with the country’s population expected to fall from 127 million to below 100 million by 2055, Prime Minister Naoto Kan last month took a step toward loosening Japan’s grip on immigration, outlining a goal to double the number of highly skilled foreign workers within a decade.

In Japan, just 1.7 percent of the population (or roughly 2.2 million people) is foreign or foreign-born. Foreigners represent small slices of almost every sector of the economy, but they also represent the one slice of the population with a chance to grow. Japan is on pace to have three workers for every two retirees by 2060.

But the economic partnership program that brought Paulino and hundreds of other nurses and caretakers to Japan has a flaw. Indonesian and Filipino workers who come to care for a vast and growing elderly population cannot stay for good without passing a certification test. And that test’s reliance on high-level Japanese — whose characters these nurses cram to memorize — has turned the test into a de facto language exam.

Ninety percent of Japanese nurses pass the test. This year, three of 254 immigrants passed it. The year before, none of 82 passed.

For immigrant advocates, a pass-or-go-home test with a success rate of less than 1 percent creates a wide target for criticism — especially at a time when Japan’s demographics are increasing the need for skilled foreign labor.

For many officials in the government and the medical industry, however, difficulties with the program point to a larger dilemma confronting a country whose complex language and resistance to foreigners make it particularly tough to penetrate.

Kan’s goal to double the number of skilled foreign workers seems reasonable enough, given that Japan currently has 278,000 college-educated foreign workers — the United States has more than 8 million, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development — but it meets some resistance.

An Asahi Shimbun newspaper poll in June asked Japanese about accepting immigrants to “maintain economic vitality.” Twenty-six percent favored the idea. Sixty-five percent opposed it. And the likelihood of substantive changes in immigration policy took a major hit, experts said, when Kan’s ruling Democratic Party of Japan saw setbacks in parliamentary elections this month.

Political analysts now paint a grim picture of a country at legislative impasse. Foreigners such as Paulino find it difficult to get here, difficult to thrive and difficult to stay, and at least for now, Kan’s government will have a difficult time changing any of that.

‘A lack of urgency’

“There’s a lack of urgency or lack of sense of crisis for the declining population in Japan,” said Satoru Tominaga, director of Garuda, an advocacy group for Indonesian nurse and caretaker candidates. “We need radical policy change to build up the number” of such workers. “However, Japan lacks a strong government; if anything, it’s in chaos.”

When Japan struck economic partnership agreements with Indonesia and the Philippines, attracting nurses and caretakers wasn’t the primary objective. Japan sought duty-free access for its automakers to the Southeast Asian market. Accepting skilled labor was just part of the deal.

But by 2025, Japan will need to almost double its number of nurses and care workers, currently at 1.2 million. And because of the test, substandard language skills, not substandard caretaking skills, are keeping the obvious solution from meeting the gaping need.

The 998 Filipino and Indonesian nurses and caretakers who’ve come to Japan since 2008 all have, at minimum, college educations or several years of professional experience. Nurses can stay for three years, with three chances to pass the test. Other caregivers can stay for four years, with one chance to pass. Those who arrive in Japan take a six-month language cram class and then begin work as trainees.

They are allotted a brief period every workday — 45 minutes, in Paulino’s case — for language study. Many also study for hours at night.

“The language skills, that is a huge hurdle for them,” said Kiichi Inagaki, an official at the Japan International Corporation for Welfare Services, which oversees the program. “However, if you go around the hospital, you understand how language is important. Nurses are dealing with medical technicalities. They are talking to doctors about what is important. In order to secure a safe medical system, they need a very high standard of Japanese.”

Advocates for foreign nurses and caregivers do not play down the importance of speaking and understanding Japanese. But they emphasize that the Japanese characters for medical terminology are among the hardest to learn; perhaps some jargon-heavy portion of the certification test, they say, could be given in English or workers’ native language.

A new culture

When Paulino boarded a flight from Manila to Tokyo in May 2009, she had a sense of trepidation and adventure — not that she could express it in Japanese. She saw her mission as a way to make better money and “explore herself,” she said. Her first chance for exploration came onboard, when a meal of rice, which she doesn’t like, came with chopsticks, which she didn’t know how to use.

“All the way to Japan, we were joking about that,” said Fritzie Perez, a fellow Filipino nurse who sat in the same row. “We were saying, ‘Joyce, how are you going to eat?’ ”

Now eight months into her stint at the Tamagawa Subaru nursing home, Paulino feels comfortable speaking and joking with the elderly people she cares for.

“She did have problems initially, especially in the Japanese language, but there’s been so much improvement,” said Keisuke Isozaki, head of caretaking at the home. “She’s not capable of writing things down for the record, but otherwise she’s as capable as any Japanese staffer.”

Paulino said she is nervous about her test, scheduled for January 2013. This month, 33 nurses and caretakers returned to their home countries, discouraged with their chances.

Her friend, Perez, described the language study and the caretaking as “serving two masters at the same time.”

“When I get home, that’s when I study,” Paulino said. “But every time I read my book, I start to fall asleep. It’s bothering me. Because [the test] is only one chance. And I don’t know if I can get it.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/27/AR2010072706053.html