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Japan Training Program Is Said to Exploit Workers

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Six young Chinese women arrived in this historic city three summers ago, among the tens of thousands of apprentices brought to Japan each year on the promise of job training, good pay and a chance at a better life back home.

Instead, the women say, they were subjected to 16-hour workdays assembling cellphones at below the minimum wage, with little training of any sort, all under the auspices of a government-approved “foreign trainee” program that critics call industrial Japan’s dirty secret.

“My head hurt, my throat stung,” said Zhang Yuwei, 23, who operated a machine that printed cellphone keypads, battling fumes that she said made the air so noxious that managers would tell Japanese employees to avoid her work area.

Ms. Zhang says she was let go last month after her employer found that she and five compatriots had complained to a social worker about their work conditions. A Japanese lawyer is now helping the group sue their former employer, seeking back pay and damages totaling $207,000.

Critics say foreign trainees have become an exploited source of cheap labor in a country with one of the world’s most rapidly aging populations and lowest birthrates. All but closed to immigration, Japan faces an acute labor shortage, especially for jobs at the country’s hardscrabble farms or small family-run factories.

“The mistreatment of trainees appears to be widespread,” said Shoichi Ibusuki, a human rights [and Zenkoku Ippan Tokyo General Union] lawyer based in Tokyo.

From across Asia, about 190,000 trainees — migrant workers in their late teens to early 30s — now toil in factories and farms in Japan. They have been brought to the country, in theory, to learn technical expertise under an international aid program started by the Japanese government in the 1990s.

For businesses, the government-sponsored trainee program has offered a loophole to hiring foreign workers. But with little legal protection, the indentured work force is exposed to substandard, sometimes even deadly, working conditions, critics say.

Government records show that at least 127 of the trainees have died since 2005 — or one of about every 2,600 trainees, which experts say is a high death rate for young people who must pass stringent physicals to enter the program. Many deaths involved strokes or heart failure that worker rights groups attribute to the strain of excessive labor.

The Justice Ministry found more than 400 cases of mistreatment of trainees at companies across Japan in 2009, including failing to pay legal wages and exposing trainees to dangerous work conditions. This month, labor inspectors in central Japan ruled that a 31-year-old Chinese trainee, Jiang Xiaodong, had died from heart failure induced by overwork.

Under pressure by human rights groups and a string of court cases, the government has begun to address some of the program’s worst abuses. The United Nations has urged Japan to scrap it altogether.

After one year of training, during which the migrant workers receive subsistence pay below the minimum wage, trainees are allowed to work for two more years in their area of expertise at legal wage levels. But interviews with labor experts and a dozen trainees indicate that the foreign workers seldom achieve those pay rates.

On paper, the promised pay still sounds alluring to the migrant workers. Many are from rural China, where per-capita disposable income can be as low as $750 a year. To secure a spot in the program, would-be trainees pay many times that amount in fees and deposits to local brokers, sometimes putting up their homes as collateral — which can be confiscated if trainees quit early or cause trouble.

The Japan International Training Cooperation Organization, or Jitco, which operates the program, said it was aware some companies had abused the system and that it was taking steps to crack down on the worst cases. The organization plans to ensure that “trainees receive legal protection, and that cases of fraud are eliminated,” Jitco said in a written response to questions.

Ms. Zhang says she paid $8,860 to a broker in her native Hebei Province for a spot in the program. She was assigned to a workshop run by Modex-Alpha, which assembles cellphones sold by Sharp and other electronics makers. Ms. Zhang said her employer demanded her passport and housed her in a cramped apartment with no heat, alongside five other trainees.

In her first year, Ms. Zhang worked eight-hour days and received $660 a month after various deductions, according to her court filing — about $3.77 an hour, or less than half the minimum wage level in Hiroshima. Moreover, all but $170 a month was forcibly withheld by the company as savings, and paid out only after Ms. Zhang pushed the company for the full amount, she said.

In her second year, her monthly wage rose to about $1,510 — or $7.91 an hour, according to her filing. That was still lower than the $8.56 minimum wage for the electronics industry in Hiroshima. And her employers withheld all but $836 a month for her accommodations and other expenses, according to her filing.

And as her wages went up, so did her hours, she said, to as many as 16 a day, five to six days a week. Modex-Alpha declined to comment on Ms. Zhang’s account, citing her lawsuit against the company.

As part of the government’s effort to clean up the program, beginning July 1, minimum wage and other labor protections have for the first time been applied to first-year workers. The government has also banned the confiscating of trainees’ passports.

But experts say it will be hard to change the program’s culture.

Economic strains are also a factor. Although big companies like Toyota and Mazda have moved much of their manufacturing to China to take advantage of low wages there, smaller businesses have found that impossible — and yet are still pressured to drive down costs.

“If these businesses hired Japanese workers, they would have to pay,” said Kimihiro Komatsu, a labor consultant in Hiroshima. “But trainees work for a bare minimum,” he said. “Japan can’t afford to stop.”

For almost three years, Catherine Lopez, 28, a trainee from Cebu, the Philippines, has worked up to 14 hours a day, sometimes six days a week, welding parts at a supplier for the Japanese carmaker Mazda. She receives as little as $1,574 a month, or $7.91 an hour — below the $8.83 minimum wage for auto workers in Hiroshima.

Ms. Lopez says Japanese managers at the supplier, Kajiyama Tekko, routinely hurl verbal abuses at her cohort of six trainees, telling them to follow orders or “swim back to the Philippines.”

“We came to Japan because we want to learn advanced technology,” Ms. Lopez said.

Yukari Takise, a manager at Kajiyama Tekko, denied the claims. “If they don’t like it here,” she said, “they can go home.”

But after inquiries by a reporter for The New York Times, a company that organizes the trainee program in Hiroshima, Ateta Japan, said it had advised Kajiyama Tekko to recalculate the wages it pays foreign trainees and ordered it to grant the vacation days owed to the trainees.

“They may have pushed the trainees too hard,” said Hideki Matsunishi, Ateta’s president. “But you must also feel sympathy for the companies, who are all struggling in this economy.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/21/business/global/21apprentice.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

Immigration procedures face huge shakeup

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As of July 1, there are big changes afoot for the laws governing foreign residency in Japan. Not since 1990, when the categories of residence increased from 18 to 27, has the Ministry of Justice’s Immigration Bureau undergone such a wholesale reordering of its operations.

What’s coming up? Aside from a number of smaller revisions, there will be an extension of the maximum length of permission to reside in Japan from three years to five, the abolishment of the re-entry stamp system required to leave the country and return, and — most significantly — the replacement of the Alien Registration Card issued by ward offices with a new Resident Card to be managed by the Immigration Bureau.

All the changes that were decided upon in this process are scheduled to be realized within three years of July 15, with the first already having taken effect on that date: the stipulation that the destination of someone deported from Japan shall not include countries proscribed by the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Of all the amendments, the abolition of re-entry permits for stays outside Japan of less than a year is probably the least controversial. It should come as welcome relief to all those who, having gone through the ordeal of getting their status of residence updated, have then had to buy the stamp for re-entry and stand in two more lines to complete that process.

The end of the re-entry-stamp process and the extension of residence status to five years should help reduce the workload of the Immigration Bureau centers, the staff of which totals only around 3,500 members across Japan, with a single immigration officer currently reviewing upwards of 50 or even 100 applications a day. At the same time, however, the bureau will be taking over full responsibility for the registration of foreign residents — a mammoth task involving the processing and centralization of a huge amount of information currently held in ward offices around the country.

The introduction of this new system will mean a reorganization of the Immigration Bureau on a major scale, and the Ministry of Justice is carrying out a study on how to ensure the bureau’s Immigration Centers run smoothly as the changes are implemented. So far, this has only resulted in advance PR, including leaflets distributed at immigration centers and details of the changes listed on their Web site ( www.immi-moj.go.jp/english/newimmiact/newimmiact_english.html ).

The assumption of responsibility for the ID system for and registration of foreign residents raises big questions, the answers to which immigration lawyers that regularly deal with the Immigration Bureau seem as uncertain of as the bureau is itself.

The transfer of responsibility for “gaijin cards” from ward offices to the Justice Ministry’s Immigration Bureau also raises important questions about what happens when a new resident arrives in Japan. At the moment, new residents with valid visas simply pass through immigration and are issued with their Alien Registration Cards on presentation of the correct paperwork at their local ward office.

There are sure to be bumps in the road as the changes come online. Some NGOs, such as the Committee against Resident Alien Card System, are concerned about the IC chip that will be embedded in the Resident Card, and in particular the security and privacy issues this raises, as well as penalties for filing changes late. The Immigration Bureau says that the chip will record “all or part of the information printed on the card,” which will consist of the cardholder’s name, birth date, sex, nationality, address, photograph, signature and status of residence. No further information has been provided by the bureau about penalties, except that they will be leveled if changes in the above information, as well as marital status, are not reported within 14 days.

For now, it is hard to tell what the reality of the new system will mean until it comes into effect — for both foreign residents as well as the Immigration Bureau, which has a lot of preparation to do as it adjusts to its new role as the central overseer of the expatriate population over the next three years. However, as far as Japan’s foreign community is concerned, the new system’s success is likely to boil down to one question: Will the handover of responsibility to the Justice Ministry mean a more bureaucratic, enforcement- heavy approach — or will it make life here that little bit easier?

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20100720zg.html

Fewer Foreigners In Japan For First Time In Half-Century

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The number of foreigners who officially call the Land of the Rising Sun home has fallen for the first time in nearly half a century, according to a report released by the Justice Ministry this week. In another blow to the country’s graying population and impending labor shortage, the number of registered foreign residents fell 31,000 to 2.186 million as of the end of the 2009, compared to the previous period. The last annual decline occurred in 1961.

The drop perhaps shouldn’t come as a shock in light of the financial crisis that sent Tokyo-based bankers packing and left swathes of corporate apartments in the posh and expatriate-friendly Roppongi neighborhood empty. But smaller urban areas saw the biggest declines, reflecting the reality of factory towns shedding thousands of jobs as the financial crisis turned into a full-blown economic maelstrom. Aichi prefecture, home to industrial heavyweights like Toyota Motor Corp. and Central Japan Railway Company, took the biggest hit, the number of foreigners dropping 13,600, or 6%, from the previous year to 215,000. Though it’s tough to pinpoint the exact reasons for foreigners quitting Japan, the ministry said fewer employment opportunities in manufacturing businesses certainly may have contributed.

Beyond economic factors, is Japan simply a tough haul for non-locals? Those that have stayed on now comprise just 1.71% of the overall Japanese population. That’s a relatively tiny slice, meaning that for some, it’s hard not to feel like an outsider looking in. While Japan has been quick to adapt some foreign customs, like eating hamburgers and playing baseball, into its cultural fabric, it’s been less successful at integrating residents from overseas, who often struggle to overcome language and culture barriers.

In an effort to combat its shrinking population, Japan eased its tough stance against migrant workers and allowed second- and third-generation people of Japanese origin to come to Japan as permanent workers. Many of the Japanese descendants based in South American countries like Brazil and Peru, where many Japanese nationals relocated to in the early 1900s in search of work, flocked to the country, but still, integration has been challenging.

There’s one group that’s bucked the trend: the Chinese, one of the few minority groups to grow its ranks in 2009. Overtaking the number of Korean residents, Chinese nationals became the largest minority group living in Japan in 2005. The group grew 25,140 over the last year and currently makes up nearly a third of the foreign population. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the number of Brazilian nationals, the third-largest minority group, saw the biggest fall, from 312,500 to 267,500.

If there are fewer legal foreign residents here, does that mean a drift into illegal immigration? Not according to estimates from the ministry. The number of illegal aliens, which has fallen by over 50% since 2005, continued to drop across the board last year, to 91,778 from 113,072 at the end of 2008, according to a March report released by the Justice Ministry.

http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2010/07/08/fewer-foreigners-in-japan-for-first-time-in-half-century/

Japanese firms to boost hiring of foreigners by up to 50%

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Major Japanese firms are planning to boost hiring of foreign nationals by up to 50 percent of their new recruits in fiscal 2011, officials of the companies said Tuesday.

Fast Retailing Co., the operator of the popular Uniqlo casual clothing chain, major convenience store chain Lawson Inc. and Rakuten Inc., which operates the largest Internet mall in Japan, are planning to recruit foreigners mainly from Asian countries including China, Taiwan and Malaysia, according to the officials.

As they are expanding global operations especially in emerging markets in Asia amid shrinking domestic sales, the three companies are accelerating operations to hire Asian graduates in their home countries and those studying at Japanese universities.

The firms hope to promote them to company executives in the future to lead their operations in the Asian markets, the officials said.

Fast Retailing said it is planning to hire about 300 foreigners, which accounts for about 50 percent of its planned new recruits for the year starting in April next year.

The company hopes to hire people who can work on its plan to open more shops in China and those who can serve as shop managers in Malaysia and Taiwan, where it plans to open its first outlets.

President Tadashi Yanai said it will further increase the hiring rate of foreign employees in fiscal 2012, with a plan for up to two-thirds of 1,000 planned new recruits to be foreigners.

Lawson is boosting recruitment of foreign students graduating from Japanese universities. It will continue hiring about 20-30 percent of its new recruits from such students from Asian countries, it said. It has already hired 66 foreign graduates in three years from fiscal 2008, which account for 20 percent of all the new recruits.

Rakuten said it will hire 150 foreigners among 600 new recruits it plans to employ in fiscal 2011.

It has agreed with China’s top Internet search engine Baidu Inc. to form a joint venture to launch an online mall in China in the second half of this year and hopes to utilize Chinese engineers to come up with services attracting customers in the Chinese market.

Other than the three companies, Panasonic Corp. has also been boosting its employment of foreigners. In fiscal 2011, it plans to increase the number of such employees to 1,100, up by 50 percent from the previous year, the company said, adding that the figure will account for 80 percent of the whole recruitment for the year.

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/business/news/20100706p2g00m0bu057000c.html

Ex-immigration boss: detentions too long

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llegal residents should not be held in detention for more than one year because any longer causes too much stress, a former chief of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau said, noting extended incarceration led to two hunger strikes at detention centers this year, one of which followed suicides.

“One year of confinement is mentally tough,” Hidenori Sakanaka, now director general of the independent think tank Japan Immigration Policy Institute, said in a recent interview with The Japan Times. “If that becomes a rule, bureau officials will try really hard to investigate thoroughly whether detainees warrant deportation or temporary release. They will work efficiently.”

He said he was unsure if applying a one-year rule would lead to an increase in detainees being granted temporary release or would trigger a rise in deportations, but added, “the Immigration Bureau must stop suicides and hunger strikes.”

There is no limit on how long the government can hold foreign residents deemed to be in Japan illegally. The Immigration Bureau’s Enforcement Division said 71 inmates out of 442 being held in three detention centers in Ibaraki, Osaka and Nagasaki prefectures had been confined for more than a year as of May 31.

Dozens of detainees went on hunger strikes lasting more than a week at the East Japan Immigration Control Center in Ushiku, Ibaraki Prefecture, in May and at the West Japan Immigration Control Center in Ibaraki, Osaka Prefecture, in March. They were demanding better treatment, including limiting their incarceration to six months.

The Ushiku inmates also demanded lowered bail for temporary release. A support group for people applying for refugee status said bail typically ranges between ¥500,000 and ¥800,000, but can be less than ¥200,000.

The immigration law stipulates bail must not exceed ¥3 million.

The hunger strikes failed to win any concessions.

The Ushiku center didn’t make any promises, said Mitsuru Miyasako of the inmate support group Bond.

The hunger strike followed two inmate suicides at the center. A Brazilian man hanged himself in February and a South Korean did likewise in April. The Brazilian had been confined three months and the South Korean six months, their supporters said.

“We will try to gauge the detainees’ mental health” to prevent suicides, said Tetsuro Isobe of the Immigration Bureau’s Enforcement Division. Plastic bags, which were used in both suicides, will also be banned, he said.

“We will also be flexible in handling the situation and try to reduce the duration of detention and the amount of bail,” he said. “Hunger strikes disturb the bureau’s operations and thus are inappropriate for making demands.”

On holding people younger than age 18, Isobe said the Immigration Bureau tries its best to find appropriate guardians for minors who are deportation candidates. If it can’t find them, detention is the only option, he added.

In addition to the three centers for long-term confinement, the Immigration Bureau has short-term cells in 16 regional bureaus where officers investigate to determine if illegal residents should be deported or released. Deportation candidates are moved to one of the three detention centers.

If those in the centers refuse to be deported or their countries of origins decline to accept them, confinement typically drags on, Sakanaka said. Iran tends to refuse deportees, including drug dealers and others convicted of other crimes in addition to overstaying their visas, he said.

Some detainees, including refugee applicants, petition for special permission to stay and await court decisions, becoming longtime detainees in the process, he said.

Another problem is that detention centers can’t release longtime inmates because the Immigration Bureau can’t keep track of them if they don’t have guarantors or people for emergency contact, Sakanaka said.

He said detention centers and the Immigration Bureau must give an explanation to the public about the suicides, hunger strikes and the treatment of detainees, and also explain how a Ghanaian man who was overpowered by immigration officers while being placed on a jetliner for deportation from Narita airport in March died on the plane in handcuffs.

Sakanaka, who headed the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau from April 2002 to March 2005, said he worked hard to disclose how detainees were treated and allowed them to make phone calls freely during the day. Other regional bureaus and detention centers followed suit after him, he said.

When the bureau integrated operations in Jujo and Otemachi, Tokyo, into the new building in Shinagawa in February 2003, it was a chance for him to overhaul operations, he said.

In addition to allowing phone calls, he abolished the practice of having a bureau officer present when a detainee has a visitor.

The eased arrangement allowed inmates to feel safe telling people outside the bureau the truth about their treatment and other things, and the bureau saves on manpower. He also stopped bureau officers from looking at letters addressed to detainees.

“I thought making immigration offices open will make them better,” he said. “Hunger strikes would not have been public information if inmates had not been allowed to make phone calls. The incidents give the Immigration Bureau a chance to improve itself.”

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20100714f1.html

Foreigners’ voting rights

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In their election manifestoes, New Komeito, the Japanese Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party pledge to achieve foreign suffrage. Other parties, like the Liberal Democratic Party, the People’s New Party, the Sunrise Party of Japan and Your Party, are opposed to the change.

In contrast, the ruling Democratic Party of Japan’s manifesto says nothing about the issue. When the DPJ was formed, its party platform said foreign suffrage should be “realized quickly.” After gaining power, then Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and then Secretary-General Ichiro Ozawa were eager to make this happen.

But the DPJ’s coalition partner, the People’s New Party, and some local assemblies reject the idea. Even some DPJ members are against the move.

More than 2.2 million foreign residents are registered in Japan, and 910,000 of them have been granted permanent resident status. Japan is already a country comprising people with various backgrounds. It is appropriate to have those people rooted in their local communities to share the responsibility in solving problems and developing their communities.

It is also appropriate to allow their participation in local elections as residents, while respecting their bonds to their home nations.

In its new strategy for economic growth, the government says it will consider a framework for taking in foreigners to supplement the work force. To become an open country, Japan must create an environment that foreigners find easy to live in.

An Asahi Shimbun survey in late April and May showed that 49 percent of the respondents were in favor of foreign suffrage while 43 percent were against it.

Since public opinion is divided, the DPJ, which put the issue on the public agenda, should not waffle but should give steady and persuasive arguments to the public.

The LDP is raising the tone of its criticism, saying foreigners’ voting rights, along with the dual surname system for married couples, is a policy that will “destroy the framework of this country.” The party apparently wants to make the voting rights issue a major conflicting point between conservatives and liberals.

Some opponents express concerns about the negative effects on national security. However, this kind of argument can nurture anti-foreign bigotry and ostracism. It sounds like nothing more than an inward-looking call for self-preservation.

Some say foreigner suffrage goes “against the Constitution.” However, it is only natural to construe from the Supreme Court ruling of February 1995 that the Constitution neither guarantees nor prohibits foreigner suffrage but rather “allows” it.

The decision on foreign suffrage depends on legislative policy.

In an age when people easily cross national borders, what kind of society does Japan wish to become? How do we determine the qualifications and rights of people who comprise our country and communities? To what extent do we want to open our gates to immigrants? How do we control social diversity and turn it into energy?

Politicians need to discuss the suffrage issue based on their answers to these questions. The issue of foreign residents’ voting rights is a prelude to something bigger.

http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201007050358.html

Department stores and sweat shops

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It’s one Japan for rich Chinese shoppers, another for low-skilled workers

Many Japanese strive to keep up egalitarian appearances. Porsche drivers keep their cars tactfully hidden away. Houses of the well-heeled are unflashy. In the finest department stores, even the demure “elevator girls” are treated with impeccable politeness.

But when it comes to the way Japan treats its nouveau riche neighbour, China, different rules apply. Two events this month betray the double standards with which Japanese officialdom treats China’s rich and poor. On July 1st Japan relaxed visa requirements for well-off Chinese tourists. It was not stated how much anyone needed to earn to apply for one. But as long as they had at least a gold credit card and a solid professional or civil-service job to go back to, they were free to come to Japan, to shop until they dropped.

Far from the bright lights of Japan’s shopping districts, however, young Chinese working in small industrial firms get anything but red-carpet treatment. On July 5th Kyodo, a news agency, reported that 21 Chinese were among 27 foreign trainees who died last year on a government-sponsored skills-transfer scheme for developing countries that over the past four years has brought in an average of 94,000 workers a year, mostly from China.

Of the 27, nine died of heart or brain diseases, four died while working and three committed suicide. A few days earlier officials confirmed that a 31-year-old Chinese trainee who died in 2008 after clocking up about 100 hours a month of overtime was the victim not of heart failure, as originally reported, but of “karoshi”, the Japanese affliction of death from overwork.

Japan International Training Co-operation Organisation, the outfit set up by five government ministries to oversee the skills-transfer programme, refuses to discuss the deaths. But Lila Abiko, of the Lawyers’ Network for Foreign Trainees, an NGO, says many guest-workers do so much low-paid overtime—with the support of their employers—that they literally work themselves to death. The mortality rate from heart disease and other stress-related ailments among trainees in their 20s and 30s is almost double that of Japanese of the same age, she says. “Japan is the richest country in Asia, yet this programme is exploiting poor Chinese like slaves.”

Japan’s shrinking population is at the root of both phenomena. As domestic spending declines, Japan needs wealthy Chinese tourists to help prop up the local economy, and low-skilled Chinese trainees to help man its factories. Figures for both have climbed .

The worse the demographics become, the more useful it may be for Japan to have China on its doorstep. But for the moment, the best many Chinese can say about Japan is that they love its products. That is not the basis for an enduring affinity.

http://www.economist.com/node/16542515?story_id=16542515

33 foreign care workers go home; test too difficult

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Thirty-three Filipinos and Indonesians who came to Japan to work as nurses and nursing care workers have returned home after becoming discouraged by their slim prospects of passing the national exams for their professions, it has been learned.

Eleven went home after learning they had failed the latest annual nursing exam. Only 1.2 percent of foreign applicants have passed the exam.

More would-be nurses and care workers could decide to return home after becoming discouraged by the language barrier in the exams, according to observers.

The government plans to review the exams’ format, including the language and terminology used.

Since fiscal 2008, 998 nurses and care workers have arrived in Japan under bilateral economic partnership agreements with the Philippines and Indonesia.

No foreign applicant passed last year’s exams, as they apparently had difficulty understanding kanji and technical terms written in Japanese. This year, only three passed the nursing exam.

The 33 trainees who returned home were among the 880 who arrived in fiscal 2008 and 2009. They comprised 15 Indonesians, including 12 nurses, and 18 Filipinos, including 11 nurses.

According to the Japanese International Corporation of Welfare Service, which oversees the program, 118 nurses and care-givers arrived this fiscal year.

Under the bilateral agreements, the nurses are given help learning Japanese and preparing for the exams while working at hospitals and care facilities in the nation.

Applicants can take the exam when they are deemed to have professional skills and knowledge equal to those of graduates of Japanese nursing schools or university nursing science departments.

These foreigners can work in Japan as certified nurses or care workers only if they pass the exams within three or four years of arriving here, respectively. They can only work in limited trainee nurse roles until they pass the exam: If they fail to pass the exam before the three- or four-year term expires, they must return home.

An expert panel of the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry this month discussed measures to alleviate the problem, such as using simpler alternatives to difficult technical terms in the nursing exams.

The panel will draw up proposals as soon as next month.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T100709004684.htm

Labor standards office to rule Chinese trainee at metal plant died of overwork

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A local labor standards inspection office [in Ibaraki Prefecture] is set to recognize the death of a Chinese trainee at a metal processing factory was caused by overwork, officials said.

This will be the first time that the death of a foreign vocational trainee in Japan has been recognized as a work-related accident, according to a liaison council of attorneys working on issues related to foreign trainees.

Jiang Xiaodong died of heart failure at the company residence of Fuji Denka Kogyo in Itako, Ibaraki Prefecture, in June 2008 while employed at its factory under a government-backed training program. His bereaved family filed a petition with the Kashima Labor Standards Inspection Office in August last year for compensation for a work-related accident.

The labor office has confirmed that Jiang worked up to 98 hours of overtime a month between March and May 2008. Moreover, the office has found that the company forged his payroll book based on a false time-clock card, destroyed relevant documents and failed to pay him some overtime wages.

The office then concluded that Jiang died from overwork resulting from working excessively long hours in violation of the Labor Standards Law. It has also sent an investigation document on the company’s 66-year-old president to prosecutors, accusing him of violating the Labor Standards Law.

The president denied that the victim’s death was a result of overwork. “He underwent a health check in April 2008, and we paid due attention to his health. We had him work overtime on his request. We don’t think his death was a work-related accident.”

Shoichi Ibusuki, an attorney for the bereaved family [and special guest at Tozen’s 2010 Convention], emphasized how common such cases may be, saying, “It’s difficult to file a petition for compensation for a foreign trainee’s death as a result of a work-related accident because we can’t easily contact bereaved families. The latest case is the tip of the iceberg.”

Approximately 87,000 foreign nationals have undergone vocational training in Japan under the government-backed program, some 65,700 of whom are Chinese.

Until the revised Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law came into force this month, trainees had not been recognized as workers — to whom the Labor Standards Law applies — during the first year of their training. Therefore, they were forced to work for extremely long hours at unreasonably low wages.

In fiscal 2008, a record 34 foreign vocational trainees died while they were in Japan, according to the Japan International Training Cooperation Organization. Of them, 16 died of brain or heart ailments allegedly caused by working too long — 2.5 times more than a year earlier.

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20100703p2a00m0na014000c.html

Chinese intern death in Japan ‘very likely’ due to overwork

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A Chinese intern employed in Japan under a government training program “very likely” died because he had been overworked, labour officials said Friday.

The 31-year-old man worked at a metal processing firm in Ibaraki prefecture, northeast of Tokyo, and died of cardiac arrest in June 2008 after working more than 100 hours overtime the month before.

The government program has long been criticized for the ease with which it can be used for labour exploitation, and lawyers said it was the first such death to be recognized as a result of overwork, but likely only the tip of the iceberg.

Japan has strict immigration rules, but some companies, especially in manufacturing, have used a loophole to bring in low-wage foreign workers on “training” schemes under the foreign assistance program.

Amid rising concern over abuses under the scheme, a government body announced last year that a record 34 workers from Asia, mainly Chinese nationals, had died in Japan in the year to March 2009 alone.

“This is a case very likely to be recognized as ‘karoshi’ (overwork death),” said a spokesman for the area labour office, adding the case was filed with prosecutors against the company Fuji Denka Kogyo and his 66-year-old boss.

Last year the Japan International Training Co-operation Organization, which oversees the nation’s training programs, said of the 34 deaths in the year to March 2009 that 16 died of heart and brain ailments, five died in workplace accidents and one committed suicide.

Some 190,000 foreigners — mainly from China, Indonesia and the Philippines — are currently believed to be in Japan on government training programs.

Lawyer Shoichi Ibusuki, a member of a legal group that has represented trainee workers in cases of alleged abuse [and special guest at Zenkoku Ippan Tokyo General Union‘s 2010 Convention], said that the foreign trainees are being exploited by Japanese companies.

Many of the trainees work on assembly lines, mainly in the textiles, food processing and machinery sectors.

Japan has one of the world’s lowest birth rates, but it has so far rejected allowing large-scale immigration of unskilled workers.

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Chinese+intern+death+Japan+very+likely+overwork/3227865/story.html