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.
Japan, give us a break!
Time after time I’ve been in offices here where people feel under pressure not to take time off, for lunches or anything else.
According to a report by Harris Interactive this year, Japanese workers took off an average of 9.3 of their 16.6 legally mandated vacation days.
As anyone who works here knows, even that remarkable statistic hides a lot of pain. Most office workers contribute dozens of hours per month in unpaid overtime. Many don’t get proper dinner breaks and toil away into the evening. More than once I’ve seen friends arrive at 9 p.m. and congratulate themselves on getting home early.
Is it because everyone is so busy they can’t afford time off? Of course not — productivity in Japanese offices is low. Most people could easily do the work they’re assigned in half the time.
The really distressing thing is that bosses don’t even have to demand this masochistic behavior from employees here — workers police themselves.
Reformers in Britain and elsewhere discovered over a century ago that happy employees are motivated, productive employees.
Economists say one of Japan’s biggest structural problems is chronic underconsumption, in part because millions of workers have so little opportunity to spend their hard-earned cash.
And one more thing: Giving reasonable working hours to men and women would give them more time to meet, fall in love and rescue Japan from its marriage and fertility crisis.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/perspectives/news/20100916p2a00m0na004000c.html
小学校英語どうなる：打ち合わせは「偽装請負」？ 指導助手活用できず 業務委託、派遣で問題
目の前にＡＬＴ（外国語指導助手）がいても、教諭は授業の打ち合わせができない。授業中の指示も禁止。すべてＡＬＴを派遣している請負業者とファクスなどを使ったやりとりでしか伝えられない－－。
Average hourly minimum wage to rise 17 yen to 730 yen
The nation’s weighted-average hourly minimum wage will rise by 17 yen from the previous year to 730 yen in the current fiscal year that started in April, the largest increase since fiscal 2002 when such wages were first calculated by the hour, the labor ministry said Friday.
The Central Minimum Wages Council, a Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry advisory panel, recommended last month that the hourly wage be raised by between 10 and 30 yen. Local panels in 42 of the 47 prefectures in the country have since added between 1 and 6 yen to the council’s recommendations for their prefectures.
The minimum wage will be revised beginning in early October.
The lowest hourly minimum wage in the country will be 642 yen. Tottori, Shimane, Kochi and Kagoshima prefectures will join Saga, Nagasaki, Miyazaki and Okinawa, where the lowest-level minimum wages have prevailed since the revisions in fiscal 2009.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20100911p2g00m0dm001000c.html
Household income gap hit record in 2008
Japan’s household income gap reached its highest level on record in 2008, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has announced.
The so-called Gini coefficient — an indicator used to measure the inequality of income distribution — hit a record 0.5318 in 2008, up 0.0055 points from the previous survey in 2005.
The Gini coefficient ranges in value between 0 and 1, with 0 suggesting the perfect equality and 1 the maximal disparity in wealth distribution.
The average initial household income for 2008 was 4,451,000 yen, down 4.4 percent from the previous survey, while the average household income after the redistribution of national income was 5,179,000 yen — a drop of 5.8 percent from 2005.
Among working generations, the intra-generation income gap was relatively large among those aged 29 or younger, with the index remaining at 0.344 even after tax and social insurance payments.
The survey also revealed that the working generations failed to benefit from the income redistribution, with all households headed by those under 60 years paying more premiums than they received as welfare benefits.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20100902p2a00m0na014000c.html
Gov’t to help foreign residents master Japanese language
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
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
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.
Japanese women stand low on corporate ladder 25 yrs after law change
Twenty five years have passed since the Equal Employment Opportunity Law for Men and Women was enacted to fight gender inequality at the workplace. By this time, people might think that a horde of college-educated women are calling the shots as corporate managers. But the latest Kyodo News survey shows that is hardly the case.
Of Japan’s 110 major corporations polled, 107 said it is important to use women’s talents, but women who are small section heads account for an average of a mere 5.4 percent of the total number of those holding that title. Of the total number of managers heading larger departments, women made up 2.5 percent. The figure goes down further to 1.7 percent for women corporate executives. In contrast, around 40 percent of corporate managers are women in other advanced countries, such as the United States and Germany.
The Japanese government has set a goal of boosting the percentage of women in managerial or other leadership positions to 30 percent by 2020, but Japanese companies appear to be less enthusiastic about the idea. Asked to give the percentages of women they want to see in managerial positions, the corporate respondents said an average of 18.6 percent for section chiefs, 15.4 percent for department heads and 14.4 percent for executives.
Still, out of this year’s new hires holding fast-track positions for managerial posts, an average of 27.7 percent were women.
Companies do want to employ more women because they are in desperate need of highly skilled workers because the country’s working population is shrinking. But the poll results suggest that there is still a widespread notion that business management is a man’s job. On the other hand, a significant number of firms want female workers to do more to improve the fortunes of employers.
Asked what they want out of female employees, 27 firms said they want women to reform their companies, and 22 said they hope to see female workers make more use of traits unique to women. Of the companies that find female employees somewhat wanting, 28 said women should acquire a broader perspective, 13 said women should be more flexible and 12 said they do not want them to quit early.
Commenting on the poll results, Professor Takashi Kashima, a gender studies expert at Jissen Women’s University, argues that there is a misconception among companies that women do not possess a broad perspective and are less flexible compared with their male colleagues. ”If they really want female workers to engineer reform, corporate managers should do more to give women their say,” he said.
Following the enforcement of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law in April 1986, further legislative reform and in-house changes at companies have done a lot to put men and women on a more equal footing. Still, women remain quite disadvantaged when it comes to obtaining secure employment.
Nonregular workers, who enjoy little job security, have become a serious social issue and male temps sacked by manufacturers have drawn much public attention over the past several years. Government statistics show, however, that some 70 percent of nonregular workers are women and the percentage has remained more or less the same for more than 20 years. Asked why many of their female employees are nonregular workers, 72 firms said women have difficulty holding down jobs as regular staff for a long period of time because they need to raise children. A total of 59 said the odds are against women seeking regular employment if they have quit their jobs in the past.
Many corporate respondents also said it is quite rare for temporary workers, who work as office clerks, an occupation usually associated with women, to become regular employees. Those who have gained regular work status tend to be workers who possess specialized skills and have worked full time at given companies for several years.
The situation for working women appears to be improving as public concern has grown recently about the need to help women keep their jobs while starting a family. Against this backdrop, 75 percent of the corporate respondents said they are implementing some measures to help regular female workers with children. Also, 65 percent have instituted a system that grants nonregular female staff regular employee status.
The poll results amply demonstrate that corporate managers are aware that they are no longer in a position to rely solely on male employees, says Jissen Women’s University’s Kashima. ”The survey shows that a large proportion of companies deem it important to utilize the talents of women on the grounds of gender equality, and that says much about the growth over the past quarter of a century of public understanding about the ideals upheld by the Equal Employment Opportunity Law,” he said. Still, much has to be done to promote the career advancement of women and make it easier for them to stay in the workforce to utilize their potential, Kashima added.
The Kyodo poll was conducted on top managers or executives in charge of employment matters at 110 companies between late July and early August.
http://home.kyodo.co.jp/modules/fstStory/index.php?storyid=519976
Japan looks for answers as China surges past
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.