In August 2018 at the age of 19, Le Thi Thuy Linh arrived in Japan to work as a jisshusei intern. Each day, she handled agricultural wastewater at a tangerine orchard in Kumamoto Prefecture. Japan’s rapidly ageing population has created a dearth of agricultural workers, forcing farmers to turn to young foreign interns like Linh to maintain their farms.
SNA (Tokyo) — On July 1, the US State Department cited Attorney Shoichi Ibuski as one of seven heroes in its 2021 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report for his long years of work fighting for the rights of foreign workers caught up in Japan’s technical intern program.
The TIP report explained how domestic and overseas brokers continue to abuse this system, ostensibly to provide technical training to those from poorer countries, to exploit foreign workers. It went on to condemn the Japanese government for lacking the political will to investigate the system’s victims and provided them real protection.