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Japan's Internship Training Program for Foreign Workers: Education or Exploitation?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Kamata Satoshi
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They fall deep in debt, and one trainee became so disturbed that he committed murder.

In 1993, when Japan still depended on foreign labor in the last days before the Bubble Economy burst, the Japanese government introduced a Foreign Training Internship Program. Although it was claimed that this system was designed to support foreigners in their acquisition of technical skills and knowledge of Japanese advanced technology, in reality it has been used to make up for a shortage of unskilled labor in Japan. Because the Japanese government is reluctant to invite transnational migrant laborers into the country, companies have had to look for new ways to find workers. As a result, many foreigners enrolled in the training-internship program—with valid three-year work permits—become a source of cheap labor, and end up working under wretched conditions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 6 , Issue 7 , July 2008 , e14
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2008

References

Notes

[1] This is actually more intrusive than it might appear at first glance as health insurance cards are often used as de facto ID's in Japan.

[2] This is the Ministry formerly known internationally as MITI.

[3] This 64 page booklet was released in 2004. An English version is available at http://www.jitco.or.jp/english/overview/english_manuals.html (then click on sendorg_manual_English.pdf). For the quotes that Kamata uses in the next few paragraphs, I have used this translation as I believe it captures in their own words the flavor of what the organization is trying to accomplish and the language in which its ideas were conveyed to many trainee/workers.

[4] Manual cited above, p. ii. In the interest of clarity, I have quoted from the manual a bit more extensively than in Kamata's original.

[5] Manual cited above, p. 1.

[6] Manual cited above, p. ii.

[7] The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 destroyed much of Tokyo and the surrounding area, and more than 100,000 people died, though the exact numbers may be higher. In the chaos and social upheaval that followed, an estimated two to three thousand Koreans were killed after rumors spread that they were looting and poisoning wells. The police and army were accused of doing little to quell the vigilante mobs attacking Koreans, and the incident is still a sensitive issue in the Japanese Korean community today.

[8] Kamata is referring to the influx of workers to the cities from the rural areas in Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These tales of hardship comprise much of Japanese popular culture, even today. His point, however, is that being Japanese, these internal migrants at least had a chance to eke out a life for themselves.

[9] This phrase, “gozoku kyowa”, literally the “harmony of the five races” [of Asia], was widely used in the 1930s and 40s as a justification for Japan's attempts to colonize Korea, Manchuria, China and other parts of Asia.