Bucking a Global Trend, Japan Seeks More Immigrants. Ambivalently.

Dec. 7, 2018

A caregiver and a resident at Mother’s Garden, a nursing home in Kashiwa, Japan. “If we aren’t helped by foreign workers, this business would not survive,” its director says.Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

A caregiver and a resident at Mother’s Garden, a nursing home in Kashiwa, Japan. “If we aren’t helped by foreign workers, this business would not survive,” its director says.Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

KASHIWA, Japan — Vexed by labor shortages in their rapidly aging country, lawmakers relaxed Japan’s longstanding insularity early Saturday by authorizing a sharp increase in the number of foreign workers.

Under a bill approved by Parliament’s upper house in the early-morning hours, more than a quarter-million visas of five-year duration will be granted to unskilled guest laborers for the first time, starting in 2019.

The measure is a remarkable turn for Japan, surprising neighbors and maybe even itself. A nation that once embraced draconian limits on immigration is now reluctantly moving in the other direction, beckoning foreigners just as anti-immigrant political forces are roiling the West.

The change in Japan, however, is driven largely by economics and demographics. Japan has no other choice for filling jobs in a shrinking work force that is simply getting too old.

But not everybody is happy about it.

“To accept a lot of immigrants would break down the borders of our singular nation,” said Koichiro Goto, director of a nursing home company in Kashiwa, a suburb of Tokyo.

Still, however reluctantly, people like Mr. Goto support the new measure. He is desperate to hire caregivers at Mother’s Garden, a 70-room nursing home where there is a waiting list of 60 would-be residents and want ads almost never attract job applicants.

“If we aren’t helped by foreign workers,” he said, “this business would not survive.”

Under the new measure, between 260,000 and 345,000 five-year visas will be made available for workers in 14 sectors suffering severe labor shortages, including caregiving, construction, agriculture and shipbuilding.

The measure also creates a separate visa category for high-skilled workers, who will be allowed to stay for unlimited periods and enjoy greater benefits, including permission to bring their families to Japan.

Construction workers in Tokyo. Japan’s new law will offer five-year work visas for the first time, in construction, caregiving and other fields with severe labor shortages.Carl Court/Getty Images

Construction workers in Tokyo. Japan’s new law will offer five-year work visas for the first time, in construction, caregiving and other fields with severe labor shortages.Carl Court/Getty Images

The change appears to mark a significant turnaround for the right-leaning administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. As recently as three years ago, Mr. Abe said on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly that “there are many things that we should do before accepting immigrants.”

To cope with labor shortages resulting from a declining population, he advocated for more women in the workplace, delaying retirement and using robots to do jobs once filled by humans.

But Japan’s shrinking work force and rapidly aging population put pressure on Mr. Abe and his conservative supporters to accept that the nation’s demographic challenges could not be solved by internal measures alone.

In the absence of immigration, Japan’s population is projected to shrink by about 16 million people — or nearly 13 percent — over the next 25 years, while the proportion of those over the age of 65 is expected to rise from a quarter of the population to more than a third. In caregiving alone, the government estimates that employers will need an additional 377,000 workers by 2025.

The shortage of workers is “an urgent matter,” Mr. Abe said during a parliamentary session late last month. The country, he said, needs “foreign workers as soon as possible.”

Yet the new law, which came under considerable criticism from opposition parties, does not represent an embrace of immigration so much as a deeply ambivalent business calculation. The bill, strongly pushed by industry groups, is vague in some aspects and is designed to limit the kinds of work that foreigners can do, as well as how long they can stay.

“This isn’t about Japan becoming a multicultural society and it’s not about Japan opening its doors to become more globally oriented,” said Gabriele Vogt, a professor of Japanese politics and society at the University of Hamburg who has studied migration. “This is just very plain labor market politics.”

Although the new law marks a shift in official policy, Japan has long accepted foreign workers through backdoor routes, such as visas granted to Brazilians and Peruvians of Japanese descent or technical programs for interns, mainly from China and Southeast Asia, purportedly so they can be trained in skills to take back to their home countries. As of October, there were nearly 1.3 million foreign workers in Japan, according to the government.

Many employers use the trainees as cheap labor, and they often are abused. Between 2015 and 2017, the government reported that 63 foreign trainees had died from accidents or illness in Japan, with another six committing suicide.

Until recently, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had resisted the idea of bringing in more foreign workers.Carl Court/Getty Images

Until recently, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had resisted the idea of bringing in more foreign workers.Carl Court/Getty Images

Critics fear the new law could simply extend the exploitation of foreign workers. “Without monitoring or an inspection system, the system won’t be managed properly,” said Chikako Kashiwazaki, a sociology professor at Keio University in Tokyo.

In a sign of how deep suspicion of foreigners runs here, politicians from both the right and the left have questioned whether accepting more workers from abroad will disrupt society.

“We need to secure jobs for old and middle-aged people, women and the youth who could not get jobs because of social withdrawal or depression,” Shigeharu Aoyama, a lawmaker from Mr. Abe’s governing Liberal Democratic Party, wrote in Ironna, a right-leaning online magazine. “We need to stop foreigners from using Japan’s social welfare system.”

Addressing the House of Representatives late last month, Shiori Yamao, a lawmaker from the left-leaning Constitutional Democratic Party, the largest opposition group, warned that “if we open up the door without carefully designing the system, we will not be able to shut the door easily.”

At Mother’s Garden, the nursing home in Kashiwa, where Christmas decorations blanketed the halls, Mr. Goto, the director, said he worried about cultural clashes between Japanese and incoming foreign workers.

“I think it might be difficult for foreigners to understand” Japan’s spirit, he said.

But Kanako Matsuo, the nursing home’s facilities director, said the handful of workers from Taiwan, the Philippines and Vietnam who already work there “have the same hearts” as their Japanese colleagues.

“I don’t feel any gap in working with them,” Ms. Matsuo said.

At lunchtime on Thursday, Ayuko Iwai, 29, a Japanese caregiver, spooned mashed chicken and soft-boiled rice into a resident’s mouth. A colleague was helping someone else, but five other residents sat listlessly in wheelchairs before a television. Soon it would be time for the colleague’s break, and Ms. Iwai would be left to supervise 10 residents on her own.

“If we had more staff we could care for each patient more individually,” said Ms. Iwai.

Some employers say foreigners may not want nursing home jobs. “If we don’t elevate the status of caregiving we won’t be able to recruit enough workers,” said Kaoru Sasaki, vice chairman of an association that represents 2,800 operators of group homes for elderly patients with dementia.

The job can be grueling. At Mother’s Garden, caregivers bathe residents, change diapers and help them get dressed. They clean bathrooms and kitchens and take care of a pet rabbit. The average monthly pay after three years on the job is 200,000 yen (about $1,775, which works out to roughly $11 an hour).

A gathering of Japanese and foreign residents in Kashiwa, featuring dishes from a variety of cultures. Some Japanese fear that accepting more workers from abroad will disrupt their society.Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

A gathering of Japanese and foreign residents in Kashiwa, featuring dishes from a variety of cultures. Some Japanese fear that accepting more workers from abroad will disrupt their society.Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

Lower-skilled foreign workers on temporary visas are unlikely to have much choice of jobs and won’t be allowed to bring their families. Analysts worry they will be treated as mere cogs.

“It raises these much broader ethical questions that I don’t think the administration has thought through quite yet,” said Erin Chung, a professor of East Asian politics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “If anything, the administration might feel quite emboldened during the Trump era to enact policies that treat migrant workers and value them only for their labor without acknowledging their humanity.”

Mr. Abe has emphasized the temporary nature of the visas. But analysts say the government needs to develop a longer-term immigration policy.

Lully Miura, a lecturer on international politics at Tokyo University, predicted that China, which will also soon face a declining and aging population, would eventually start to recruit foreign workers as well. “So we have to create a proper system for foreign workers in order for them to stay and live and work happily in Japan,” she said.

Local governments struggle to provide services for foreigners. Katsutoshi Murayama, an official at Kashiwa City Hall, said workers had to publish guidelines for emergency evacuations and trash disposal in several languages. He wondered whether newcomers would acclimate to Japan’s rules-based culture.

“Our biggest worries are about whether they will be able to follow rules, like sorting the garbage,” he said.

Such concerns are often cited by Japanese who fear an influx of foreigners. Michelle Fukai — who was born in the Philippines, moved to Japan for work 13 years ago and married a Japanese man — said her neighbors had recently asked her to explain to a new Pakistani neighbor how to sort his recycling.

During a potluck lunch on Thursday at the Kashiwa Cross-Cultural Center, where a couple dozen foreign-born residents and Japanese volunteers shared homemade treats like pancit palabok, a Filipino noodle dish, Ms. Fukai said she hoped to become a caregiver at a local nursing home.

“Japan,” she said, “needs to be rescued by foreign workers.”

Correction: Dec. 13, 2018

An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of a contributor who helped in the reporting. He is Shunta Takino, not Tashino.

Makiko Inoue contributed reporting from Kashiwa, and Hisako Ueno and Shunta Takino from Tokyo.

A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 8, 2018, on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Out of Necessity, an Insular Japan Changes Its Tune on Foreign Caregivers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

The Times Sale. Subscribe for $1 a week. Ends soon.

This is your last free article.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4225992&forum_id=2#37968739)