Japan Has a New Guest Worker Program—Just Don’t Call It an Immigration Policy
Abe’s plan to grant five-year residency permits to 345,000 low-skilled workers will launch soon.
Kenichi Tanaka at a construction site in Kanagawa prefecture, Japan. His company employs several Vietnamese workers through a technical trainee program set up in the 1990s.
Photographer: Noriko Hayashi for Bloomberg Businessweek
Naosuke Sugihara runs a business that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Since 2016 he’s been recruiting Filipinos, Vietnamese, and Chinese for low-skilled jobs at Japanese hotels, nursing homes, and food-processing plants. Despite the country’s long-standing resistance to employing foreigners, Sugihara’s company, Gaijinbank—gaijin means “outsider” in Japanese—is on track to place more than 500 people this year, about double what it did in 2018. “This is just the start,” Sugihara says. “A big wave is coming.”
As President Trump and other leaders in the West move to erect barriers to immigration, Japan is moving in the opposite direction. The number of foreign workers has doubled in the past five years, entering via a back door for student visa holders and overseas trainees. Beginning in April, the front door will open a bit wider as Japan starts officially issuing visas for unskilled guest workers, something it’s never done before.