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Immigrants or Temporary Workers? A Visionary Call for a “Japanese-style Immigration Nation”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Glenda S. Roberts  and
Lawrence Repeta
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Since the Democratic Party took power in Japan with the Hatoyama administration in September 2009, there has been little movement on immigration issues in Japanese politics. There has, however, been notable discussion by civil society commentators who are advocating the establishment of some form of regularized immigration policy as a partial solution to Japan's demographic decline. Among them one could mention the policy proposals made by the Council on Population Education/Akashi Research Group (2010), “Seven Proposals for Japan to Reestablish its Place As a Respected Member of the International Community: Taking a Global Perspective on Japan's Future.” One of the seven proposals is to enact an Immigration Law and establish an Immigration Agency. The Council notes, “Political will and leadership will be required to take the necessary action for the enactment of such a law” (Council on Population Education/Akashi Research Group, 2010:6). In the current economic doldrums, however, with the media reporting on the difficulties even college students are facing trying to secure jobs before spring graduation, this political will is quite unlikely to surface.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 8 , Issue 48 , November 2010 , e3
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 2010

References

Notes

1 The full text of the UN Human Rights Committee's comment follows.

24. The Committee is concerned about reports that non-citizens who come to the State party under the Industrial Training and Technical Internship Programmes are excluded from the protection of domestic labour legislation and social security and that they are often exploited in unskilled labour without paid leave, receive training allowances below the legal minimum wage, are forced to work overtime without compensation and are often deprived of their passports by their employers. (arts. 8 and 26)

The State party should extend the protection of domestic legislation on minimum labour standards, including the legal minimum wage, and social security to foreign industrial trainees and technical interns, impose appropriate sanctions on employers who exploit such trainees and interns, and consider replacing the current programmes with a new scheme that adequately protects the rights of trainees and interns and focuses on capacity building rather than recruiting low-paid labour.

2 Numerous relevant issues are addressed in the contrasting essays by American and Japanese authors in Soft Power Superpowers – Cultural and National Assets of Japan and the United States (Watanabe and McConnell (eds.), M.E. Sharpe, 2008.) See Chapters 3 “Higher Education as a Projection of America's Soft Power” and 4 “Facing Crisis: Soft Power and Japanese Education in Global Context.”