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Dying to work: Japan Inc.’s foreign trainees
“The Industrial Trainees and Technical Interns program often fuels demand for exploitative cheap labor under conditions that constitute violations of the right to physical and mental health, physical integrity, freedom of expression and movement of foreign trainees and interns, and that in some cases may well amount to slavery. This program should be discontinued and…
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Uniqlo chief Yanai calls on Japan to internationalize, accept immigration
The positive sides to immigration are enormous, as immigrants would both increase the population and stimulate the economy. If Japanese come into everyday contact with foreigners from childhood, it would also help alleviate Japanese people’s distaste for internationalization. Europe, the U.S. and all the other advanced nations in the world accept immigrants. As the economy…
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Stop exploiting trainees as cheap labor: lawyers
It is high time the government faced facts and scrapped its industrial training and internship program because it is used to exploit foreign trainees as a cheap source of labor, a lawyer group said Thursday, claiming the purpose of the system and its reality are worlds apart. The trainee system is touted as making an…
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Japan Training Program Is Said to Exploit Workers
Six young Chinese women arrived in this historic city three summers ago, among the tens of thousands of apprentices brought to Japan each year on the promise of job training, good pay and a chance at a better life back home. Instead, the women say, they were subjected to 16-hour workdays assembling cellphones at below…
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Immigration procedures face huge shakeup
As of July 1, there are big changes afoot for the laws governing foreign residency in Japan. Not since 1990, when the categories of residence increased from 18 to 27, has the Ministry of Justice’s Immigration Bureau undergone such a wholesale reordering of its operations. What’s coming up? Aside from a number of smaller revisions,…
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Fewer Foreigners In Japan For First Time In Half-Century
The number of foreigners who officially call the Land of the Rising Sun home has fallen for the first time in nearly half a century, according to a report released by the Justice Ministry this week. In another blow to the country’s graying population and impending labor shortage, the number of registered foreign residents fell…
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Japanese firms to boost hiring of foreigners by up to 50%
Major Japanese firms are planning to boost hiring of foreign nationals by up to 50 percent of their new recruits in fiscal 2011, officials of the companies said Tuesday. Fast Retailing Co., the operator of the popular Uniqlo casual clothing chain, major convenience store chain Lawson Inc. and Rakuten Inc., which operates the largest Internet…
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Ex-immigration boss: detentions too long
llegal residents should not be held in detention for more than one year because any longer causes too much stress, a former chief of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau said, noting extended incarceration led to two hunger strikes at detention centers this year, one of which followed suicides. “One year of confinement is mentally tough,”…
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Foreigners’ voting rights
In their election manifestoes, New Komeito, the Japanese Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party pledge to achieve foreign suffrage. Other parties, like the Liberal Democratic Party, the People’s New Party, the Sunrise Party of Japan and Your Party, are opposed to the change. In contrast, the ruling Democratic Party of Japan’s manifesto says nothing…
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Department stores and sweat shops
It’s one Japan for rich Chinese shoppers, another for low-skilled workers Many Japanese strive to keep up egalitarian appearances. Porsche drivers keep their cars tactfully hidden away. Houses of the well-heeled are unflashy. In the finest department stores, even the demure “elevator girls” are treated with impeccable politeness. But when it comes to the way…