Low-Skilled Migrant Labor Schemes in Japan’s Agriculture: Voices From the Field Open Access

Abstract

Despite rapid demographic decline, until recently, low-skilled migrant workers have been welcomed only through ‘side-doors’ such as technical interns (TITP). Yet pressure for change comes from two sides: the moral critique of the ‘side-door’ scheme, and the growing economic pressures of a dwindling labor force. In 2018 Japan put in place a short-term bona-fide labor scheme (Specified Skilled Worker; hereafter, SSW) in fields previously largely inaccessible to foreign labor. In combination with the TITP schemes, these workers are allowed to stay longer. But what do these changes mean, how do the farmer-employers see them, and will the SSW lead to a sustainable farm labor supply going forward? We explore stakeholders’ views of the current schemes and their opinions on how low-skilled labor migration should proceed in agriculture. Businesses are desperate for labor, but not at any cost. Under SSW, employers are being asked to change the ways they envision and treat migrant labor. The tensions between their expectations and the realities on the ground reflect the contradictions that Japan’s migration policies inherit, based in the bureaucratic fiction that only ‘skilled’ labor is necessary. Data for this paper come from qualitative interviews conducted from 2018 to 2022 in Kyoto, Aichi, and Tokyo.

1. Introduction

Asis and Battistella (2018) have observed that, in Asia, temporary schemes for the recruitment of foreign labor came to the fore in the 1970s. Japan is a bit of a late-comer, but by now, such schemes are indispensable to the provision of unskilled labor for industry as well as agriculture. This is an era when, due to a strong demographic decline that is forecast to continue at least until 2060, coupled with the reluctance of young Japanese to work in low-skilled jobs, the country has an ever-greater need for foreign labor.

Yet up until recently, the Japanese government, while creating schemes that open paths to permanent residence for the ‘gifted and talented’, has not opened such paths for long-term residency of lesser-skilled manual laborer migrants (Oishi 2021). Co-ethnic migration, largely Brazilians of Japanese descent [Nikkeijin] began in 1990. These people did have a long-term residency visa with possible access to permanent residency. They worked mainly in contract labor in the auto industry, which, while meeting that particular labor shortage, did nothing to address labor shortages in other industries (Roth 2002; Tian 2018; Strausz 2019; LeBaron von Baeyer 2020). Other foreign migrants have been accepted only through side-doors¹ as temporary workers under the guise of ‘trainees’ or ‘interns’ on the Technical Intern Training Program (TITP) for nearly three decades (Kamibayashi 2015; Strausz 2019).

Japan’s tentative and indirect approach to recognizing unskilled foreign labor as labor (not as co-ethnics or under the guise of training) was brought to an abrupt end in 2019, when a short-term bona-fide labor scheme, the Specified Skilled Worker (SSW) [tokuteiginō gaikokujin], was enacted to meet the still-persistent labor demand in Japan. Under SSW, more industrial sectors are allowed to hire foreign migrants. While the SSW scheme is a bona-fide low-skilled guest-labor scheme, it stands (rather shakily, as we will demonstrate), on the notion that the workers who come in on this visa are skilled workers, not unskilled labor. In the wording of the Ministry of Justice (MOJ 2019), these workers are supposed to provide ‘rapid deployment forces’ [sokusenryoku]. That is, they are supposed to be already equipped with all the knowledge and skill necessary to carry out the work set before them. Yet, as social scientists have pointed out, ‘skill’ is a socially constructed concept, in the eye of the beholder (Ameeriar 2017; Liu-Farrer, Yeoh and Baas 2021; Oishi 2021).

Our research is inspired by the interpretive method of social anthropology. As policy analysts Shore, Wright and Però (2011) underline, the business of the anthropology of policy is to track ‘the genealogies and flows that those policies hold for those actors whose lives they touch and the cultural logics that structure those “policy worlds” (Shore, Wright and Però 2011: 8).’ Hence, this paper sets two central research questions: What meaning does this system change carry in regard to Japan’s ‘opening up’ to low-skilled labor migration? And what do farmer stakeholders really want for their agricultural businesses to work sustainably? From the outset, we were also interested in whether the introduction of this system signaled a willingness on the part of the government to put a close to the much-criticized TITP program, but this question has recently been answered, as we shall address in our concluding section.

The authors chose to investigate agriculture, where both TITP and SSW schemes were operating. We queried the differences between the long-standing TITP system and the sudden, newly installed SSW scheme. We went to the field to address employers and labor dispatchers to ask about their stake in and views on these temporary migrant labor programs, making this research novel and original. That is, no other study that we know of takes the stakeholders on the ground as the focus, yet these people’s views are essential to understand the incentives for migrant labor, as well as the import of migrant labor, for employers as well as for the communities, in terms of social integration. While we agree that it is imperative in future research to inquire of migrants themselves how they view and experience the policy systems, we limited this research to studying the farm owners, dispatchers, and local government agencies associated with these labor schemes.² Drawing on voices of stakeholders in the agricultural field whom the authors studied over four years of fieldwork, this paper discusses the current state of low-skilled labor migration in Japan’s agriculture and assesses the implications for the future.

We argue that, first, the system change lays bare various contradictions inherent in Japan’s labor migrant schemes such as the meaning of ‘skilled’ and the possible length of the stay. What the farmer-stakeholders need for their sustainable business is workers who are able to do manual jobs after on-site training, for modest wages, for a certain period of time, i.e. less than several years. The farmers want a system with on-time labor force deployment, less paperwork, clear guidelines, and no brokers exploiting the migrant workers. These findings indicate that the current labor schemes, both TITP and SSW, have little potential for future agricultural business. We hope that this research will provide a springboard for future studies on other stakeholders, including the migrants themselves, in the complex system of labor migration policy and practice on Japan’s farms.

2. Background: Demographic Decline, Shrinking Labor Force, and Aging Farmers

While the SSW has been introduced in 14 industries (consolidated to 12 in 2022), we chose agriculture because it is rapidly losing its mainstay workforce, the family farmer, due to the aging of society and the lack of successors. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF 2022) reports in the white paper that the total food self-sufficiency ratio and the total number of farmers have dropped over the decade on the whole, while the number of young farmers, who are under 49 years old and consist of 11% of all farmers, have only increased little for the past five years (MAFF 2022: 26–28, 54–55). Furthermore, while some young people from urban areas have entered the industry in recent years, they are not sufficiently productive to make a dent in this loss (Kurochkina 2020; Lollini 2021). Aging is occurring nationwide with the percentage of senior citizens higher in the farming villages (MAFF 2022: 196). The average age of farmers is approximately 67 (MAFF 2021). Digital transformation in farming is only beginning and weakly promoted, mostly among younger farmers (MAFF 2022: 177–185). The vulnerability of domestic food production puts Japan’s food security at risk, according to MAFF (2022). Furthermore, as Nobuhiro Suzuki (2022) points out, global security concerns such as the Ukraine war, the COVID-19 pandemic, and extreme weather conditions wreak havoc on agricultural supply chains, leading to soaring prices for agricultural imported inputs.

Almost all the farmers we interviewed in Aichi and Kyoto Prefectures felt hopeless in the face of the shrinking workforce. They have fewer successors and few young farmers doing start-ups. Some farmers told us that the younger generation values more balance in work and life; farming is just too hardship-laden for them. The realities of the rapidly aging society are seen in the growing numbers of abandoned farms and in the aging faces of their rural neighbors.

But they had to maintain their assets and land holdings—in some cases, multiple high-tech greenhouses as well as expanded dry field land holdings, spacious homesteads inherited from their ancestors, and expensive tractors. In the past 20–30 years, these farmers have expanded their holdings and invested greatly in their farms. Some of them have used foreign labor to keep the expanded farm afloat.

One of the Aichi farmers narrated that around 2000, they had submitted public comments directly to former Prime Minister Koizumi concerning their critical labor shortage.³ After this, the farmers obtained access to visit one company in Tokyo which had dealt with a TITP scheme to ask how they could utilize it. Eventually, 13 farmers decided to hire laborers from China. Since then, they complied with the necessary revisions to fulfill the more stringent requirements of the TITP migration system as it evolved, and increased the number of foreigners they hired.

Here, let us briefly explain the genealogy of the temporary migration systems we encountered in our fieldwork: the Technical Intern and Trainee Program (TITP), Foreigners for Agricultural Support, and Specified Skilled Workers (SSW).

3. The Genealogy of Temporary Migration Programs for Farms

Japan’s first foray into allowing farmers to hire foreign migrant labor was the one-year Foreign Trainee Visa Program [kenshū seido], which was introduced through the 1990 amendment of the ICRRA (Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act) and then installed in the agricultural sector in 1992 (Kamibayashi 2015: 133–134). Since then, this ‘trainee’ framework for the purpose of ‘technical skills transfer’ (MOJ & MHLW (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare) 2022) has remained as a robust rationale for Japan’s short-term labor migrant scheme.

In 1993, a one-year TITP scheme was installed on top of the Trainee Program as a designated activity [tokutei katsudō] visa scheme. The duration of the TITP became two years in 1997, in order to answer the persistent labor demand by extending the total period of stay of the foreigners up to three years (Kamibayashi 2015: 135). In the agricultural sector, however, it was not until 2000 that the two-year TITP scheme was finally admitted in horticulture, poultry and pig farming, and food processing manufacturing, and in 2001, crop and vegetable farming, and dairy were included (Kamibayashi 2015: 138). The whole process of the policy establishment and changes were aimed to supplement the labor shortage in various industries for the short term, while not arousing public opinion too much (Kamibayashi 2015; Hamaguchi 2019; Strausz 2019).

In 2009, another revision of the ICRRA was made and enacted in 2010. It aimed to institute the TITP 1 and 2 visa status to replace the former one-year Foreign Trainee Program and two-year TITP scheme (Kamibayashi 2015: 3). This change was made not only in the name of the visa, but also on working status. The TITP foreigners who finished a two-month training period were for the first time treated as ‘workers’, in that they were subject to Japan’s Labor Standard Law (Tsubota 2018; Shikata 2021). Their wages were also increased to the minimum wage [saitei chingin] (Horiguchi 2017).

Then in 2017, in order to make the whole management system more rigorous and less open to exploitation, the government passed the Act on Proper Technical Intern Training and Protection of Technical Intern Trainees [TIT Act or so-called Ginō jisshū hō] (Horiguchi 2017; Tsubota 2018; Shikata 2021). The Organization for Technical Intern Training (OTIT) was established to watch and supervise the entire TITP system (Shikata 2021). The Act also established a new scheme, TITP3, for employers who were qualified as good accepting organizations (Horiguchi 2017). Thereafter, TITP consists of three types, TITP1 for the first year, TITP2 for the second and third years, and TITP3, for the fourth and fifth years. Foreigners who enter Japan as TITP1 workers are supposed to be trained in various industries in Japan and acquire new skills, while being paid minimum wages equivalent to those for Japanese workers in the same prefecture. Limitations are placed on their job mobility, job contents, and length of residency. Soon after entering Japan, the interns take off-the-job-training, such as classes for basic Japanese language and culture, and then be dispatched to each enterprise. Once the workers arrive at an enterprise, they are managed by their own employers and supported by supervising organizations [kanri dantai], such as agricultural corporations as well as private enterprises, who do paperwork for immigration, connect workers to employers/farms, and supervise the training (Horiguchi 2017; Tsubota 2018; MOJ & MHLW 2022). The employers (implementing organizations) are responsible for housing, incoming and return air tickets, and off-the-job-training fees for the workers (Horiguchi 2017).

In June 2022, there were 327,689 TITP workers in Japan, of whom about 9% were in the agricultural sector, the fourth largest percentage among Japan’s industrial sectors utilizing these workers. They hail largely from Southeast Asia and China (MOJ & MHLW 2022: 6).

Meanwhile, aside from TITP, in 2017, the ‘Foreigners for Agricultural Support’, with a designated activity visa, was introduced in four regions which had been labeled as ‘National Strategic Special Zones’ [Tokku] (Horiguchi 2017; Ishida 2017; Tsubota 2018). Aichi, Kyoto, and Okinawa Prefectures and Niigata City were the regions chosen. In this three-year program, these foreigners were described as ‘agricultural supporters’ [nōgyō shiensha] and dispatched from specified organizations [tokutei kikan] who had applied to be dispatchers. In contrast to the TITP program, the foreigners’ labor is secured and managed by dispatch organizations which have been certified by a proper acceptance management council [tekisei ukeire kanri kyōgikai] built in the Tokku frame, not by farm owners. The system also widened the scope of the jobs, for example, to include shipping, and display and sales of the products at their owners’ ‘farmers market’ [chokubaijo], which usually stands within the farms. Former TITP2 graduates could join this program and come back to stay in Japan for further three years. By 2021, most of the foreign workers in this category had either ended their duty and left Japan, or remained as SSWs.⁴

In December 2018, the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (2006–2007; 2012–2020) passed another revision of the ICRRA, to allow foreigners in 14 sectors to enter Japan to work in semi-skilled labor, a ‘Specified Skilled Worker’ (SSW) visa status (Lessard-Phillips, Roberts and Phillimore 2020). This is a genuine ‘front-door’ short-term labor scheme, unlike the TITP and Supporters’ programs. For the first time, the government used the term ‘worker’, accepting SSWs as short-term migrant laborers, expecting them to be ‘rapid deployment forces’ (MOJ 2019). While not yet replacing TITP, this program gives significantly more autonomy to workers. SSW1 can extend their stay in Japan up to five years. They qualify for the status either by taking written exams of basic knowledge and skills for farming and Japanese language skills (N4) or by being TITP2 graduates. Their wages are stipulated to be at least slightly higher than those of TITP. Although their visa is still tied to one employer, it is possible for them to change jobs/employers within the same field or by testing, if the skill level is deemed to be in common (MOJ 2023b). Through the 2018 revision and 2019 enactment, SSW2 was also introduced. The new scheme, which is only applied to the construction and shipbuilding industries was extended on 9 June 2023, to all SSW industries except the care [kaigo] industry. It allows workers to apply for permanent residency (Suzuki 2020; Oishi 2021; MOJ 2023c). We will discuss this legal revision in the conclusion. In December 2022, there were 130,915 SSW workers in Japan, of whom 16,459 were agricultural workers, or 12.6% of all SSW workers, the third largest percentage among Japan’s industrial sectors utilizing these workers. 58.9% of all SSW are Vietnamese, followed by 12.5% Indonesians and 10.1% Filipinos (MOJ 2023a). 27.3% of the agricultural workers were qualified by taking the exams; 72.7% came up from the TITP route (MOJ 2023a).

Over the course of nearly 30 years, then, many incremental changes were made to TITP in the effort to crack down on egregious employers and provide some labor rights to migrants, in response to public criticisms of the program. The problems include outrageous broker fees and debt bondage on the sending side, as well as exploitation on the receiving side, such as sexual and power harassment, unpaid or ridiculously low wages, excessive overtime, verbal and physical assault, withholding of wages or passports (Sunai 2019; Sakamoto 2020; Torii 2020; Sato 2021; Shikata 2021; Yoshida 2021).

Yet over all this time, Japan’s government has maintained the fiction that TITP is for trainees’ ‘technical transfer’, not an unskilled guest worker program, without raising the hackles of those who fear a rise in immigration. As many scholars have asserted, Japan is an ‘ethno-nationalist’ state, where the word ‘immigration’ has been taboo for its conservative government (Roberts 2018; Tian 2018; Strausz 2019; Liu-Farrer 2020b). Naming has been essential over these years, whether to emphasize co-ethnicity, or ‘training’ or ‘supporters’; to avoid the suggestion that simple laborers were being allowed to enter. We should not be surprised that the government has begun the new visa program, SSW. Kalicki (2022) notes that the threat to economic security from the labor shortage as well as concern for internal security which was seen to be threatened by large-scale immigration to western Europe in the aftermath of the Cold War were double triggers for Japanese politicians to proceed with the Nikkeijin and TITP visa schemes and let these migrants work in a controlled fashion. The implication of the policy reform is that the SSW program is placed on top of the TITP. In other words, with these schemes, unskilled migrant workers can enter Japan as ‘interns and trainees’, and after three or five years, they can continue to stay in the country as ‘specified skilled workers’ up to an additional five years, for a total of eight to ten years, with temporary resident visas. The Late Prime Minister Abe asserted that SSW is NOT an immigration program (Roberts 2018). But it is obvious that with the introduction of the SSW1, Japan’s migration program took one more step to opening the front door for low-skilled foreign workers to reside long term, if not allowing access to permanent residency or citizenship. It is here where the desirability of such schemes can be questioned.

4. Methodology

Data for this paper come from qualitative interviewing with management organizations for farming and construction, farmer-employers, MAFF officials, local government officials, and an agricultural researcher, in Kyoto, Aichi, and Tokyo from December 2018 to January 2022. Kyoto and Aichi were our main fieldwork sites. We chose these prefectures as our field sites, firstly because Kyoto and Aichi Prefectures were involved in the above-noted government’s dispatch-based projects of Foreigners for Agricultural Support, implemented since 2017. Although the farms in Aichi had hired none from the Supporters program, a Kyoto dispatcher who operates both this program and the SSW scheme clarified that the Supporters scheme can be seen as in between the TITP and SSW schemes. Therefore, fieldwork in these two prefectures provided us with good insights for comparison. Second, despite the economic and geographical differences, during our fieldwork the stakeholders in both Kyoto and Aichi told us of many common experiences in their businesses and lives. They were doing small-scale agriculture on small and sometimes disparate land holdings. Some farmers had several dispersed fields for vegetables as well as greenhouses. Dairy farmers told us that manufacturing milk in mainland Japan was not so lucrative, as their land holdings were small, in comparison to Hokkaido, Japan’s major milk-producing region. But farmers in both locations insisted that local milk tastes superior. In their everyday lives, they both had local shrine-related festivals and rituals that the village people needed to support through their participation. All of their family businesses were succeeded by the eldest sons or daughters. They had invested in redesigning their homes or building entirely new facilities to house TITP and SSW migrant workers on their farms. In addition, some SSW workers in Kyoto prefecture were accommodated in rental apartments or in vacant housing near the farms, arranged by the dispatch organizations.

In December 2018, we directly contacted one TITP supervising company and held one interview. This brought us to the Kyoto dispatcher who had just started the Supporters project and prepared for the SSW scheme. The dispatcher, Kumazawa-san (pseudonym), kindly invited us to egg farms, vegetable farms, and a dairy center in Kyoto. He also held meetings with the local residence association. Kumazawa-san was sympathetic with our research not only as one of the business stakeholders of the schemes, but also as a man in his 30s who grew up in a place where Nikkei-Brazilians resided. Every time on our way to the field sites, he freely gave his opinions including how he sees the systems as problematic. Apart from this connection, we made another direct contact with one local government in Kyoto.

In Aichi, we asked an acquaintance to introduce farmers. This personal connection eventually brought us to the vegetable and flower farmers, as well as a dairy farmer. Initially in December 2018, we attended a monthly meeting of farmers who had hired TITP foreigners for many years, held by a supervising organization. This time was the first encounter with most of the Aichi farmer-employers we interviewed. Among them, Higashi-san (pseudonym), in his 60s and a prefectural university graduate, often expressed his opinions on the system changes with a global mindset. It was obvious to us that he was a de facto leader among the farmer-employers in this community, much admired and respected. Later on, one of the farmer-employers clearly told us that Higashi-san is ‘singular’ [tokubetsu] in terms that he can understand the system properly and do all necessary paperwork by himself. He helped us to contact other farmers, as well as to visit their supervising companies, the local government, and a language school hosted by local volunteers. Invited by Higashi-san, we also joined an informal meeting of politicians and other stakeholders including researchers held in Shinbashi. This opportunity later led us to our interview at MAFF. Aichi farmers had a strong network lasting at least for decades as the stakeholders in the global migration system.

In our conversations with them, we sometimes mentioned our own agricultural backgrounds. One of us grew up assisting her family in a summer fruit farming business. The other was raised in a family in Aichi where doing agriculture used to be part of her family and relatives’ lives. Our personal understanding of agriculture may have helped us to gain entry into the lives of these farmer-employers. They told us it was the first time to have anthropologists actually come to inquire of their opinions of the labor migration schemes.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we conducted Zoom interviews with Kumazawa-san, Higashi-san, and an agricultural researcher. When the COVID restriction was lifted, we visited the field sites three times. Altogether, we carried out 45 interviews.

5. What Exactly Is the Relationship Between TITP and the SSW System?

Not surprisingly, the MAFF officials we interviewed envisioned the TITP system as perfectly wedded to the SSW program, as a first step to training for becoming a worker with ‘specified skill’. In their words,

The (visa) status of TITP (workers) is under the jurisdiction of the Labor Standards Law (through the revision of ICRRA in 2009), so in that sense, they are workers, but according to the TIT Act (the Act on Proper Technical Intern Training and Protection of Technical Intern Trainees), Clause 3.2., there is a regulation that they are not to be utilized to fill the demand for labor, and... the spirit of the law, is—I don’t know if it’s appropriate to use the expression ‘developing countries’—but I think you understand that it is through on-the-job-training that (this program seeks to) transfer Japanese skills to people in countries that are now developing.

The TITP visa holds this ambiguous status. It is a worker program protected by law, while simultaneously limiting the stay in Japan of TITP migrants to a maximum of five years while restricting the job mobility as well as pay and living conditions of TITP migrants. Moreover, it is ostensibly a training program. The officials insisted that while the farm tasks of TITP workers may appear to be simple labor, in fact, the tasks embody considerable specialized knowledge that TITP workers imbibe through on-the-job-training, and which they are able to transfer to their home countries, as some scholars (Nikaido 2019; Sato 2021) also claim.

In contrast, SSW status is, as one MAFF official put it, ‘a straight-forward work credential’ [masshōmen kara no shūrō shikaku]. MAFF noted that they are making efforts to have the two systems operated in accordance with their different aims. In other words, from the viewpoint of MAFF, SSW rests on TITP’s shoulders as a skills training ground in Japan’s technical know-how for people from developing countries. Once they are trained, they might apply for SSW, which is strictly a labor system without the ‘international contribution’ underpinnings of TITP. Without elaborating on the contradiction of two different purposes of TITP, MAFF officials provided us with some literature which gave examples of farms with model TITP programs that fit the imperatives of the system as making contributions to developing countries through technical transfer⁵ (MAFF 2019).

6. What the System Change Means: Voices From the Field

The interviews with the farmer-employers certainly revealed the problems that these migration systems embody. Farmer-employers require manual laborers who can stay for a certain period at a minimum cost, but the systems make it difficult. We identified four issues from the stakeholders’ viewpoints: fluctuating costs, ‘de-familizing’ the labor relationship, the meaning of ‘specified skill’ and a reasonable period of stay. We address them in order.

6.1. Fluctuating Costs

In our interviews and participatory observation at the meeting in the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019, many farmer-employers told us that they had very much relied on TITP workers, but they had been anxious about the costs of hiring the SSW migrants, who were supposed to be paid above the minimum wage.

An agricultural think-tank researcher confirmed in our Zoom interview in April 2021 that the main reasons farmers were hesitant to employ SSWs were that they had to pay more than the minimum wage, and also, they were already accustomed to the TITP system and its management. Furthermore, he told us that the new program had taken time to catch on until the details of bilateral national agreements were worked out. The farmers had a wait-and-see approach. He admitted that basically the SSW system has been established on top of the TITP system as a desperation measure [kuniku no saku]. While he did not elaborate on why it was a ‘desperation measure’, we assume from his interview as well as the discussions with farmer-employers that a new system that would allow longer years of working was desperately needed to fill the labor shortages with trained labor. While activists such as Ippei Torii (2020) of Solidarity for Migrant Workers Japan call for an immediate dissolution of the TITP system, the researcher told us that it would not be realistic unless the workers coming in on SSW had already had sufficient experience, but, since the law had already established that these workers would be trained already or have passed tests, the law could not now be fiddled with [ijiru] to include a lesser-paid internship period. The MOJ (2022) report indicates, since June 2020, agricultural workers have been able to become SSW1 through testing.

Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the labor scheme. Some farmer-employers have had to keep workers who wanted to go home, while at the same time accepting workers who had planned to come even if that means a surplus of workers, while other farmers could not secure replacements for workers who had gone home just before COVID. The government set up a special program to encourage TITP2 workers to transition to SSW status even in other sectors than those where they had been certified. According to the researcher we interviewed, by April 2021, 95% of agricultural migrant workers who attained the status of SSW1 had come directly from the TITP2 status, so they were bona-fide experienced farm hands, often continuing on at the same farm. Their wages ended up not as high as the farmer-employers anticipated. One vegetable and flower farmer told us with satisfaction that they paid the SSW workers an additional 50 yen hourly to the TITP wage (the regional minimum wage), but with a lot less paperwork.

Yet, the farmers told us of other cost problems. Aside from the monthly payment to the supervising organization [kanri dantai] (TITP) or to the registration support organization [tōroku shien dantai] (SSW), which amounts to 15,000–30,000 yen, there is an additional cost to the farmer if his TITP worker switches to SSW status. Based on the bilateral agreements between Japan and sending countries, an employer in Japan has to use the same ‘sending agency’ in the SSW scheme as they did in TITP. Then workers must pay a fee to the ‘sending agency’ in their home country for the issuance of a ‘work certificate’ [rōdō shōmeisho] which is to prove that the workers have worked in Japan as TITP. Shocked at the price of 250,000 yen per certificate for his Cambodian employee, one Aichi vegetable and fruit farmer disputed this charge with his worker’s sending agency in Cambodia. He eventually reached an agreement to pay 2,500 yen to the agency in monthly installments for the five years of the worker’s contract, plus have his worker give 100,000 yen to the government office (for the certificate). The farmer was particularly incensed that the sending agency would require such fees even though the agency would be doing nothing for him or the worker since the worker had already been employed on his farm as a TITP for three years. He ruefully noted that the fine-tuning of the system was in many ways far from being achieved. It seems obvious that the sending agency, seeking to profit from a worker’s change in status, decided to demand this extortionate fee for ‘certifying’ the worker. Unless the farmer bore the cost, the worker would have been exploited by the agency. We can see through this example that workers are still tied to their ‘sending agencies’ abroad, even when they have become fully fledged experienced workers in their own right. They are not free agents. Shikata (2021: 94) comments that the Japanese government, whether with the TITP program or the SSW program, demands sending countries through their two party agreements that they regulate their brokers, but the actual implementation of regulations is totally left in the sending countries’ hands (who, he implies, fail to carry out the regulations).

6.2. ‘De-familizing’ the Labor Relationship

Historically, Japanese farms have been run by families (Kumagai 2002, 2006). The sudden installation of the SSW system made some farmer-employers question how to treat SSW migrants as employees, rather than as pseudo family members.

‘Will workers charge for spending part of their break time in practicing Japanese conversation with their employers?’ If so, one employer was unsure how to proceed. ‘If workers live off premise, will they expect to be paid for the time spent en route and back to their homes?’ Heretofore, TITP workers lived on the premises, but under SSW, they are allowed to live apart from the farm, arranged by their dispatcher.

Family farms generally treat TITP workers as part of the family, taking them on trips, bringing them to local festivals, occasionally providing them tasty foods, and accompanying them to the medical clinic if necessary. They call them ‘ko’ (children) and in a sense, treat them as children. Settling the quarrels of workers who spend day in and day out in a small operation, and who share a dormitory room and cooking facilities, is also part of this management style.

But SSWs are supposed to be workers, not interns, and they are to be treated as workers, not as pseudo-family. As workers, they must be given 10 or more paid holidays per year—yet another thing that farmers had not been accustomed to with until TITP became the subject to Labor Standard Law in 2010.

Furthermore, farmer-employers are supposed to respond to the ‘reform of working style’ [hatarakikata kaikaku], a new policy of the Abe administration aimed to restrict the abuse of overtime in Japan’s industries (MHLW 2022). Yet the farmer-employers saw this protective measure as more suited to factory labor than to farm labor. Some farmers were not pleased with the imposition of the current labor reforms restricting excessive overtime hours, even when workers desire overtime to earn more. These farmer-employers tended to see the flexibility of working style as normal and favorable to running farming. One foliage farmer complained, ‘The reform avoids those who have aspirations and dreams from making efforts. Japan’s development has stopped. And we are running short of young workers coming into the farms!’ His frustrations were clearly evident in his comments. And, we understand that he himself and his wife had ambitions, worked very hard, and managed to successfully expand their farm with the help of many employees over the years. But who reaped the dividends of all that labor input? Certainly, migrant workers, no matter how long and hard they work, are not given the possibility to become farm owners. Even Japanese hourly farm workers are not likely to be able to afford to transition to farm ownership. When farmer-employers chafe under these new regulations about working style, their complaints are rooted in the perspective of their own profit, not of worker protection.

Some farmer-employers were also critical about the kinds of knowledge provided them to manage the migrants on their farms. One herb-leaf farmer who employs Chinese TITP workers and also plans to have SSW workers emphasized the importance for farmers to have ‘people skills` He told us that JITCO (Japan International Cooperation Organization) has study sessions for farmer-employers, but they are only about legal regulations, nothing about how to treat employees well, such as ‘Don’t swear at them, don’t yell at them’, nor about how to teach the farmer-employers that workers from other countries have different cultures than the Japanese. ‘These workers are not indentured servants [dechi bōkō]. You can’t sexually harass them or power harass them. Those days are gone.’ From this we can assume this farmer-employer sees the necessity of harassment training for all those who hire migrant workers. No doubt this is a sensitive issue for the farmers we studied, as they knew the TITP system has been heavily criticized for its exploitation of migrants. This farmer-employer seemed particularly enlightened; from our research we cannot say whether his viewpoint is typical of the majority, but certainly some farmers were keen to stress that they did not abuse their workers, nor would they do so in the SSW scheme.

It is obvious to us that, no matter whether these workers are called ‘interns’ or ‘trainees’ or ‘specified skilled workers’, to farmer-employers they are considered as children (ko) and treated as family members in a hierarchical relationship at the bottom of the ranking system. The workers’ age—mostly in their 20s and 30s—their lack of language facility, their lack of cultural knowledge about how to make a life in Japan, and their lack of understanding of their rights as workers doubtless puts the workers at a disadvantage. One dispatcher told us that workers do receive a booklet about their labor rights, but when one of the authors inquired, she learned that it was all written in Japanese syllabary [hiragana], which was difficult for the workers to decipher. Furthermore, workers’ status as coming from developing countries in the region leaves them vulnerable in a way that Japanese farm workers, even part-time ladies from the community, would never be. What is more, most workers lived very close to their workplace if not on the premises of their workplaces, so they could easily be at the beck and call of their employers. When the farmer above insisted that these workers are not indentured servants, he may have been pointing to this particular vulnerability. As Mills (1999) wrote in the case of Thai domestic workers, when they had the opportunity to enter factory work rather than stay in household employ, they took it, because not only did it pay better, but it allowed them to separate their housing from their place of employment, keeping them from the exploitation that can arise from close quarters.

6.3. The Meaning of ‘Specified Skill’

Farmer-employers wondered what ‘specified skill’ really means. A cut-flower farmer noted that during the COVID pandemic, her farm had accepted as an SSW a worker who had finished TITP2 in a herb-leaf farm. While the worker had supposedly passed a basic language exam and had worked already in Japan for three years, her ability in Japanese was in fact very low. Moreover, the flower farmer had to train this worker from the start in flower cultivation. Hence, she was far from being a ‘rapid deployment force’, and yet, because of her status, her wage had to be higher than others who had already been trained but who were still TITP workers. In fact, the agricultural researcher told us that he was also concerned about this issue and had noticed the importance of setting criteria based on how well the workers can perform their jobs, so that the differences in wages could be justified for all concerned.

An elderly fruit farmer in Aichi, whom we interviewed in June 2021, weighed in on the skill question as well. He had hired TITP workers for 15 years. He had been expecting one Cambodian worker to come to his farm on the TITP scheme, but he had been delayed due to the COVID pandemic. We asked him if it would be problematic if the worker could not come. He agreed it would be. We pointed out that he had not hired workers from abroad before this program began. Why would it be such a difficulty now? He replied,

If the worker doesn’t come this time, then he doesn’t, but right now there is some unskilled [tanjun] work I guess you’d call it, and I’ve become an old man, it’s true I used to do that kind of heavy work up to now, and hiring people is quite stressful [seishin teki ni wa taihendakedo], but I can really count on what they will do for me. Even my son, today he might want to go out with his friends, or go to the doctor’s office. Or he might have something he has to do for the town office. I can’t tell how much time he won’t be spending on work. But they [TITP workers] are definitely going to be here, and they will work even in an emergency. I can count on it. But I do have to get things all ready for them to do the work (whereas with his sons, they know exactly what to do and how to do it).

Later in the interview, he commented on other farmers’ utilization of the TITP program:

That is, even if you’re not a farmer, everybody has become old. Amongst them are elderly gents who are all alone, but they still want to plant the rice and till the fields, so they bring in several TITP workers and leave everything, even spraying to them.

He then explained that in the first year of hiring a TITP worker, he does not make much profit hiring them but from the second year, he can leave many things up to them and just tell them to do it, and they say ‘OK!’ In the first year he would ask them to bring a bucket and they wouldn’t know the meaning of ‘bucket’. He notes that some farms hire three workers where the one who has done the jobs for three years becomes the leader who instructs the second- and first-year TITP workers. While he (as well as other farmers) previously had hired part-time women in the community for some of these jobs, this labor source had dried up, and anyway, he noted, hiring a local worker amounted to a loss of one’s family’s privacy.

What can we learn from this narrative? First, indeed these workers are asked to do simple (but tiring) work that the farmer-employer’s sons cannot be relied upon to do, and the farmer himself is too old to do anymore. Yes, workers need to learn how to do the tasks, and once learned, they are asked to lead the inexperienced workers. The farmer-employer emphasizes that TITP workers are in place—living on the property—and have no excuses not to do the work (as his sons have); indeed, many farmer-employers have told us their workers want to work as much as possible in order to pay back their debts and send remittances home. Furthermore, the community is aging so rapidly, that farmers cannot get the work of farming done without the labor power of these migrants. The farmer-employers do not see the TITP as a technical skills transfer program—a worker from Dalien cannot grow semi-tropical fruits in Dalien; nor invest in the kind of equipment it takes to produce hot-house flowers, but farmers are willing to go along with the fiction as long as it fulfills their needs at the least possible cost. As it stands now, the ‘skills’ learned in the TITP system are being transferred not abroad, but back to Japanese farmers in the form of SSW1 workers.

In Aichi, while pointing out disjunctures in the systems, Higashi-san wryly suggested a new name for TITP and SSW visas: ‘Special Work Visa’ [tokubetsu shūrō viza]. TITP workers are not trainees, but laborers in reality, he reasoned, while the SSW scheme requires too high a level of Japanese language and agricultural knowledge. Moreover, opportunities for taking the SSW exams are limited, in terms of how often and where in their home countries the tests are held for workers. He asserted that if the potential worker’s language and agricultural skills were high enough to pass the SSW test, they would probably rather choose other fields to work in, than agriculture, that is, with high language skills, service work could be possible (and it’s a lot easier). Instead of passing the SSW test, the easier way to become an SSW, he noted, was to first be a TITP graduate, who had returned to her home country and now wishes to return as SSW. Becoming a TITP worker is an easy way to acquire a visa to enter Japan. Hence, under the current system, the TITP scheme cannot be abolished.

At this stage, Higashi-san posed a question, ‘Is the public stance [tatemae] that SSW labor is skilled labor really necessary?’ Under the MOJ’s special guidelines to deal with the labor shortage during the COVID pandemic, workers have been allowed to change industries altogether, which obviates the meaning of ‘skill’. Indeed, Higashi-san has recently hired an SSW who formerly was in the construction industry. Calling the visa ‘Special Workers’ Visa’ can make more sense, he reasoned, laughing. This name does not contradict what workers actually do, that is, simple manual work on farms. As it currently stands, some farmers pay only a small premium for TITP3 and SSW workers, about 50–100 yen per hour over the prefectural minimum wage. It is not a substantial difference from the TITP workers, nor is their daily work much differentiated.

The reader will note that in the above narrative of the fruit farmer, workers gradually learn the tasks of farming so that by their third year, they can even instruct the new workers on what should be done. Yet this increase in knowledge and skills is not rewarded financially; there is no formal promotion system or ‘base-up’ system in place according to years of service. When we inquired with farmer-employers about opportunities for SSW workers to be promoted, we met with surprise; the prospect had not occurred to them. Egg farmers and vegetable farmers did agree that if workers had credentials such as drivers’ licenses, they could then use the farm equipment to drive in the egg factory or on the public roads among the various land holdings of the farmer; it would be much more convenient. Moreover, egg farmers and flower farmers told us that if the workers had writing skills and computer skills, they could note down the greenhouse settings and take daily logs. Furthermore, in all farms, if the workers were able to manage other workers as a leader, that would be highly useful. Such skills could in the future be used as benchmarks for promotion. The fact is, however, that because SSW is basically thought of by farmer-employers as a temporary labor scheme, they are not considering investing in this level of skills training that would give workers an upward trajectory in the farming management field. In the end, there was little sense of ‘skill-up’ or ‘skill’ itself, among the farmer-employers, in regard to these workers. This contrasts with the mindset found in the narratives of the employers Roberts interviewed in the construction field. There, employers were definitely interested in having their migrant workers trained for specific construction skills, Japanese language skills, as well as leadership skills, with incremental pay increases. Government literature also explains this aspect of the construction industry (MLIT (The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism) 2019).

6.4. Reasonable Period of Stay

Another issue surrounding ‘short term’ labor is what constitutes a reasonable period of stay. In The Price of Rights: Regulating International Labor Migration, Martin Ruhs (2015) stresses the importance of a human rights-based yet pragmatic approach in migrant labor schemes. According to his theoretical and empirical framework drawn from his quantitative research on migration programs of 46 countries, temporary labor migration programs exhibit trade-offs between the openness to unskilled labor migration on the part of the receiving country, and the extent of rights given to these migrants. Hence, he argues that countries will allow relatively open access to their unskilled labor market as long as they can restrict some rights—to permanent residency, employer choice, and job mobility or certain social rights such as access to social welfare benefits. This, he argues, benefits migrants (who seek to better economic circumstances) and sending countries (who seek remittances) (Ruhs 2015: 122–153). Temporary restrictions of these rights can be acceptable from a moral point of view as well as from a human rights perspective, according to Ruhs’ logic (Ruhs 2015: 197).

Specifically, Ruhs (2015: 176–177) suggests that the time-limited restrictions of rights could be up to four years. Although he acknowledges that it is hard to justify why it should not be three or five years, the latter seems to come close to ‘long term’, or rather ‘permanent exclusion’ from equal citizenship rights (Ruhs 2015: 177). The requirement to grant eventually all temporary migrants access to permanent residence and citizenship would significantly lower receiving countries’ incentives to admit some migrant workers, especially low- and medium-skilled workers (Ruhs 2015: 177). With this pragmatic approach, therefore, he insists that there must be a time limit after which receiving countries need to decide whether to grant temporary migrant workers access to permanent residence or require them to leave. To make sense of it, Ruhs (2015: 177) suggests a points-based system that can use transparent criteria for regulating the transfer of migrant workers from temporary residence status with restricted rights to permanent residence status with almost equal rights.

Ruhs’ model (2015) suggests that the duration of permissible stay in Japan’s current temporary migration programs, which could extend to ten years without the possibility of obtaining the right to permanent residency is not reasonable. The longer migrant workers stay, the more vulnerable they become. The current system that is able to combine five-year long TITP and five-year long SSW programs could function as an abuse of migrant workers. We could at this juncture ask, do the farmer-employers wish for their workers to stay on a long-term basis?

In fact, only a few of the farmers with whom we spoke positively expressed that they would like foreign migrant workers to settle and remain continuously with them for the long term. If they stayed long years in Japan without access to family reunification, workers might miss important life events, such as marriage, births, and child-rearing, some farmer-employers worried. Baas (2018: 55) argues that ‘temporariness’ in labor arrangements for migrant workers ‘contribute(s) to an innately unequal and unstable relationship between migrant, employer and the state’. From our fieldwork we can certainly attest that Japan’s stakeholders view Japan’s ‘temporary’ low-skilled migration schemes as flawed, but they are not clamoring for long-term residency schemes. One might think it odd that they are not insisting on longer stays, with more rights, for their workers. After all, depopulation proceeds apace, and reliable, hard-working employees are not easily found. What could be the reason for this reluctance toward the long-term settlement of migrant farm workers?

As we mentioned earlier, in Kalicki’s (2022) analysis, fears of internal security, from the negative example of migration trends in Europe, led Japan’s government to hesitate over opening up its borders to unskilled labor. This must be at the forefront of farmers’ minds as well, because, in the December 2018 Aichi farmers’ monthly meeting, the farmer-employers raised with us the topic of migration in Europe, especially that of Turkish guest-workers in Germany, which they took as a cautionary tale. When one farmer-employer then asserted that Japan should make an immigration policy, another spoke up, saying ‘I think that’s quite tricky [bimyō].’ When the first again said ‘It’d be fine to do it [yareba ii yo]!,’ the second man reasserted, ‘It would be quite tricky.’ He later added that it would necessitate (the government to assert) extremely skillful control [yoppodo jōzu ni kanri shite morawanai to]. This argument ended when the first man brought the conversation back to the level of economic security, saying, ‘If you think of all the problems, you end up saying it’s better not to (bring in immigrants), but in order for Japan to keep growing, if we had no immigrants, we’d certainly not grow [ironna mondai wo kangaereba, shinai hō ga yoittenarukedo. Jissai ni nihon mo seichō shite ikutameni, (iminga) inakattara, zettai nobinai].’ Later in the meeting, a manager at a dispatch organization also brought up the issue of security, mentioning that in Tokyo, groups of foreign men would gather at night in some neighborhoods, making people feel anxious and frightened, even if they weren’t committing any crime by congregating.⁶ He then went on to say that ‘national security’ [kokka no anzen] is important to Japanese people, and such occurrences made them feel insecure. Another member of the group then caused everyone to laugh by interjecting, ‘National security? Isn’t your own security more important?!!’

7. Discussion

It is obvious that whatever their nomenclature, these migrant workers are absolutely necessary to the smooth functioning of Japan’s agriculture. Time and again, the farmer-employers we met emphasized this reality. In Japan’s rapidly aging society, where it is no longer possible to rely on a local labor supply, farmer-employers and officials alike recognize that migrant workers are indispensable. Furthermore, many farmers expanded the scale of their holdings in the past two to three decades. The larger holdings necessitate more labor at a time when labor has dried up.

The TITP system has been in place for decades. Over time, the use of this system expanded greatly in the numbers employed, as well as widely in terms of the sectors employing these workers. There are many vested interests and sunk costs in this system, not the least, the farmer-employers who built lodgings, installed Wi-Fi systems, and expanded their holdings, thinking they could rely heavily on these workers.

In the meantime, the SSW system was suddenly introduced. The farmer-employers felt very uneasy about the new system. Kumazawa-san, the Kyoto dispatcher who handled the Agricultural Supporters’ Program and then started to use the SSW system as well told us that he made every effort to give an explanation to his clients about the merits of adopting the systems, particularly in terms of the costs, management, and skills. The number of the clients gradually increased. It was unlikely that the introduction of the new system, which is more costly to farmers, which requires a business model to which they are not accustomed, and which is unclear about the level of the skills that workers have, would mean a rapid replacement of the TITP.

The COVID-19 pandemic has served to illuminate the inconsistencies in the current system. When, due to the pandemic, some workers lost their jobs and were allowed to switch industries, the pretext that SSW labor had to be equipped with particular skills was dropped. Workers needed jobs, and farmers needed people willing to work hard. Basically, this desire to put the effort into the work appears to be what farmer-employers value the most—not skill; this can be taught on the job. Hence, we would agree with Higashi-san who told us, why not call TITP and SSW ‘Special Workers’ and rid ourselves of the notion that they must acquire technical skills to transfer to their home countries, or (as with SSW) that they must already possess such skills before coming to Japan to work. Whatever training that needs to be undertaken, could be accomplished through on-the-job-training in farms, just as it is currently with Japanese workers. Farmer-employers want people who are willing to work efficiently, at low cost, at whatever job needs doing on the farm, whether the skills are ‘transferable’, or technologically superior, or not. Yet, MAFF still insisted on the integrity of TITP, and some businesses were making stronger attempts to conform to the ‘technical skills transfer’ elements of that program (MAFF 2019; Nikaido 2019; Sato 2021).

As anthropologists interested in how stakeholders view these two systems, we cannot make predictions on the outcome. But we have observed that the system is in flux, there are disjunctures between the two systems, and the future is uncertain if we continue on this route.

Furthermore, through our participant observation at an evening language class in Aichi and interviewing at a community center in Kansai, we learned that language training for migrants is disorganized and manifestly underfunded, relying on a patchwork of dedicated but largely untrained ‘unpaid volunteers’, and lacking a systematic method for teaching Japanese as a foreign language. A centralized, coordinated, and funded provision of language training is needed to help migrants incorporate more smoothly into society. Online training could be part of the solution. At present, we see no efforts in this direction.

As we noted earlier in the paper, under the newly revised law, SSW1 migrant farm workers will have the possibility to become SSW2 and would be allowed family reunification. In that case, local school systems would need to be ready to handle an influx of migrant schoolchildren. Kumazawa-san, the Kyoto dispatcher, noted that without significant central government support, SSW2 workers would become a failed project, form an underclass, living in slums, receiving sub-standard educations, and creating friction with Japanese residents. While they would be earning more income than in their home countries, their consumption would also rise to meet the higher living standard, and educations of the 1.5 and second generation would suffer due to sub-optimal language acquisition, circular migration, and low-income levels. Hence social mobility in Japan for the second generations is curtailed. Kumazawa-san noted that this situation is similar to what many Nikkei-Brazilian families encountered over their long years of working in automobile factories in Japan, a situation he had seen with his own eyes growing up. Envisioning permanent residency for these workers would necessitate considerable fiscal and social support by the state to avoid a similar fate.

We would agree with Shikata (2021: 94) who notes that the current immigration system in Japan is lacking a ‘Grand Design’, without which a secure future cannot be assured whether for the Japanese, whose economic solvency depends on migration, or for the migrants who invest and risk considerably in their journey to work in Japan.⁷ In Shikata’s estimation, the TITP should be scrapped entirely. He suggests that a comprehensive law to protect foreign migrants is desirable. Whether such initiatives will come to pass, is quite uncertain at this time. We see many vested interests in maintaining the bricolage of systems as they stand.

Given what we have found, the reader might wonder how we as researchers envision the future of these schemes. What would be an ideal scenario?

From the viewpoint of transparency, we feel that the TITP system is irretrievably flawed. The number of migrants in this system who actually learn skills that they transfer to their home countries must be very few. One woman farmer who participated in the December 2018 meeting clearly stated, ‘In Japan, on the farms, I don’t think there is a single one who comes with the desire to return to their home country to utilize their skills after learning them. They come first and foremost to earn money.’ While we acknowledge that ‘soft’ skills such as diligence toward work, timeliness, and teamwork or cooperation, and even language skills might be learned, as Sato (2021) pointed out, ‘hard’ skills related to the actual farmwork are less transferable. Why pretend otherwise? The TITP system, if kept at all, could be reserved for those few fields where the transfer of hard skills is actually feasible, such as IT. The SSW system could absorb the rest. Furthermore, based on what we learned from the farmer-employers, the long-term residency of migrants is not something that most desire, nor is it something that could be supported by the current infrastructure. Instead, from the point of view of their human rights (Ruhs 2015), a shorter stay is better. Only in terms of the period of stay, would the current SSW1 system be adequate for their needs. There is no reason to call the workers ‘specified skilled workers’, either. As farmer-employers admitted, the workers learn the basic skills from their daily participation in the farm work. Currently, there is no ‘step-up’ system in place to differentiate SSW workers in terms of skills learned or licenses held, despite the fact that construction companies provide the ‘career-pass system’ which encourages migrant workers to improve the job, leadership, and language skills with pay increases (MLIT 2019). Certainly if they spend long years in the SSW status, these workers will attain proficiency at the job as well as facility in Japanese. It would seem reasonable to install pay rises in the SSW system, according to the acquiring of basic skills, and then, advanced skills such as driving or inputting agricultural data. The drivers’ licensing system could be made more accessible to migrant workers so that, if desired, they could add this license to their toolkit. Of course, not all farmer-employers need a worker who can drive, but on many farms, this skill would enhance the worker’s value. Having said this, we understand that the farmers always emphasized the necessity to keep their costs down. Yet, as Keidanren (2022) pointed out, Japan is losing labor to countries that are willing to pay higher wages. In order to make Japan attractive, giving workers a path upward and compensating them fairly for new skills acquired could help retain valuable employees.

Now that SSW2 has recently been added for the farming industry, however, we expect that the infrastructure to support migrants’ families, including language schools for adults, and public school JSL support for children, should be in place to support them. Long-term migrants would also need access to skills training programs with language support in such areas as driver’s licensing and IT technologies for farming, as well as farm management, so that they could access social mobility. Training programs could be set up for these areas. Furthermore, local public housing and empty rural houses could be opened for use by these migrants. Indeed, we were told by Kyoto Prefectural local officials that there are many vacant spots in public housing that could be filled, were the laws changed to allow migrant families to fill them. A dairy official in Kyoto Prefecture told us that in his rural locale, many houses were just standing empty, creating an eyesore and fire hazard but also an invitation to vandalism. They could be put to use to house migrant workers, he reasoned. Kumazawa-san, our dispatcher informant, complained vociferously to us that much of the housing he could find for the SSW workers was sub-standard and ‘rickety’ [boroboro]. He had a very difficult time finding apartments that SSW migrants could rent near their farm sites. Changing the laws to allow access to public housing seems imperative. All of these changes would necessitate a great deal of central government funding and planning. At present, the central government does not support JSL language training, nor do they budget for educational training programs for these workers. Since SSW2 is made a reality for more than the construction and ship-building industries, the central government needs to provide the budget necessary for such initiatives, making the acceptance of foreign labor a national project, not just something devolving to local governments and employers.

We learned through our research that local people want to get to know these foreign migrants in their communities. The farmer-employers interact with migrant workers on a daily basis and see them as indispensable to the operation of their farms. But others in the locale are not so convinced. Events that bring together migrants and the village dwellers, such as the ‘café’ that the local residents’ association in Kyoto Prefecture tried to establish for senior citizen residents and migrant workers, would be helpful in dispelling the fears of the residents toward the strangers in their midst, yet employers need to be convinced to provide their workers with compensated time off in order to participate in these activities. At one egg farm we visited, the employer told us that after working fulltime for a six day week, he doubted that his workers would want to spend some of their one day off attending a meet and greet with the local seniors.

Keidanren (2022) pointed out that the MOJ was supposed to review the SSW program two years after it was put in place. This review stalled due to the disruptions of COVID-19, but the committee is currently deliberating on the two systems, in terms of both content and coordination. In the minutes of the fourth Experts’ Meeting on Technical Intern Training and Specified Skills System (hereafter, ‘Experts’ Meeting), held in 8 March 2023, all the issues which we addressed in this paper, such as costs, labor management, skills, career-up systems, the period of stay, permanent residency, possible social friction, and the question of whether or not to dissolve the TITP program, were on the table for discussion (MOJ 2023b). By the time of this writing, the seventh ‘Experts’ Meeting has issued an interim report, with a final report due in the fall of 2023. The interim report suggests that TITP be replaced with a system that secures and trains labor, relaxing transfer restrictions among the fields of labor, making the requirements of supervisory system stricter, and strengthening the language proficiency system (JITCO 2023). We cannot predict the outcome, but it seems that the government is moving swiftly now to realign the systems, to increase transparency, and to acknowledge the necessity of a strong and fair migrant worker program that will give workers a path toward long-term residency and a decent future in Japan.

8. Conclusion

This is the first scholarly inquiry to address how Japan’s two low-skilled agricultural migrant labor schemes operate on the ground. We have used voices from the genba of Japan’s agriculture to explore the meanings of the new migrant labor dispatch system from the viewpoint of farmer-employers, labor dispatchers, and local officials. In this sense we have given ethnographic flesh to Kalicki’s (2021) argument that although Japan is becoming increasingly liberal in its immigration policy, it is ‘riddled with inconsistencies across and within these policy domains’ (Kalicki 2021: 862).

At the time of our interview with them in December 2021, MAFF itself continued to insist (on the tatemae) that TITP would remain as a vital program to provide technical transfer to developing countries, but all the stakeholders we spoke with in the field saw this as ludicrous. On our January 2022 Zoom interview, Higashi-san laughingly mentioned, ‘Taking all the situations into account [dō kangaetemo], I wonder who is coming here for learning and transferring skills? Must be very few! [laughed].’

The SSW system inherits contradictions itself in terms of its label of ‘skill’ and the potential length of the stay. It is also in considerable variation with how Japanese farmers like to utilize and manage workers, as Horiguchi (2017) notes.

What the farmer-employers tell us is: they need people they can train to do their work; they don’t care what nomenclature is used. They want a streamlined system with on-time labor force deployment, less paperwork, clear guidelines, and no brokers exploiting the workers. While some farmers would welcome long-term stay and family reunification, others are satisfied if a dispatch system would work smoothly, and workers could come to Japan for shorter periods without disrupting their own chances to marry, have families, and remain attached to their places of origin.

If the SSW scheme, or another temporary labor migration system, is to become robust without standing on the shoulders of TITP, on-the-job-training must be an integral element in the migration labor scheme for both short- and long-term spans. If the new system envisions long-term residency for migrant workers, wage increases may also have to be designed by seniority and skills, as the current system already requires employers to pay additional wages for TITP3 and SSW workers. Ultimately, we wonder about the sustainability of any temporary migrant worker program. Japan currently draws the majority of SSW workers from Southeast Asia, but these countries are rapidly developing. In fact, the number of workers they send has decreased—witness the drop in the number coming from China (MOJ 2021: 4). Oishi (2021) points out, Japan is in competition with other nations for labor of all kinds. The supply of nearby low-cost labor in Asia is likely to shrink over time. How much longer will it be before the prospect of coming to Japan to work will be less appealing?

Although the farmer-employers themselves seemed mostly reluctant to entertain the thought of settlement for farm workers, there was one person in Aichi and one in Kyoto prefecture who were strongly in favor of it. The Aichi farmer-employer told us, if his workers would stay, he would even be glad to put their children through university. This man had three daughters himself, none of whom wanted to succeed to the business so far, even though he had built a new home, now standing empty, to entice them back. In the future, despite local reluctance to embrace the long-term migration of foreign labor, we feel it will be necessary to give migrants more access to training, social mobility, JSL education, and rights (permanent residency, family reunification, access to public housing, etc.) in order to attract them to stay. Here, we see the need for future research focusing on the migrant workers themselves, to inquire of them their hopes for the future, what sorts of policies and practices they would like to see in place, and what kinds of rights they would desire, in order to facilitate their residence in Japan, whether short or long term.

Understanding the critical situation of labor shortages in Japanese industries, while constrained by the late Prime Minister Abe’s assertion that SSW is NOT an immigration program (Roberts 2018), the MOJ has taken the bold step of creating this new program. The system is a work in progress, placed as it is atop the TITP, which does not acknowledge workers as possessing the same work rights as their Japanese counterparts. Whether this is only the first step to a more streamlined system that is fairer to workers and furthermore offers them a place at the table in Japanese society, or not, remains to be seen, but if the interim report of the ‘Experts’ Meeting is an indication, things are proceeding in a promising direction. With SSW2 workers in the farm sector now eligible for family reunification, workers would be able to get on with their personal lives as well as their working lives in Japan. The details for researchers to follow will be to see how much investment the state is willing to make in terms of systematic language education for these people, educational support in the schools, housing assistance, and other measures to smooth the pathway to social inclusion. A symposium sponsored by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA and the Japan Business Federation),⁸ emphasized that the government must demonstrate the advantages of working in Japan. Now that the Immigration Bureau has been upgraded to the Immigration Services Agency (since 2019), one hopes there will be increased funding and systematic focus on the needs of foreign migrants in whatever industries they work, so that their sojourns in Japan, whether short or long, will be well spent, and worthwhile to migrants, their employers, and their communities alike. Certainly, the future of Japan’s agriculture rests in large part on foreign migrant labor.

References

Footnotes