Laborers' hopes of a fresh start in Japan turn into a living nightmare

TOKYO - Fang, a 36-year-old Chinese woman, came to Japan a year ago on the promise of job training, decent pay and a chance to achieve a better life back home.

One year later, however, she has a job that involves little training, is repetitive and strenuous, pays poorly and comes with the added humiliation of severe scoldings from her boss.

"I really regret coming to Japan," Fang said at her tiny, makeshift room converted from containers in Hiroshima. She asked for her full name not to be made public.

Fang's job is sewing clothes at a home-run factory in a remote farmland area, where she works with 28 other Chinese "trainees" who were brought to Japan under the Japanese government-sponsored Technical Intern Training Program.

"We have to work at a hectic pace here, with almost no time to rest," she said, citing the fact that though the Chinese trainees already work very hard, the boss often scolds them for no reason, and yells at them to work even harder.

Despite such a heavy workload, Fang has not been able to earn as much money as she had expected, as wages for foreign trainees are roughly half the amount Japanese workers are paid for similar work.

Meanwhile, her living conditions are dreadful as she has to share with five other trainees a 10-square-meter makeshift room which has no kitchen, bathroom, air conditioning heater, TV or Wi-Fi. The rent, however, amounts to $1,050 a month, which is much more expensive than even Tokyo rates.

Internship or servitude

Lu, a 35-year-old Chinese trainee working at a construction company in Hiroshima, said that almost all the Chinese trainees in Japan regret their decisions as they earn a pittance and learn little from excessive labor.

"I hope my compatriots could know what we've been through here in Japan, so that they won't be fooled and make bad choices like us," Fang said.

Fang and Lu's stories are snapshots of the sad experience of hundreds of thousands of foreign trainees working in Japan, many of whom found themselves only used as cheap labor and trapped in indentured servitude.

As of June last year, there reportedly were 210,000 foreigners working in firms and farms across Japan as, what Tokyo calls, trainees, among whom the Japanese Ministry of Justice has confirmed that 85,000 are Chinese.

The program, which allows foreign trainees to stay in Japan for three years, was introduced by the Japanese government in 1993.

However, the program has been widely criticized as a platform to attract cheap labor from overseas.

With little legal protection, the foreign trainees are often underpaid, and illegally placed as oyster shuckers, construction workers and other unskilled positions. Many of the indentured workforce are exposed to substandard, sometimes deadly working conditions.

Lu said some Chinese trainees employed at other Japanese construction companies are often scolded and even beaten by their bosses.

"I've heard that a Chinese trainee became a vegetable after getting his head seriously wounded by a falling excavator," Lu said, adding the trainee has been hospitalized for months but his company has done nothing to help him.

"I don't know what will happen to him next," Lu added.

The Chinese embassy in Japan said it will take strong measures to protect the legitimate rights of Chinese nationals working under the intern training program.

Xinhua