Foreign Labor In Japan Case Study

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One characteristic that makes Japan different from other developed capitalist countries is that it has a very low percentage of foreign labor. Batram (2000) describes this as a “negative case” of labor immigration. In other words, Japan’s case is a contrast to European countries where the import of immigrants was loosened for a large amount of labor to maintain the economic growth. To cope with the lack of labor, rather than import the labor from overseas, Japan had used other solutions. The first solution was outsourcing the production to developing countries. Since the 1980s, a lot of businesses in Japan have invested its manufacturing, especially the labor-intensive one, in low-wage countries as they could no longer find the supply of labor
The reserve source of the labor force which were the women, the elderly and the people in rural areas were also encouraged to participate in the workforce. Those solutions for the shortage of labor eventually made Japan able to function without a large supply of foreign workers, which identify Japan as an unusual "negative" case of migration. This is also the reason why the general theories of migration that were developed from the context of Western countries could not apply to the case of Japan. Bartram suggests that rather than using the most general theories of migration developed in the Western world to explain this phenomenon, other factors could be considered such as cultural factor. For example, the idea of homogeneous nation has refrained Japan from getting people from the outside. Moreover, medium and small businesses are the ones who suffered the most from the lack of labor shortage but they have less influence on the government than the big businesses, who can manage to sustain the labor better with higher wages. Therefore, they did not have much power in pressuring the central government to open the door for the outside resources of
While classic countries of immigrants such as Sweden, Denmark and the United Kingdom have open policies for the immigrants that help them blend into the society for nation-building, Japan has a more conservative welfare regime that embedded a clear insider-outsider cleavage that prevents the low-level foreign workers from upward mobility (Takenoshita, year). Also, compared to classic countries of immigrants, Japan has a relatively low budget for integration programs with optional short language courses for the foreign workers. The model the Japanese government uses is said to be similar to the guest worker system that Germany used to have in the past, which was the most restricted system among developed European countries. Rather than integrating the immigrants, they kept the guest workers system in which the foreigners were only perceived as temporary citizens. Later in 2005, they modified the law for immigration for better integration of foreign workers. Unlike German, Sweden adopted a broader and more open system to integrate the foreigners into the society by providing language and culture education. The Swedish government also provided an allowance for the immigrants as social assistance. Other northern European countries also have similar integration system sponsored by the government. In japan, such system was not