Nipponica

Leading Japanese retailer Aeon will take on 4,000 skilled foreign workers groupwide by fiscal 2030 amid severe labor shortages in Japan's food service sector, Nikkei has learned.

The Aeon group currently employs around 1,500 under Japan's Specified Skilled Worker program, which targets foreign workers with specialized skills in shorthanded industries. They work largely at food-processing plants that supply Aeon supermarkets.

Japan's parliament on Friday enacted revised laws to replace the controversial foreign trainee program, which has been criticized as a cover for importing cheap labor. Japan seeks to ensure foreign workers will stay on longer in a bid to address an acute labor shortage in a rapidly greying society.

Under the new system, workers will be able to move after working in a job for one year provided their Japanese language and professional skills meet certain requirements.

Businesses in Japan that employ immigrant labor are getting a wake up call and hopefully exploitative practices start to die out. Props to the national government for passing immigration reform for this classification of visa but there is still work to do to raise all workers up to a better overall standard wage to catch up to the rest of the world.

The renewed exhibition room is located on the fifth floor of Mori JP Tower, Japan's tallest building, which opened in November 2023. It includes a special section featuring materials related to Chiune Sugihara (1900-1986), who issued "visas for life" to Jewish refugees during World War II while serving as a vice-consul for the Japanese Empire in Lithuania, and on Shigeru Yoshida (1878-1967), a diplomat who served as foreign minister and prime minister.

Admission to the new exhibition room is free, and unlike the prior facility, it is open on Saturdays, too. It remains closed on Sundays and public holidays.

The new training and employment system that is expected to take effect in 2027 aims to foster foreign workers to achieve the specified skills visa level over three years once they've entered the country. Meanwhile, more attention will be paid to their rights as workers, and rules on job-changing are being eased to allow transfers over the course of one to two years. The retention of this workforce is an issue that will persist under the new system.

This is a good on-the-ground story about the actual lives of foreign workers trying to integrate into local communities. Also a good example of how local governments are picking up the slack from Tokyo and actually doing the hard work of making a flawed immigration system work for new immigrants and for local businesses.