Informalization and Temporary Labor Migration: Rethinking Japan’s Technical Intern Training Program From a Denationalized View

Abstract

This article asks how Japan’s Technical Intern Training Program (TITP) has promoted a transfiguration of employer into predator who utilizes fraudulent economic strategies to exploit trainees under the abusive conditions. Situating Japan’s case within the global dynamics of temporary labor migration as well as drawing on the critical discussions about the ‘informal economy’, I argue that the formation and expansion of the unequal capital–labor power relations, facilitated by the processes of informalization under the TITP in Japan and the sending countries, has constructed trainees as precarious workers and augmented the dehumanized treatment of these workers by their employers. Specifically utilizing Slavnic’s notion of the two patterns of informalization—‘informalization from above’ and ‘informalization from below’—from a de-nationalized perspective, this article illustrates how the involvement of so-called labor migration intermediaries at both departure and destination sites has affected trainees’ hierarchical and discriminatory relationships with their employers in Japan.

Keywords

labor migrant workers temporary migration labor migration intermediaries informal economy denationalized perspective Japan international political economy

Introduction

The death of a 27-year-old Filipino who entered Japan under its Technical Intern Training Program (TITP) was ruled as karoshi (death by overwork) in 2016. As a ‘technical intern trainee’ (hereafter trainee), he worked for a casting company in Gifu, aiming to financially support his family in the Philippines. Prior to dying from heart failure in April 2014, which was only 3 months before the completion of his program, he had logged up to 122.5 overtime hours per month—well over the threshold of 80 hours that has been used as one of the criteria to determine karoshi in Japan (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of Japan (MHLW), 2021c). According to the MHLW, the karoshi of this Filipino was rare because it marked the first such case among TITP trainees since 2011 when the Japanese government started collecting data (Kobayashi, 2016). In reality, as Kristin Surak (2013) notes,

[t]o pocket a bit of cash or to keep from losing their jobs, trainees have no option but to put in long overtime hours or work through holidays . . . [which tends to render] the traditional salaryman malady karoshi . . . all too common. (p. 95)

Shoichi Ibusuki, who proclaims himself ‘a labor movement activist wearing a lawyer’s badge’ through his long battle for the protection of trainees’ rights in Japan, stresses that the officially recognized claims of their karoshi are just the tip of the iceberg.¹

Japan’s TITP, a temporary migrant work program that originated in 1990, accepts young workers from developing countries for the purpose of transferring Japanese vocational skills and knowledge to these workers who can then contribute to ‘the development of industries and business enterprises in their countries’ (Japan International Training Cooperation Organization (JITCO), 2010). Since its launch, Japan has witnessed a steadily increasing number of trainees, with a record high of 402,356 in 2020, which accounted for a quarter of 1.7 million migrant worker total (MHLW, 2021a). Whereas the Japanese state highlights the crucial function of the TITP ‘as part of Japan’s international contributions’ (Ministry of Justice, Japan (MOJ), 2016: 28), within Japan and beyond the program, has been accused of serving to provide cheap and flexible labor to industries struggling to meet the shortage of workforces (e.g. Asahi Shimbun, 2023; U.S. Department of State, 2021). The MHLW (2021b) report announced that 70.8% of the business facilities employing TITP trainees (5752 of audited 8124) committed violations of the Japanese labor standards-related laws in 2020, including excessive overtime, which is illustrated in the above karoshi case. Reflecting the sustained prevalence of these misconduct instances, Ippei Torii, Representative Director of the Solidarity Network with Migrants Japan (SMJ), underscored that the TITP turns decent Japanese employer into the perpetrator who is distorted by wicked lust and feel nothing about the infringement of trainees’ rights and treating them like slaves.² This article asks: How has the TITP promoted such transfiguration of employer into predator who utilize fraudulent economic strategies to exploit trainees under the abusive conditions?

Especially since the mid-2000s, research on the problem-plagued TITP has been undertaken by scholars, journalists, non-governmental organizations, and others. Examining the institutional arrangements of the TITP, some have outlined the gap between the nominal objective and actual situation of the program (Kamibayashi, 2015; Murakami, 2007). Others empirically document how this institutionally constructed dissonance has influenced the everyday life of trainees as low-paid and disposable labor (Gaikokujin Kenshusei Kenri Nettowaku [Foreign Trainee Rights Network], 2006; Kurematsu, 2017). In contrast, Mai Yoshida (2021) shows how the paternalistic ideology rooted in the TITP and its influence on labor management compel trainees to become ‘silent workers’, but her analysis leaves unexplored what conditions enable employers to apply such ideology explicitly/implicitly into their relationships with trainees. More fundamentally, most previous studies are constrained by the shortcomings of ‘methodological nationalism’ traditionally embedded in migration scholarship. They tend to operate within a national framework by taking the Japanese nation-state as the ‘natural social and political form’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002: 302) for the implementation of the TITP while underestimating the transnational dynamics that significantly constitute and shape its practices, with a few exceptions (e.g. Gunji, 2019; Onuki, 2016). With these limitations in mind, situating the national within the global as well as drawing on the critical discussions about the ‘informal economy’, I argue that the formation and expansion of the unequal capital–labor power relations, facilitated by the processes of informalization under the TITP in Japan and the sending countries, has constructed trainees as precarious workers and augmented the dehumanized treatment of these workers by their employers.

More specifically, this article utilizes Zoran Slavnic’s (2010, 2016) notion of the two patterns of informalization—‘informalization from above’ and ‘informalization from below’—from a de-nationalized perspective cultivated in the literature on migration industries (e.g. Gammeltoft-Hansen and Sorensen, 2013). By doing so, it aims to illustrate how the increasingly informalized governance of temporary migrant work program has enhanced the power of capital at the expense of labor, and how the involvement of so-called labor migration intermediaries at both departure and destination sites has affected trainees’ hierarchical and discriminatory relationships with their employers in Japan. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic since early 2020 exerted the harshest impacts on those who were already in vulnerable positions before the crisis worldwide, including temporary migrant workers, like trainees in Japan, who tend to be concentrated into less stable jobs and the sectors most affected by the economic instability (Suzuki, 2021). Reflecting these situations, since the privatization of migration control is one of the central themes in research on migration industries (Krifors, 2021), this study offers insights about the possible forms of the relationships between informalization and temporary labor migration in Japan and beyond over the ‘post-pandemic’ rebuilding of the global political economy.

This article starts by reviewing the literature on the processes of informalization in relation to temporary labor migration. The second section provides a sketch of the TITP’s structure and key trends. Then, the third section draws on the notions of informalization from above and below to highlight the ways in which intermediary actors’ negotiation of the im/mobilities of trainees at their home and host societies under the TITP has led to the prevalence of highly exploitative relationships between these trainees and their employers.³

Informalization, Temporary Labor Migration, and Methodological De-Nationalism

Through the neoliberal restructuring of the global political economy since the mid-1970s, the resilience, extension, and increasing ‘normalization’ (Jütting and De Laiglesia, 2009) of informal employment relations have largely been driven by a growing conflict between post-Fordist flexible accumulation trends and post-war welfare regulatory frameworks (Schierup et al., 2015). The informal economy, according to Manuel Castells and Alejandro Portes’ (1987) widely cited definition, refers to not an individual condition but rather a process of income-earning activities that are not monitored or controlled directly or indirectly by the state in ‘a legal and social environment in which similar activities are regulated’ (pp. 11–12). As they note, it ‘simultaneously encompasses flexibility and exploitation, productivity and abuse, aggressive entrepreneurs and defenseless workers, libertarianism and greediness’. As the International Labour Organization (ILO) (2018) notes, more than 60% (two billion) of the world’s workers make their living in the informal economy and are deprived of decent work, which has rendered it a pressing need to tackle the dynamics of informality and informalization.

The growth of informal economic activities fostered three major explanatory perspectives on its causes as well as its linkages to the formal economic and institutional frameworks (Chen, 2007, 2014). The first ‘dualist’ approach postulates that, as a residual, pre-capitalist vestige of ‘backwardness’ (Williams et al., 2007: 403), informality would wane in the modernizing course of industrialization and economic growth (Bangasser, 2000; Tokman, 1992). Deriving from the recognition of informalization as a ubiquitous, persistent, and even expanding component of contemporary capitalist economies across diverse societies, the second ‘neoliberalist com legalist’ perspective interprets the informal economy as a consequence of the voluntary and rational decisions of both workers and employers to ‘exit’ from the formal government regulations on economic activities to avoid burdensome institutional costs and increase profits (De Soto, 2000; Gindling and Newhouse, 2014; Maloney, 2004).

The third ‘structuralist/Marxist’ approach claims that the ‘zero-sum’ perception of a formal/informal divide, assumed in previous perspectives, obscures the interactive and structural connections between the two economies (Portes et al., 1989; Sassen, 1998; Tabak and Crichlow, 2000). It illustrates how the neoliberal transformation of the global political economy deepened informality’s inherent ‘subordinations’ to, and even its exploitation by, formality under the corporate strategies of downsizing, outsourcing, and subcontracting, which erode secure employment conditions (Rakowski, 1994; Siegmann and Schiphorst, 2016). The structuralists shed light on the vulnerability and disposability of workers through the expansion of flexibilized employment relations. They emphasize that the flexibilization of the labor force has facilitated involuntary ‘exclusion’ of workers and their families from the formal frameworks of state benefits and job security (Peterson, 1990).

Thus, the structuralist approach has most substantially enriched the explanation of the rapid spread of the informal economy within neoliberal globalization through revolving around the permeable borderline between informality and formality. It has also been developed by various studies that aim to examine the ‘multifarious nature of economic activities defying a straight-jacketed formal/informal division’ (Routh, 2011: 218; see also Hammer, 2019; Horodnic et al., 2018; Routh and Borghi, 2016). Here, Slavnic’s (2010, 2016; also Likic-Brboric et al., 2013) illustration of informalization as dual processes both ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ leads to the context-specific and relational exploration of how all economic actors have a propensity to rely on informal strategies to achieve their economic goals. Within the context of neoliberal socio-economic transformations that have intensified privatization, liberalization, re-regulation in favor of capital, and restructuring of the state to facilitate shift in the landscapes of labor practices, the processes of informalization from above designate the ubiquity of informal economic activities, driven by large companies and the states (Breman and Van der Linden, 2014; Phillips, 2016). Corporations pursue the best conditions for expanding economies of scale through replacing previously regulated, permanent workers with unregulated, temporary ones, which tends to introduce informality into the formal production practices and the regulatory framework. Top-down transformation trends include the dismantling of the welfare state that has promoted deregulation of governing mechanisms and reductions in public expenditures. Complementary to these processes are those of informalization from below, which encompass the activities of marginalized social groups (e.g. low-income earners and small/medium-sized businesses). ‘[T]heir engagement in the informal economy’, as Slavnic (2010) puts it, ‘is on the one hand a reaction to informalization from above, that is, marginalization, [exploitation], and stigmatization, and on the other hand the only way for the majority of them to survive’ (p. 16). One oft-mentioned group is migrant workers who are often subjected to various forms of discrimination as well as violations of their labor or human rights.

In short, Slavnic’s conceptualization of informalization provides a vantage point for analyzing not only the diverse way a range of actors and institutions shape the interlinkages between the formal and informal economies, but also the implications of informalization for global labor migration. Reflecting the intensification of labor contacting in developed economies as a dominant feature of the flexible industrial structures that promote informalization, many scholars have drawn attention to the spread of temporary labor migration (e.g. Howe, 2019; Piper and Withers, 2018). Research on migration industries explores the ‘ensemble’ of state and non-state actors driving the enlargement of temporary migrant work programs in the dual processes of informalization from above and below (Hernández-León, 2013; also de Haas et al., 2020; Szytniewski and Van der Haar, 2022).

Concerning the increasing involvement of private actors in coordinating temporary flows of migrant labor, neoliberal state reforms are illuminated as the processes of informalization from above. These prioritize the establishment of a market-oriented and business-friendly environment through rationalizing governance while externalizing costs and risks related to the fluctuations of supply and demand for migrant labor (Menz, 2013). The privatization of migration regulation demonstrates substantial outsourcing of public functions to ‘labour migration intermediaries’ (Žabko et al., 2018: 577) that provide services to foster, organize, and assist the cross-border mobility of workers. Although the delegation of coordination tasks to non-state actors mainly operating for commercial gain does not automatically result in the retreat of the state, ‘a structural interweaving of the informal and formal in migration facilitation and control’ (Cranston et al., 2018: 546) has transformed the role of the state in mediating the relation between capital and labor from regulator to deregulator.

As the consequences of interlinked informalization from below, the migration industry literature has also investigated the proliferation of labor migration intermediaries (Harvey et al., 2018; Spaan and Hillmann, 2013). According to Johan Lindquist et al. (2012), a bottom-up understanding of intermediaries helps open the ‘black box’ of migration research by highlighting how the transnational mobility of workers is made possible and organized. Despite ‘an increase in formally licensed private recruitment agencies . . .’, as they (Lindquist et al., 2012: 14; also Lindquist, 2017) further put it, ‘it is clear that the relationship between formal and informal brokers should be understood as a continuum rather than a dichotomy’. Many temporary migrant work schemes have embraced a ‘triangular employment relationship’ that decouples laborers from employers via contracting agencies. Such employment arrangements relieve employers of responsibility for compliance with labor laws and other statutory obligations (Knox, 2018), and operate mostly in low-wage sectors, as this context lets labor migration intermediaries ‘offer employers the greatest “flexibility” in terms of how they use labour’ (McCollum and Findlay, 2018: 564). As Stephanie Barrientos (2013) and others (Deshingkar, 2019; Peck et al., 2005) have shown, the prevalent recruitment, supply, and management of temporary migrant workers by unscrupulous profit-driven intermediaries who utilize coercive measures, including high fees (e.g. placement and travel) that see workers owning as debts, have produced insecure, flexible labor that is always at risk of hyper-exploitation and abuse.

Furthermore, migration industry research underlines how temporary migrant work programs operate beyond national borders through the social infrastructure that connects origin and destination (Cranston et al., 2018; Xiang and Lindquist, 2014). Its focus on cross-border ties connecting migrant workers to state and non-state actors in sending and receiving countries helps move away from ‘methodological nationalism’, which naturalizes the nation-states as the given containers of social processes (Anderson, 2019; Dahinden, 2016; Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002), Nevertheless, as Oksana Žabko et al. (2018) sharply claim, migration industry scholarship tends to underrepresent the sending-country perspective. To de-center migration research from the viewpoint of receiving countries, their study of labor flows from Latvia to Norway illustrates how different types of intermediaries respond to regulatory changes in both countries as well as to fluctuations in labor demand and supply. By using a similar transnational method, my previous work (Onuki, 2016) showed how Japan’s decision to accept Filipino migrant care workers was endorsed by the interests of the labor-sending Philippine state. I argued that this labor migration arrangement, together with the development of Japan’s TITP, embodies what I call new constitutional moments of primitive accumulation that facilitate the production and expansion of social spaces for the commodification of migrant workers while leaving these workers without effective means of protecting themselves.

As such, embracing a transnationally oriented and methodologically de-nationalized perspective on the migration industry opens up new possibilities to recognize temporary labor migration as building social fields that connect across borders, and to understand the myriad ways in which the interrelations between labor mobility and informalization from above/below in sending and receiving countries constitute unequal power dynamics between employers, workers, and intermediaries. By utilizing this approach, the following sections investigate the growing processes of informalization through the conduct of the TITP in Japan and labor-sending countries. This inquiry starts by briefly mapping out the institutional organization of the program.

The Institutional Overview of the TITP and its Recent Conditions

Compared with Western developed countries like West Germany that implemented labor-importing schemes from the 1950s, Japan was long thought to be immune to labor migration given its post-war ‘miraculous’ economic growth occurred without mass labor inflows (Bartram, 2000; Komine, 2018). However, accelerated shortages of low-waged workforce during Japan’s ‘bubble’ economic boom of the 1980s led the state to reform its Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act (hereafter, Immigration Control Act) in 1990 (Akashi, 2010). This revision upheld Japan’s traditionally strict ban on so-called unskilled migrant workers, while seeking to meet labor demands through ad hoc measures that allowed temporary migrant workers to enter Japan under visa statuses officially unrelated to employment purposes (Chung, 2010; Muranaka, 2021). One of these measures legalized the entry of the Nikkeijin (Japanese descendants up to the third generation and their spouses mainly from Brazil and Peru) to Japan with no employment limits. As another channel, the TITP was launched in 1990 and reformed several times with the most significant changes enacted in 2010. This established the current form of the TITP and a new legal status of a ‘technical intern trainee’ (referred to as ‘trainee’ in this study) (JITCO, 2010).

The officially stated objective of the TITP is to promote economic advancement in the developing world through the transfer of Japanese technology and skills (MOJ and MHLW, 2022). Under the program, trainees accepted from developing countries must engage in activities to acquire skills through on-the-job training at the same company for the duration of their training and utilize the learned skills for industrial development by returning to their home countries after their training. The maximum length of training (non-renewable) was initially 1 year, and this was extended to three in 1997 and then to five in 2017 (MOJ, 2017). By repeatedly stressing that ‘[t]he aim of the program is not accepting unskilled laborers or those who want make money’ (JITCO, 2010: 4), the Japanese state seeks to categorically distinguish TITP trainees from migrant workers employed in the low-skilled and low-paid jobs to reconcile its official stance that entry for such workers was prohibited.

The annual number of newly arrived trainees under the TITP steadily increased from 43,649 in 1991, to 66,025 in 2011, and then 173,705 in 2019, although this dropped to a still large 76,456 in 2020 under the stricter border regulations of the COVID-19 pandemic (Kawakami, 2006; MOJ, 2016, 2021a). The total number of trainees in Japan at the same time has consistently been more than 100,000 since the mid-2000s, reaching 402,356 in 2020. This made them the second largest group of migrants working in Japan after those with ‘statuses of residence for foreigners based on status’, including ‘permanent resident’ and ‘spouse/child of Japanese national’ (MHLW, 2021a). The overwhelming majority of trainees hail from Asia, and in 2016 Vietnam replaced China as the top source of trainees. In 2020, Vietnamese trainees accounted for 54.3% of the total, followed by China at 19.1, the Philippines at 8.6, and Indonesia at 8.3. The number of approved occupations for the TITP rose from the original 17 to 86 (as of April 2022) (MOJ and MHLW, 2022). The major industrial sectors that accepted trainees, according to the 2020 data, were construction (22.5%), food manufacturing (19.0), machinery and metals (14.2), agriculture (9.1), and textiles (5.9).

There are two ways of accepting trainees under the TITP: ‘acceptance managed by individual enterprises’ and ‘acceptance supervised by organizations’ (MOJ and MHLW, 2022). The ‘individual enterprise type’ has been cultivated through the internationalization of production with factories relocating from Japan to neighboring Asian countries within the context of neoliberal globalization. Japanese corporations receive full-time employees from their overseas offices, merged corporations, or business partners for training in Japan. Under the ‘supervising organization type’ trainees are admitted through nominally non-profit private intermediaries (e.g. Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Small Business Associations, and Agricultural Cooperatives) and assigned to member companies for training. According to 2020 statistics, 3276 supervising organizations had licenses. 98.3% of total trainees were accepted via these supervising organizations, and most of their receiving companies in Japan were small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In fact, 83.4% of them had less than twenty employees (JITCO, 2021; MOJ, 2022; Organization for Technical Intern Training (OTIT), 2021).

Under the supervising organization scheme in particular, various state and non-state actors inside and outside Japan are involved in the TITP (MOJ and MHLW, 2022). This is based on bilateral Memoranda of Cooperation (MOC) between Japan and the labor-sending countries, which sets out the official commitment to promote the transfer of Japanese skills. Japan has signed a MOC with 14 countries all in Asia. Individuals who are interested in participating in Japan’s TITP are first recruited by ‘sending organizations’—that is, labor migration intermediaries recommended by the sending states. These organizations filter candidates to match the available job postings and forward the applications to their contracted supervising organizations. The selected trainees then sign employment contracts with the Japanese host enterprises, called ‘implementing organizations’ under the TITP. Once the trainees arrive in Japan, they are supposed to receive off-the-job lectures (e.g. courses in the Japanese language and business culture) at the supervising organizations for 2 months. Then, under the guidance of the supervising organization, they start undergoing on-the-job training. Figure 1 illustrates the web of connections among different actors.

Figure 1.

State and non-state actors in the supervising organization type of the TITP.

The supervising organization type is the dominant acceptance method, and this has constructed a complex demand–supply arrangement for trainees, which involves both state and non-state actors in labor-sending countries and Japan. Concentrating on the processes of informalization from above and below in relation to the operation of the TITP, the next section elucidates how the increasing deregulation of the program has functioned as a highly controlled mechanism to supply unskilled migrant labor for SMEs strictly on a short-term basis. In so doing, the TITP promotes hierarchical and highly exploitative relationships between trainees and their employers.

Informalization Under Japan’s TITP

The States, Capital, and Informalization from Above

The deregulation and subsequent expansion of the TITP have been driven by the interests of capital as well as the Japanese state and its labor-sending counterparts, which promotes the informal outsourcing of migration management to non-state actors. The 1990 amendment of the Immigration Control Act stipulated strict requirements for trainee applicants and companies implementing their training under the TITP. For example, ‘trainees’ were limited to implementing companies’ full-time employees at their overseas offices or trading partners (now called ‘individual enterprise type’) (Japan Immigration Association, 1990). The skills to be learned were not to be attainable through repetitive simple work and needed to be difficult or impossible to obtain in the trainees’ home countries. These requirements rendered the TITP unavailable for many SMEs in manufacturing, construction, service, and agriculture sectors, which suffered most from the scarcity of low-waged and low-skilled labor. Jobs in these industries were increasingly shunned by Japanese workers because of their ‘bottom wages’ and socially undesirable ‘3 K’ nature (kiken, kitsui, and kitanai—dangerous, difficult, and dirty in English). Given the traditional ban unskilled migrant workers entering Japan, in the late 1980s, SMEs had deepened their reliance on so-called overstayers who often arrived as tourists and were employed against their visa terms and even after their expiry. Reflecting the surge in unauthorized migrant workers, the Japanese government issued by-laws in 1990 and 1992 as concessions to SMEs’ mounting demands for substantially relaxing the procedures and qualification criteria for the TITP (Kamibayashi, 2015; Tian, 2019).

The main state-led deregulation of the TITP created the ‘supervising organization scheme’ (as illustrated in Figure 1). Indeed, whereas the original regulation had capped the number of trainees to less than 5% of regular employees at an implementing company, this scheme enabled SMEs with 50 or fewer workers to accept three trainees per year. The Japanese state further raised limits on the numbers of trainees available for SMEs in 2017, by enabling the implementing companies with 6–30 regular workers to accept up to 36 trainees (Hatate, 2017; MOJ and MHLW, 2022). These reforms of the TITP have not only made the supervising organization type the dominant acceptance method, but also generated a basic mismatch between the program’s alleged objective and its practices of conducting most ‘training’ at SMEs that do not possess the capacity to achieve this aim. This gap was illustrated by a comment of a Japanese mentor of Filipino trainees at a machine sheet metal factory who explained his desire to teach these trainees new skills but, at the same time, posited: ‘It is impossible for us to know what kinds of technologies and skills are needed in the Philippines’ (see also Sawada, 2020).

A corruption scandal that erupted in 2000 highlights how the power of capital had informally instigated the deregulation of the TITP (Idei, 2016). This so-called KSD scandal disclosed illegal political donations by Tadao Koseki, the then President of the KSD Foundation for Promoting the Welfare of Independent Entrepreneurs, to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). With the support of influential LDP politicians, Koseki lobbied relevant ministries to ease the requirements of the TITP, leading to the creation of the supervising organization scheme. By stressing the TITP as an ideal means to ameliorate labor shortages at SMEs while dismissing its alleged goal, Koseki established a supervising organization to absorb trainees mainly from Indonesia and to dispatch them to SMEs for profit.

Following the launch of the TITP, Japanese business leaders had begun to stress the diversity of a company’s workforce as the source of profitability. The prospect of a decline in the number of Japanese workers due to falling birth rates and an aging population prompted the Japan Business Federation (2003, 2007) to advocate for the enlargement of the TITP. Accordingly, many owners of SMEs and big companies have increasingly admitted that trainees play an indispensable role in maintaining their business (e.g. Asahi Shimbun, 2019; Mainichi Shimbun, 2008).

The state- and capital-driven deregulation of the TITP has seen that the supervising organizations operating as juridically non-profit, yet practically for-profit, handle the major parts of program implementation ‘with informal consent of the state’ (Surak, 2018: 509). For Japan’s state officials and employers, through these processes of informalization from above, the TITP has served as a feasible and effective means to secure flexible supply of low-waged migrant labor. This is primarily due to two distinct features. First, the TITP is designed to provide a rotating and stable supply of a ‘calculable workforce’, secured by both a strict restriction on trainees to change jobs because of legal ties to their first employers and the prohibition of their settlement, or family reunification, in Japan (Kamibayashi, 2015; Sun, 2003). This rotation mechanism flexibly adjusts the labor force supply.

Still, it may trigger some problems, including significant administrative costs to ensure trainees’ returns to their sending countries and the risk of incurring international criticism. Here, the deregulated TITP has brought forth an unofficial arrangement that allows the Japanese state to efficiently overcome this constraint by informally delegating responsibility to the supervising organizations over the entry, maintenance, and departure of trainees. A few of the supervising organizations are based in the Chambers of Commerce and Industry or Agricultural Cooperatives, but the bulk—more than 90% in 2020 (JITCO, 2021: 39)—are Small Business Associations formed by five or more SMEs. They are meant to guide and support the proper conduct of training at implementing companies (OTIT, 2022), but their role often becomes a mere façade, due to the mutually beneficial relations with the companies from which they receive monthly ‘supervision fees’ of 30,000–50,000 yen per trainee (Ibusuki, 2020). Since most of the supervising organizations, although registered, operate in a legally gray zone as profit-seeking labor migration intermediaries, the privatization of migration management in the TITP has also generated lack of transparency, causing the prevalence of substantial human rights violations among trainees (Mochizuki, 2019; Sano, 2002).

The second distinct feature is that the TITP incorporates relatively ‘cheap’ migrant workers into the Japanese labor market. ‘Training’ was originally defined as a non-employment activity in which trainees were paid not wages but ‘training allowances’ to cover their living expenses (Bhattacharjee, 2014). Based on the pretense that ‘trainees’ were not workers, supervising organizations encouraged SMEs to use the TITP as a way to reduce labor costs and alleviate workforce shortages (Gaikokujin Kenshusei Kenri Nettowaku [Foreign Trainee Rights Network], 2006; Yasuda, 2007). Yet, the escalated criticisms against these practices saw that the state revised the TITP in 2010 and recognized trainees as eligible ‘workers’ under Japan’s labor-related laws. This revision, however, has created a situation in which trainees only receive compensation that nominally follows ‘regional minimum-wage standards’. From the SMEs’ standpoint, the required monthly supervision fees to the supervising organizations do not make it more cost-effective to hire trainees than Japanese or other migrant workers. Consequently, to lower labor costs while utilizing the TITP, the employers typically extract supervision fees, along with excessive charges for ancillary services (e.g. accommodation and utilities), from trainees’ salaries. For example, Filipino trainees at an electronic parts factory in the Tokai area were forced to share a room with four others at the dormitory owned by the employer, and 40,000 yen was subtracted as a monthly rent from their net salaries of 100,000 yen, which was substantially below the region’s legal minimum (approximately 160,000) (Kurematsu, 2017; Osaka, 2018). These deductions are often compulsory and fraudulent at the discretion of the employers, meaning that many trainees have been widely underpaid and might never see any, or most, of their earnings.

These processes of informalization-from-above in Japan, which established the privately managed TITP as the mechanism for strictly controlling a short-term rotating supply of cheap migrant labor, have also been accompanied by similar processes in the trainee-sending countries. State officials in these countries tend to recognize the TITP, like other commercialized outmigration, as a component of their neoliberal labor export schemes with the purposes of tackling the problems of unemployment and earning foreign currency via remittances (Asahi Shimbun, 2017; Yanzhang, 2004). For example, Yun, a Chinese female who completed her 3-year training at a garment company in Ibaragi Prefecture notes that a ‘trainee’ coming to Japan is officially called dagong in Chinese, which means ‘overseas migrant workers’.⁴ From this viewpoint, the sending states have steered the development of the ‘labor export industry’ (Rodriguez, 2010; Saito, 2015) through the approval and licensing of private labor migration intermediaries to take charge of the selection, dispatch, and control of trainees (Era, 2018; Hamano, 2015).

Particularly in countries such as China and Vietnam, many sending organizations levy ‘security deposits’ (around 150,000–300,000 yen) on trainee candidates, which are forfeited if they resign from their training (Ibusuki, 2020). More strikingly, in 2001, the Vietnamese state institutionalized a deposit collection scheme by the sending organizations in the name of mitigating the number of trainees’ absconding in Japan (Komai, 2006: chap. 3). Despite a clear ban on such practices in the 2010 TITP revision (Watanabe, 2010), these informal practices remain rampant because the bilateral MOC between Japanese and sending countries have no binding means of regulating sending organizations. Circumvention of the formal regulations has further allowed these organizations to charge TITP applicants exorbitant commission fees—for example, for many Vietnamese candidates, about one million yen (which equate to 4–5 years of their average annual incomes). This forces many of them into deep debt and consequently means that they tend to endure any conditions in Japan (Asahi Shimbun, 2021; Yamaguchi, 2020).

In sum, through promoting the processes of informalization from above, both the Japanese and trainee-sending states have condoned and utilized labor migration intermediaries to manage the TITP, locking in the power of capital and constituting trainees as precarious labor. The next section explores how the processes of information from below driven by the sending and supervising organizations contain a high risk of treating TITP trainees as dehumanized, tradable commodities over the course of their migratory journey.

Labor Migration Intermediaries, Employment Relations, and Informalization from Below

Trainees exert a certain degree of agency in determining their participation in the TITP, but their decision-making is often misguided by the deceptive and unethical recruitment methods of the sending organizations that do not provide complete and accurate information about a range of aspects of their training in Japan, including the level of remuneration. It is widely trumpeted that trainees can easily acquire large sums of money. According to interviews with 27 Chinese trainees, many were told by the sending organizations that they would obtain on average about 5 million yen over 3 years, but few achieved this amount (Verité, 2018: 11). Similarly, Nguyen, a Vietnamese female trainee decided to apply for the TITP by trusting the sending organization’s promise of a monthly wage of 150,000–200,000 yen, yet she only received 60,000–90,000 yen per month after taxes (Sigona et al., 2021).

Sending organizations spruik the idea of going to Japan as a trainee to many candidates ‘who wished to kill two birds with one stone: make money abroad and acquire valuable training for the future’ (Bélanger et al., 2011: 41). Rex, a prospective male Filipino trainee, shows his excitement about his training:

Although I have the job in the Philippines, my purpose to join the TITP in Japan is to gain the expertise in my field, agriculture . . . . I am very amazed by Japan as a highly developed country. So, if I go to Japan, I can learn advanced skills. And then when I come back, I can share them with many other Filipinos.

Whether trainees can receive the expected training depends on the perception of the TITP by the supervising and implementing organizations in Japan as well as the sending organizations in the home countries. For example, the Phil-Japan Skill Transfer Foundation, a sending organization in Manila that recruited Rex, carefully matches up the previous occupations and expectations of trainees with the tasks to be performed in Japan. Nonetheless, requirements for trainees to have previous ‘experience of engaging in the same kind of work in a [home] country as the work to be engaged in while in Japan’ (OTIT, 2022), which are clearly stipulated by the TITP, are regarded as taboo by many sending organizations (Sawada, 2020; Tokyo Shimbun, 2021). It is appalling that some trainees from Vietnam ended up undertaking radioactive clean-up work on the site of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant where the 2011 triple disasters occurred (Asahi Shimbun, 2018). For the TITP applicants, while assignments to decontamination tasks are unusual, recruitment based on false information about training is not uncommon.

After being recruited, all aspiring candidates must pay the sending organizations commission fees for visas and other services, in addition to informally collected security deposits. They are also required to cover the costs of the mandatory pre-departure training (e.g. lessons on Japanese language and business culture), which includes tuition and accommodation at facilities often owned by the sending organizations. Naoko Sunai (2019a: chap. 2; also Asato, 2019) elaborates the ways in which many sending organizations in Vietnam have built the ‘trainee business’ model. According to her study of 59 former or current trainees, the average amount of charges imposed by the sending organizations was about 1 million yen. One Chinese trainee describes her pre-departure experience as ‘falling into a pitfall’, because she was asked to cover various costs upon the progress of her application procedure, and she could have lost all paid money if she stopped the process by questioning some conditions (Hayazaki, 2015: 29). To finance pre-departure expenses, nearly all applicants secure loans from different sources and generally mortgage their assets to do so.

Sending organizations tend to adopt ‘army-type’ training to beat rigid domination-subordination relationships into candidates. The owner of an organization in Vietnam stresses the importance of militaristic disciplines to cultivate the trainees who satisfy the demands from the Japanese companies (Sunai, 2019a: 74–79). Many of these organizations force trainees to sign a pledge form that includes steep financial penalties—that is, the confiscation of deposits and the imposition of additional forfeits—for activities like joining a labor union or abandoning their training (Ibusuki, 2020: 33–37). For trainees, therefore, a breach of their contracts in Japan would ruin their attempts to repay the significant debts and acquire financial security for their families. That is, concerning the processes of informalization from below on the trainee-sending side, it is vital to recognize how it is the psychological and economic pressures to earn as much as possible in Japan, rather than paternalistic labor management (Yoshida, 2021), that push TITP trainees to become ‘silent workers’ who obey the rules and orders of their employers, even when they have grave complaints.

As long as trainees go through their training as silent workers, the supervising organizations can reap bumper profits because of the monthly payment of supervising fees from their client companies or the implementing organizations. To establish and sustain this capital-driven acquisitive system, they instruct the employers at the implementing companies to utilize various informal strategies to control trainees (e.g. Gaikokujin Kenshusei Kenri Nettowaku [Foreign Trainee Rights Network], 2009; Idei, 2016). For instance, trainees’ employment contracts often stipulate a set of strict rules, such as prohibitions on accessing cell phones or the Internet and contacting with the outside world. To prevent trainee ‘runaway’, employers frequently impose ‘compulsory deposits’—which sometimes account for as much as 70% of their salaries—though this practice is forbid under the TITP official guidelines (Verité, 2018: 13–14). Due to this form of enforced savings, along with the confiscations of bankbooks and passports by the employers, many trainees do not know how much they have earned during their programs until they reach the airport for their flight back home.

Supervising and implementing organizations compel trainees to be amenable to these extreme demands, by threatening them with dismissal (Hatate, 2019; Moro, 2016). To set examples, some have repeatedly sent trainees who disobeyed any conditions in the contracts and/or demanded basic human or labor rights back to their home country. Xuan, a male Chinese agricultural trainee in Ibaragi Prefecture, was threatened by his employer’s reference to possible deportation when he asked about a lack of overtime payment. For most of trainees, since repatriation would result in a major financial loss, they are terrified of the phrase, ‘kikoku saseruzo’—which literally means ‘I will send you home’—often used by their employers. The utilization of informal enclosing strategies creates the extremely unequal capital–labor relations that transform trainees into ‘slave workers’ who have no liberty to change or quit their jobs and employers into predators who have internalized and normalized the dehumanized treatment of these workers (Torii, 2020).

By extracting fees and other charges (e.g. accommodation and utilities) as well as collecting ‘compulsory deposits’ from trainees’ wages, employers tend to offer very limited compensations that are noticeably below the regional minimum wage standards and what the sending organizations guaranteed (Kurematsu, 2017; Tran, 2020). For instance, War Nu from Myanmar, who hoped to earn a much higher salary and learn new skills at a textile factory in Gifu Prefecture, ended up undertaking simple tasks (e.g. packing garments into cardboard boxes) with one, or no, days-off in a week. Her monthly income was only 60,000 yen, which was half of what she had been promised. She barely had sufficient time to eat and sleep while sharing two rooms above the factory with four other trainees, her boss constantly roared at her with abusive language and the threat of repatriation. War Nu recalled her experience of being a trainee as being like a ‘slave’ and noted that: ‘it was inhumane’ (Denyer and Kashiwagi, 2018). Her and many other trainees’ narratives point out how the unequal capital–labor relationships have contributed to verbal and physical abuses by the employers, along with the supervising organizations (Omagari, 2015).

Despite various constraints on trainees’ ability to raise their voices against the harsh and demeaning conditions in Japan, some have taken their cases to court (Ibusuki, 2020; Kyoto Shimbun, 2019). These situations have been made possible in part by the establishment of support networks for trainees. Yet, the most important factor behind the emergence of these cases must be the strong will and political action of trainees who have contacted supporting networks by overcoming much fear of dismissal. In addition, some trainees have resigned from their training to escape from abusive employers or seek higher wages in the informal labor market. Although the number of ex-TITP trainees overstaying their visas has been markedly low—12,427 or about 3% of total registered trainees (402,356) in 2020 (MOJ, 2021b)—the issue of the ‘runaways’ has attracted attention from the Japanese state and media as a dangerous problem generated by the TITP. In contrast, Sunai (2019b: 31) underlines their leaving decisions as a method of ‘resistance’ against their disadvantaged positions. Put differently, it is vital to realize that runaways represent the processes of informalization from below mobilized by trainees themselves as they attempt to move out of their dehumanized conditions and/or secure better salaries.

The numbers of runways and court cases brought by trainees have increased, but these actions remain scarce. It is highly difficult for trainees to contact a relevant support network or leave their training, due to the supervising and implementing organizations’ enclosing strategies and the risk of deportation under the informalized conduct of the TITP.

Conclusion

While prior study of the TITP limited its focus to the Japanese nation-state, this article used a denationalized perspective to highlight its complex organization that involves state and non-state actors through the processes of informalization from above and below in Japan as well as the sending countries. Through the informal outsourcing of the TITP to sending and supervising organizations as labor migration intermediaries, the Japanese state has made it possible for SMEs to rely on trainees as a stable source of cheap labor power while offering workers little in return. Its sending counterparts have effectively executed the dispatch of trainees to Japan as an important part of their labor export policies. Narratives from trainees demonstrate how they are highly vulnerable to the violation of their labor and human rights under their subservient relations with their employers who often fail to recognize the seriousness of treating them in exploitative and dehumanized manners. As Torii and many others (e.g. Hatate, 2019; United Nations, General Assembly, 2011) have suggested by accounting for the momentously widened gap between the stated purpose and actual practices of the TITP, the abolition of the program appears to be inevitable. Based on the interactive and structural relationships between the formal and informal economies that are discussed here, a crucial avenue for future research is to explore how it is possible to develop alternatives to the TITP that effectively uphold the rights of migrant workers and avoid the interference from exploitative labor migration intermediaries. More broadly, with the interconnection between economic informalization and international labor migration in mind, it is also vital to consider whether temporary migrant worker programs, like the TITP, are the most ideal schemes for filling labor demands in developed countries and stimulating economic growth in developing countries over the ‘post-pandemic’ reconstruction of the global political economy.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2023 International Sociological Association (ISA) World Congress of Sociology in Melbourne, Australia. The author would like to thank the following for their valued comments: the participants in the ISA panel, Susan Engels, Haji Oh, and Rowena Ward.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Hironori Onuki

Notes

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