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Resistance Through Care: Japan’s Technical Intern Training Program

Serena Eleonora Ford

Facing a demographic crisis because of its ageing population and declining birthrate, Japan has been pressured to introduce a number of reforms to increase the labour force, while keeping its typically restrictive immigration policies in place (Oishi 2021; Endoh 2021). Migration scholars working on Japan have typically noted the use of ‘side-door’ or ‘backdoor’ channels for workers to enter the country via ‘unofficial immigration’ avenues (Tian 2019: 1496; Chung 2021; Endoh 2021), wherein visa categories or migration programs are not formally recognised as labour migration programs or avenues for guestwork, but are concealed with the use of ambiguous or unclear language to appease potentially xenophobic voters (Endoh 2019, 2021; Surak 2018; Roberts 2018). One program under which migration to counter the labour shortages is possible is the Technical Intern Training Program (TITP). The TITP is a government initiative that ostensibly upskills young people from neighbouring Asian countries in Japan, but also serves as a stopgap measure to counter critical labour shortages in small and medium-sized enterprises across the country (Hironaka and Yamada 2022; Tian 2019; Mazumi 2019; Demelius 2020; Oishi 1995).

For nearly 30 years, the TITP has attracted criticism from activists in Japan and abroad. Advocates for TITP trainees in Japan have vocally argued for the abolition of the program and pushed for reform, directly challenging the state and working as activists to promote TITP trainees’ labour rights, including demonstrating on the street or outside government offices after cases of alleged labour rights or human rights abuses (Surak 2018; Kremers 2014). However, another, quieter coalition of advocates across Japanese and Vietnamese communities supporting TITP trainees works in solidarity to reverse the harms generated by the TITP, through the provision of care—including affective support, housing, reproductive support and so on—to trainees, without necessarily targeting the TITP itself.

This division between those who challenge the program and those who supplement the gaps is also captured in the literature, with some scholars condemning the program outright and arguing for its immediate dismantlement and others suggesting more reform and care practices be implemented to mitigate the harsh consequences of the scheme. For instance, Tian (2019: 1508) refers to the TITP as ‘an extremely restrictive, exclusionist, and profoundly illiberal guest worker programme that does not even fully recognise its participants as labourers’. Liu-Farrer (2020: 5) argues that the ‘[d]emographic crisis is a long-term structural problem that can’t be addressed by temporary labor imports’—a point stressed also by Ogawa (2020: 121), who suggests that ‘the whole society will collapse without an adequately regulated labor migration channel, sustainable through ensuring decent working conditions and strengthening human rights protection’. These scholars clearly condemn the TITP as an unsustainable and damaging system and their arguments sit squarely within the consensus in TITP scholarship that the program is controversial and problematic (Yoshida 2021; Shipper 2002; Roberts 2018; Kim 2021; Sasaki 2020; Bélanger and Giang 2013; Oishi 1995, 2021).

Other scholars, while not overtly promoting the TITP, argue for a different approach in caring for and supporting trainees, without necessarily dismantling the TITP itself. Kuwano and McMaster (2020) argue for new approaches in both medical services and welfare, to ensure the provisioning of culturally sensitive care to TITP trainees in need, while Shinohara et al. (2021) suggest that Japan’s immigration system is immature relative to Western countries, leading to an insufficient level of support in healthcare provisioning for trainees in the system. They suggest an improvement in the accessibility of resources for TITP trainees, rather than an overhaul of the whole system (Shinohara et al. 2021). Arita et al. (2022) also write on TITP trainee wellbeing and acknowledge that trainees face increased risks of mental health issues due to participation in the program, compared with other migrant groups in Japan. They argue that improved social supports are fundamental for improving trainees’ mental wellbeing in Japan (Arita et al. 2022). While these scholars identify and acknowledge problems within the TITP, they still argue for changes to the system’s design as it stands and promote increased inflows and supports for trainees to mitigate some of the program’s harmful effects.

Drawing on these bodies of literature, this chapter attempts to bring both perspectives together to argue that trainees in Japan’s TITP experience harm from a lack of care from the Japanese state, but that by providing care and inflows to support trainees, Japanese and Vietnamese advocates resist the depletive status quo of the TITP without taking on an overtly revolutionary tone. First, this chapter examines the origins of the TITP, then introduces a feminist international political economy theory as a framework to understand the lack of care and support for TITP trainees, known as ‘depletion through social reproduction’, and combines it with studies of everyday resistance to understand quieter forms of subversion in the TITP. Next, this chapter looks specifically at a civil society organisation known as Tomoiki (Japan–Vietnam Tomoiki Support Association), which provides support for Vietnamese trainees in Japan and suggests that by so doing, depletion in the TITP is mitigated, trainees are replenished and proposals for societal transformation to reverse the harmful effects of the TITP are made.

I first came across the TITP as a 20-year-old student a few years into my Bachelor of Asian Studies degree. For several weeks, I interned at a feminist organisation in Tokyo, the Asia–Japan Women’s Resource Centre, which works closely with transnational feminist groups in the Asia-Pacific to support Vietnamese trainees entering Japan through the program. It was this initial exposure to transnational feminist activism in Japan that sparked my interest in the interrelationship between advocacy, social reproduction, depletion and labour migration.

Being neither Japanese nor Vietnamese and engaging with Asia-Pacific advocacy groups as an undergraduate from a Global North university, my analysis of the TITP involves risks. These include blind spots that might essentialise the experiences of Vietnamese workers in the program or the advocates who work alongside them (Rajan and Thornhill 2019; Lee and Chang 2023). I also risk positioning Vietnamese trainees as lacking agency in terms of their views of the program and its outcomes (Rajan and Thornhill 2019).

For these reasons, my aim is to maintain dialogue with the advocates and trainees about whom I write (Lira et al. 2019; Au 2019). My honours thesis, on which this chapter is based, was sent to Tomoiki and the Asia–Japan Women’s Resource Centre. Their insights and perspectives on the TITP are ones that I bring with me into this chapter.

The Technical Intern Training Program in Japan: An overview

According to Japan’s Ministry of Justice, there were 181,957 Vietnamese trainees residing in Japan at the end of June 2022, accounting for 55 per cent of total TITP trainee numbers in Japan (MOJ 2022). Vietnamese remain the largest proportion of foreign workers in Japan (Vietnam News Agency 2023). The latest figures show women constitute 42.5 per cent of the TITP trainee workforce (OTIT 2022) and it is generally believed that Vietnamese women (and other women migrant workers in Japan) tend to work in feminised industries including manufacturing, agriculture, food processing and service-oriented work in restaurants (CGD 2021)—consistent with other regions in the Asia-Pacific (Vijeyarasa and Liu 2022; Bourke-Martignoni et al. 2018). In 2022, 23.2 per cent of Vietnamese trainees worked in food processing, 21.6 per cent in construction, 15.8 per cent in assembly and welding and 6.8 per cent in agriculture, among other sectors (MOJ 2022). These Vietnamese workers enter Japan as ‘trainees’ under the auspices of the TITP.

The TITP originated from a labour transfer scheme in the 1950s under which workers in Japanese companies situated abroad could come to Japan temporarily and learn skills to improve work performance at home. This intraregional training scheme was possible due to Japan’s involvement with the Colombo Plan for Cooperative Economic and Social Development in Asia and the Pacific beginning in 1954, which allowed thousands of trainees from South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia to enter Japan and upskill in certain technologies for the benefit of their home countries’ developmental advancement (The Colombo Plan Secretariat 2024; Surak 2018).

The program was operated largely under the management of the Japan International Cooperation Agency and attracted some 48,000 trainees between 1954 and 1977 (Surak 2018). Surak (2018) notes that, by 1982, there were 10,000 intracompany trainees, which increased to 23,000 by 1988. By the late 1980s, Japan started to experience severe labour shortages in small manufacturing firms, which lacked access to capital for investing in labour-saving equipment or the option to invest in the labour market abroad (de Carvalho 2003). Concurrently, the number of overstaying migrants increased to more than 10 million people, at which stage the trainee system was reformed to allow Japanese companies with no international operations to also recruit trainees through mediating institutions, including chambers of commerce and industry and small enterprise associations (Shipper 2002; Yoshida 2021). Over the following decade, the TITP system was reformed and expanded several times to increase the intake of trainees into small and medium-sized enterprises across Japan, often coinciding exactly with periods of economic downturn and labour shortages, which explains Japan’s dependency on the TITP (Shipper 2002; Oishi 1995; Surak 2018). Nevertheless, the system has never ceased to be described as an initiative for upskilling trainees to improve the economic development of their home countries (OTIT n.d.; JITCO n.d.).

These days, the TITP is widely acknowledged by activists and scholars in both Japan and Vietnam as a thinly veiled guestworker program, which serves to counter the demographic woes facing contemporary Japan and does not deliver on its stated aims of upskilling foreign workers but rather appoints them to sectors and industries where there are critical labour shortages (Mazumi 2019; Tian 2019; Bélanger et al. 2011; Bélanger and Giang 2013; Tran 2020). Vietnamese workers started working in the TITP in greater numbers in the early 2010s and, in 2016, overtook Chinese workers as the largest cohort of foreign labourers living in Japan through the TITP (Tran 2020). The TITP, while sustaining its public mission statement as being designed for international cooperation and development (JITCO n.d.; OTIT n.d.), has attracted international condemnation from civil society groups, foreign governments and human rights advocates for facilitating widespread abuse and exploitation of trainees (Department of State 2020, 2021, 2022; Sasaki 2020; Tian 2019). Some scholars have referred to the TITP as a form of ‘modern-day slavery’ (Sasaki 2020: 247).

One sobering fact to illustrate this is the rate of deaths on the program. Between 2012 and 2017, the Ministry of Justice of Japan reported that 171 trainees had died while undergoing training through the TITP (MHLW 2017; Osumi 2019). This reporting prompted immediate condemnation from the US Department of State, which declared Japan a Tier 2 country for human trafficking in 2017—namely, identifying Japan as a country that does not meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking (Department of State 2017). In response, Japan introduced several new laws and labour protections for TITP trainees and established the Organization for Technical Intern Trainees (OTIT) to monitor and audit companies recruiting TITP trainees (JITCO n.d.; Yoshida 2021; Department of State 2018). This resulted in an improved standing in the US State Department’s rankings from 2018 to 2019, when Japan ranked in Tier 1—meeting the minimum standards. Nevertheless, reports of abuse continued. By the end of 2018, 9,052 trainees had ‘fled’ their workplaces, with half of these being Vietnamese workers (Tran 2020), followed by another 8,796 in 2019 (MOJ 2021). From 2020 to 2022, Japan has continuously been ranked as a Tier 2 country for failing to counter human trafficking through the TITP, among other measures. The US State Department’s ranking system also merits caution as a tool for measuring human trafficking. The Trafficking in Persons report does not provide explanation of how national data have been compiled or whether it has comparative analysis in other languages, and it is questionable whether the US Government is adequately neutral to make accurate assessments of other states (Vijeyarasa 2015; Gallagher 2011). Even at Tier 1 status, it is possible that trainees’ situation in Japan was dire.

An underlying factor of the level of abuse reported on the TITP is the Japanese Government’s failure to account for trainees’ wellbeing. The OTIT sits underneath the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, but observers have continued to argue that the agency is far too understaffed to make a difference. For example, in 2020 there were just 350 staff in the OTIT, covering more than 7,300 companies (Department of State 2019). In this environment of poor regulation, employers are not penalised sufficiently to incentivise proper conduct within the workplace in terms of providing adequate living space or inflows to sustain trainees’ wellbeing. The reported insufficient and unsanitary housing provided for trainees by their employers (CCC 2020), as well as constant oversight of trainees’ personal lives and overwork in the workplace, can lead to depletion—what feminists define as the harmful outcome of a devaluation and lack of inflow to support the social reproduction of individuals, households and communities (Rai  et al. 2014). The next section will elaborate on depletion in the TITP and the ways it is resisted in the context of Japan.

Depletion and everyday resistance

Depletion through social reproduction theory is a feminist framework developed by Shirin Rai, Catherine Hoskyns and Dania Thomas (2014), which emerges out of ongoing debates about the unacknowledged contributions of individuals and communities performing social reproductive work. It focuses on the negative consequences for people who perform this labour, when excessively relied upon, in global economies (Rai et al. 2014). Social reproduction here is defined as biological reproduction, unpaid production of goods and services within the home and the reproduction of cultural beliefs and ideologies (Rai et al. 2014). Depletion of an individual occurs when they are performing excessive amounts of both productive (wage labour) work and social reproductive work in a given context, without the inflows (such as adequate rest, leisure time or maintenance of social networks) needed to recharge and replenish after labouring hours (Rai et al. 2014). Depletion has been mapped in cases of dispossession (Fernandez 2018), natural disasters (Tanyag 2018), in export-oriented zones (Gunawardana 2016) and in settler-colonial settings (Chilmeran and Pratt 2019). Depletion can also occur in cases where individuals and communities cannot or are prohibited from biologically reproducing, performing unpaid work in the home or practising cultural beliefs freely, given the crucial roles these activities play in supporting healthy social relations and individual health (Chilmeran and Pratt 2019; Rai et al. 2014).

In the past, scholars working on the TITP have frequently attributed the bodily harm and suffering of trainees to insufficient labour laws (Shipper 2002; Bélanger et al. 2011; Sasaki 2020; Hayakawa and Barnes 2017), but beginning in 2017, the Japanese Government introduced a new law to protect trainees’ labour rights, the Technical Intern Training Act, which grants trainees the same rights as Japanese workers, including maximum working hours, a minimum wage and parental leave (Department of State 2017; JITCO n.d.). Nevertheless, reports of abuse and harm have not reduced (see the next section). This is suggestive of a deeper structural issue that transcends work rights issues. To this end, depletion is a useful framework for analysing how trainees’ lives and treatment in the workplace, where productive work takes place, intersect with their social reproduction outside training spaces. Depletion acknowledges violence and bodily harm even in contexts where trainees may consent to the work or are not engaged in obvious forced labour as such. This is because the framework is used to measure ‘invisible’ harms that stem from the unacknowledged overwork that occurs outside formal workplaces, as well as inside them, and is less reliant on more ‘visible’ indicators of forced labour (Rai et al. 2014; Johnston and Lingham 2021).

Beyond the ‘obviously depleting effects’ of labour under poor conditions, depletion sees productive and social reproductive labour as intimately connected to each other, and labour time and wages, rather than the effects of certain kinds of labour, as the main indicators of and risk factors for bodily harm (Johnston and Lingham 2021: 12). Under Japan’s TITP, where reports of overwork are rife and trainees do not have sufficient hours for rest (Verité 2018; Yoshida 2021; Kamibayashi 2013), there is also a lack of sufficient support from the Japanese Government to provide inflows to help Vietnamese trainees recover or replenish from their labouring hours, which has been noted by civil society organisations across Japan (Solidarity Network with Migrants Japan 2019). This has a cumulative effect on trainees’ bodies, with individuals unable to keep up with the labouring demands of the system and simultaneously practise social reproduction or simply replenish from their hours of output. The consequence of this unsustainable lifestyle is a deterioration in the health and wellbeing of individuals (Rai et al. 2014), which is evident in the statistics of trainee distress, discussed in the next section.

As with other contexts in the Asia-Pacific (Vijeyarasa and Liu 2022), in Japan, regulation and oversight of the labouring conditions of TITP trainees are very poor and often the government defers the responsibility to care for and attend to the needs of Vietnamese trainees to civil society groups. These groups fill the gap by providing inflows to support trainees where they are missing (Tian 2019) as well as vocally resisting the status quo of the program. Civil society groups have made overt demands to the government to reform or scrap the program and this work has largely been undertaken by lawyer-advocates (Kremer 2014), labour unions and migrant advocacy groups, such as the well-known Zentoitsu Workers’ Union and Solidarity Network with Migrants Japan, both headed by Trafficking in Persons Hero Ippei Torii, who uses methods such as public protest and coalition-building with other civil society groups across Japan to condemn the TITP (TIP Report Heroes 2022). However, this resistance also takes place in much quieter forms at an everyday level, which helps reverse the depletion of trainees.

Resistance to depletion is complex and multifaceted. Due to the complication of measuring and identifying depletion in the first place (Rai et al. 2014), resistance against its negative effects should not be understood as manifesting in overt expressions of political protest but takes the form of everyday negotiation and struggle. To this end, discussions of everyday resistance prove a fruitful starting point to begin unpacking resistance against depletion in the TITP.

Everyday resistance is a theory posited by James C. Scott in 1985, exploring resistance that is quiet and less visible to the state or mainstream society and that is often not overtly politically articulated (Johansson and Vinthagen 2019). While everyday resistance has been explored and defined in a multitude of different ways, this chapter agrees with the theory posited by Johansson and Vinthagen (2016; Vinthagen and Johansson 2013) that this form of resistance, while still an oppositional activity against forms of domination, does not require a shared political consciousness or a coherent form of action or coalition-building. Everyday resistance is not an act that intends to fundamentally disrupt hierarchies of power that subordinate particular groups, but it can nevertheless carve out a space for these groups to create systems that serve their own interests within the constraints imposed by their subordination (Elias 2005; Johansson and Vinthagen 2015).

In the case of Japan’s TITP, everyday resistance against depletion takes form through attempts to reverse it by Vietnamese and Japanese activists, who work together to care for Vietnamese trainees afflicted by abuse and harm in the system. If we draw on the theory of everyday resistance to understand the context of the TITP, we must first identify the power relationship that underpins the program and where the power lies. In the TITP, there is a power hierarchy between the state and trainees. Because the state neglects to provide adequate services and protections for trainees, it ultimately facilitates depletion within the system, which trainees therefore endure. Trainees are subordinated by this depletion, which is generated by the state, and it should therefore be seen as an effect of an unequal and dominating relationship. Framing depletion in the TITP as a form of domination, or at least a product of unequal power relationships that subordinate trainees, allows us to see the reversal of depletion by activists as a form of everyday resistance.

By assisting trainees to mitigate the stresses of their workload, providing support and inflows for trainees to recover from their labours and highlighting the lack of care afforded to these trainees by simply providing it themselves, activists challenge depletion in the everyday without overtly voicing their political resistance to the TITP. They carve out spaces for TITP trainees and other groups to recover from the dominating effects of depletion in the program. One association in Tokyo, the Japan–Vietnam Tomoiki Support Association (hereinafter Tomoiki), provides support to trainees and is a good site to examine everyday resistance and solidarity against the TITP through the provisioning of care. The next section builds on Tomoiki’s work to illustrate the reversal of depletion and the resulting acts of everyday resistance contained therein.

Tomoiki: Mitigating, replenishing, transforming

Nisshinkutsu Temple (colloquially known as the Vietnamese Temple in Tokyo) first became a safe haven for Vietnamese migrants who had become homeless in Japan after the Tohoku earthquake in 2011, which formed part of Japan’s triple disaster earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown (Murakami 2020). Members of the temple formed the civil society organisation Tomoiki to promote positive Japan–Vietnam relations across the citizenry of Japan. However, they increasingly focused their energy on the TITP, starting in 2013, when the number of Vietnamese people entering Japan began accelerating and the abuse that other foreign trainees had faced before them began to surface more prominently in the Vietnamese community (Tomoiki n.d.[a]; Tran 2020). These days the temple serves as the headquarters of Tomoiki and as a place for trainees to seek refuge, with most of the organisation’s members also running the temple, including head nun of Nisshinkutsu and leader of Tomoiki, Jiho Yoshimizu. Tomoiki states that, since 2014, its mission has been to support and protect the lives and human rights of Vietnamese trainees, prompted by a feeling of indignation at the number of young Vietnamese people losing their lives in Japan (Tomoiki n.d.[a]).¹ As Yoshimizu shared in 2020: ‘We do everything. We take care of people from when they’re inside the womb to when they’re inside an urn’ (Murakami 2020). Care is a key framework informing the activities of Tomoiki and works to reverse and resist the depletion of trainees in several ways.

Tomoiki’s activities align with Rai et al.’s (2014) original theory for reversing depletion—namely: mitigation, replenishment and transformation. Mitigation includes communities and collectives sharing stressful work; replenishment includes groups and institutions voluntarily assisting people to cope with depletion through social reproduction by providing inflows when they are missing; and transformation is the society-wide change needed to dismantle structures that generate depletion.

Mitigation

Mitigation is the first layer of care that Tomoiki provides to trainees. Rai et al. (2019) describe mitigation as a short to medium-term response to depletion, in that it reallocates care without necessarily challenging the underlying factors that generate depletion in the first place. Tomoiki mitigates the pressure for trainees to find sufficient housing or food to replenish from their often-traumatic experiences working in intensive labour settings with poor accommodation, particularly in cases of emergency departure from their workplaces. Housing on the TITP visa is connected to one’s employers (MOJ 1990), so if a trainee is unfairly fired from a workplace or must escape a violent situation, they lose both their income and their housing in the same instant (Kamibayashi 2013). Tomoiki provides accommodation to trainees to stay safely in the temple and supports them in finding alternative arrangements. They also provide emergency food packages and meals to trainees, sending food assistance to 6,038 people in 2021 alone (Tomoiki n.d.[a]).

By providing housing and unpaid labour within the home (namely, the provisioning of nutritious food for overworked bodies), the organisation tends to the immediate consequences of depletion and harm but, in so doing, forms part of the wider infrastructure of the TITP’s functioning, as the government increasingly relies on these resource-poor civil society groups to tend to trainees’ needs, rather than taking action itself to address the pitfalls of the system for trainee wellbeing (Tian 2019; Kremers 2014). This confirms Rai et al.’s (2014) observation that inequalities are inbuilt within mitigation despite mitigation remaining the most available method of reversing depletion. It also echoes the feminist global care chain literature that notes how the redistribution of care labour intensifies the risk of ‘depletion of the weakest down the care chain’ (Rai and Goldblatt 2020: 177; Yeates 2009). In other words, the care burden falls onto individual advocates in Tomoiki, who themselves may begin to experience depletion from their advocacy output in support of trainees. Despite Tomoiki’s best efforts at mitigating depletion to lessen the negative consequences of the TITP on trainees, there is limited potential for everyday resistance given this method of reversing depletion still forms part of the larger harmful ecosystem that is the TITP.

Replenishment

Rai et al. (2014) posit a second strategy for reversing depletion, which is replenishment. Replenishment is understood here to mean the role of public and private entities ‘filling’ the gaps that are systematic consequences of depletion (Rai et al. 2014: 99) and lessening its effects. In this case, Tomoiki replenishes trainees as a kind of ‘social resource’ (Fernandez 2018: 160) in that it provides options for trainees over a longer term and in a systematic way, compared with their work in mitigating depletion in emergencies. This provisioning of information about trainees’ rights to parental leave or legal rights to biologically reproduce is an inflow that supports trainees in their practice of social reproduction. This conforms with Rai et al.’s (2014: 99) vision of replenishment as a fill-in for systemic causes of depletion, but, as they note, ‘these interventions are extremely variable and always in danger of cutbacks in times of economic crises’.

Tomoiki attends to the needs of pregnant Vietnamese trainees working through the TITP in Japan who lack sufficient access to sexual and reproductive health services and information, particularly about their access to childcare services or parental leave. To this end, Tomoiki volunteers source childcare centres for trainees and disseminate materials, as well as holding sessions to explain the legal rights to parental leave to which trainees are entitled under the TITP. The inflows to sustain the form of social reproduction that is biological reproduction are lacklustre within the structure of the TITP. Apart from a few passages in TITP handbooks given to trainees on arrival in Japan and some campaigns to try to make trainees aware of their right to parental leave, as with many other trainee rights, the government leaves it up to employers to make their workers aware and does not sufficiently audit organisations to ensure those rights are being protected (Department of State 2020, 2021). For example, reports of trainees being laid off on discovery of their pregnancy are widespread across activist groups (Sasaki 2020; Oie 2016). One government survey found that between 2017 and 2020 as many as one-quarter of pregnant trainees were told by their companies to repatriate on discovery of their pregnancy and 25 per cent of the surveyed participants said they had not received explanation of their maternal and sexual health rights (Kyodo News 2022).

In this context, Tomoiki replenishes trainees’ social reproduction by providing longer-term care options for pregnant trainees, including providing institutional arrangements for women to using childcare once they return to their traineeship in the TITP (Tomoiki n.d.[c]), sorting visas for trainees and their newborns and finding alternative means of employment so that mothers can stay in Japan for longer (Tomoiki n.d.[c]).

This strategy of reversing depletion cannot rest on its own and must be accompanied by broader structural change. This is where transformation of depletive systems, potentially generated by forms of visible everyday resistance against the TITP and the visible provisioning of care where it is lacking, might generate deeper change compared with mitigation or replenishment.

Transformation

Rai et al.’s (2014) third and final vision for reversing depletion is transformation, which is the promotion of structural change within depletive systems. Transformation can be viewed as a reconfiguration of power relationships within a society (with an emphasis on gendered social relations in depletion theory), but it can also be viewed as the result of incremental and minor changes that lead to changes in societal perspectives in the longer term (Rai et al. 2014). To this end, the visible inflows that Tomoiki provides to trainees should be seen as a potential avenue for deeper change in public perceptions of the program and its effects on trainees.

Tomoiki (n.d.[a]) engages near-weekly in media discussions highlighting the lack of care within the TITP. It disseminates articles that highlight the lack of support infrastructure for trainees who have been laid off and personal stories of interactions between the Japanese and Vietnamese people within Tomoiki to highlight the systemic issues of the TITP and its depletion. This dissemination of materials is performed without the revolutionary tone that some other organisations take (see Tomoiki n.d.[a]). For example, one high-profile nun who has worked closely with Tomoiki at the Nisshinkutsu Temple, Thich Tam Tri, has stated openly:

As a nun, my efforts aren’t based on a political motive or wanting to criticise a system, but simply from a humanitarian perspective. If there is someone in front of me who needs help, it is natural that I want to help them, and I am happy to. (Lee and Inuma 2022)

This approach to seeking change vis-a-vis TITP’s challenges has interesting implications for resistance in that the advocacy promoted within the organisation is not overtly confrontational to the TITP but rather negotiates with its depletive consequences in a more discreet way.

By highlighting a lack of care within the system of the TITP, the members of Tomoiki advance a subversive truth (Lilja and Johansson 2018): that the TITP is not a development initiative but is systemically depletive, as proven by the uncared-for figures of Vietnamese trainees with whom they work. Through the repeated imagery and media engagements in which Tomoiki participates to emphasise this lack of care, it circulates a narrative that challenges the veneer of what the TITP professes to be to the Japanese public. Lilja and Johansson (2018) argue that dominant narratives are challenged when resistant voices repeatedly articulate an alternative understanding of power relationships. Resistance may take the form of a challenge to the vocabulary used by the dominating voice, by subverting the status quo (Lilja and Johansson 2018). By visibly and publicly providing inflows to trainees’ social reproduction, Tomoiki highlights its systematic lack within the TITP and resists the dominant narrative that this program benefits Vietnamese trainees. In this sense, the dissemination of materials is one of the more subversive undertakings of Tomoiki and is evidence of its resistance to the TITP in a more direct manner compared with mitigation or resistance.

Limitations of the theory? Resistance, change and the future of care in Japanese guestworker programs

In 2018, the Japanese Government introduced a new status of residency for accepting migrants into Japan, including those without tertiary education, known as the Specified Skilled Worker (SSW) visa (Oishi 2021). The SSW visa allows workers to enter the country in 12 different fields, including nursing, construction, accommodation and agriculture (MOFA n.d.[b]). After years of using the TITP and other avenues, it seemed Japan was finally opening its ‘front door’ to labour migration (Oishi 2021). Partnered with the new visa categories was the introduction of 126 programs designed to support workers adapting to Japanese society, including provisions for their everyday life, the recruitment process to companies and support with foreign residence controls (Endoh 2021). Not only this, but SSW workers will be able to change company and workplace without the administrative hurdles that the TITP has traditionally had in place; they are guaranteed wages and conditions that match those of Japanese citizens, and they can be hired directly by a company rather than using intermediaries, which has been generative of exploitation in the past (Endoh 2021).

Further, on 29 July 2022, then justice minister Yoshihisa Furukawa pledged to overhaul the TITP and create a new system (potentially sitting within the SSW visa) that would have no difference between its stated aim and its reality in practice (Tauchi 2022). These positive changes must be viewed as partly, if not completely, the outcome of vocal activism and advocacy on the part of Japan’s loudest groups supporting trainees, who have resisted the system and attracted the attention of international organisations that put pressure on Japan to make policy changes improving conditions for migrant workers (Kremers 2014).

Nevertheless, these positive inroads are not perfect and there is still work to be done at a micro-scale and in support of trainees’ social reproduction. For example, there are two different visa categories under the SSW scheme. The first, SSW-1, allows migrants to enter Japan and work for a maximum of five years with no possibility of family reunification or contract renewal—effectively mirroring the rotating labour migration layout of the TITP (Oishi 2021). If migrants demonstrate ‘improved’ skill levels by passing Japanese-language and skills tests in their sector, they are eligible to apply for the SSW-2 visa, which enables them to work permanently in the country and also allows for family reunification (Oishi 2021). On the announcement of the visa categories, then justice minister Yamashita Takashi’s staff testified in the Upper House that the jump from SSW-1 to SSW-2 would be made into a ‘fairly high’ hurdle (Endoh 2021: 293), suggesting that the Japanese Government does not intend for migrants and their families to live in Japan without first going through challenging administrative steps.

TITP trainees will be able to seamlessly apply for the SSW-1 visa without the initial Japanese-language test and occupational examinations required of other migrant groups in the country (MOFA n.d.[b]). One NGO reported that more than 90 per cent of migrant workers in Japan under the SSW were former TITP interns in vulnerable sectors prone to human trafficking (Department of State 2022). This suggests the SSW might be, as Endoh (2021: 292) describes, ‘the same wine (a de-facto guest worker program) in a different bottle’. Without the easy option of family reunification, trainees are likely to experience the same isolation and inability to practise, for instance, their social and cultural reproduction—one of the categories of social reproduction that Rai et al. (2014) identify as key to sustaining wellbeing.

To this end, depletion through social reproduction theory is useful in understanding Tomoiki’s contributions in supporting trainees. Even if its efforts to sustain the day-to-day life and social wellbeing of trainees and provide emergency care do not appear as a direct challenge to Japan’s guestworker programs on the surface, Tomoiki’s contributions should nevertheless be acknowledged through the prism of social reproduction. Looking at the TITP through depletion allows us to analytically step back from a focus on production, labour issues and resistance to labour exploitation, to look at the workers’ lives in the micro, everyday level beyond the workplace. Tomoiki is valuable for its resistance to the depletion that hides within the TITP and which may hide within the SSW in future, because it illustrates the lack of care for trainees’ social reproduction by the state by providing that care itself. This type of resistance may not appear as revolutionary as the more vocal advocates in Japan whose work seems to be linked to wide-sweeping policy change and reform, but their work is likely to become increasingly important in the next stage of Japan’s labour migration visas. This will be particularly the case if depletion continues to hide in incremental policy reforms that still do not account for or cater to the social reproductive needs of workers in Japan.

References

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1. 1 Original quote in Japanese: 「ベトナム人技能実習生、留学生などが若くして命を落とすことに憤りを感じ2014年より『命と人権を守る』支援活動を行う。」 (Tomoiki n.d.[a]).