Ngo Gia Khanh is a sturdy 22-year-old man with close-cropped hair, whose slightly worried gaze seems to bear witness to the checkered journey he has been on since leaving Vietnam a year ago. When he followed the so-called “technical trainee” course, allowing unskilled foreign workers to be hired by Japanese companies, he certainly hadn’t imagined what awaited him.
A native of the northern province of Quang Ninh, located in northern Vietnam, the young man had two objectives, one being the corollary of the other: “Learn Japanese and make a career here in Japan. » So he left for Hanoi, the capital, where he began to learn the basics of Japanese. Then local intermediaries put him in contact with the Japanese organizations responsible for organizing the stay in Japan of the “trainees”. And find them work. In the spring of 2022, he finally arrived in Tokyo.
Khanh quickly had to become disillusioned: “I was promised I would be a mason and I found myself scraping cement, I was told I would earn 180,000 yen [1 144 euros], I only got 124,000he says in the office of a support NGO whose headquarters is located in a residential district of Tokyo. My level of Japanese did not allow me to communicate with my colleagues. I got yelled at by the foreman, once he even hit me with a metal grater. Another time, a Japanese worker grabbed me by the collar and spat at me, “Go back to your shitty country!” I was completely lost…”
Japan’s demographic twilight is forcing local businesses to rely more and more on labor from elsewhere, particularly in the construction, shipyard and hospital services sectors. At the end of the last century, nearly 90 million Japanese were between 15 and 65 years old. In 2040, the same age group should be reduced to 60 million people. As a result, according to a report published by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the archipelago will need 4.2 million foreign workers by 2030, and 6.7 million by 2040. ..
Abuse of power by bosses
Japan embodies one of these dreams from elsewhere and promises of a bright future for unemployed young people from modest backgrounds in South and South-East Asian countries. But this so-called “trainee” sector, reservoir of cheap labor for the companies that Ngo Gia Khanh imprinted, is increasingly controversial: it favors the abuse of power by the bosses with regard to foreign workers confronted, among other difficulties, with the complex cultural codes of a Japanese universe willingly withdrawn into itself and, for the most part , remained ethnically homogeneous: the number of foreign residents barely exceeds 2% of a population of 125 million of inhabitants.
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