Society Japan's rural businesses adapt to foreign workers

[thomas]

The NYT on Japanese businesses relying increasingly on foreign labourers:

Hizatsuki Confectionery, a traditional rice cracker maker founded in 1923, has faced a significant challenge recently. Located in Tochigi , the company has struggled to find enough Japanese workers to keep up with production. This is a substantial change for the third-generation president, Hizatsuki Takeo, whose father and grandfather never faced such a problem. The company hired its first foreign workers four years ago to address the labour shortage.

Most of these workers come from other Asian countries like China, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Big companies in major cities have gradually hired more foreign workers for the past decade. However, in rural areas, where labour shortages are especially bad, even long-established businesses like Hizatsuki Confectionery are just starting to hire foreign workers. These are areas where only some people speak languages other than Japanese, and communities may be more hesitant to welcome newcomers. Whether these companies can convince foreign workers to stay could determine their survival. Yuki Hashimoto, a senior fellow at RIETI, a research institute in Tokyo, says that foreign workers are essential for small and medium-sized businesses, which are the backbone of Japan's regional economies. Without them, these businesses might not survive.

Japan lacks a national system for helping foreign workers with essentials like language assistance. Local businesses and municipalities are quickly fashioning their methods of long-term support. For Hizatsuki Confectionery, the company's experience with foreign workers began in 2020, when Mr Hizatsuki, the president for the past two decades, decided to hire ten workers from Vietnam. He recalled in an interview that his Japanese employees were deeply unsettled by the change. "I told them: 'To feed the Japanese people, we need to survive. And to be able to survive, we need to accept foreign workers.'" Over the past four years, Mr Hizatsuki said, he established various policies to retain the workers from Vietnam and others from Indonesia, who now make up two dozen of the company's 210 employees. Mr. Hizatsuki has started using a translator at the company's factory to check in directly with his foreign employees. He also raises the base wages for his foreign and Japanese workers by the same amount each year, which some other companies in Japan decline to do. Mr Hizatsuki plans to promote a non-Japanese worker to deputy line manager and then line manager within three to five years, which he hopes will show other foreign employees that they have opportunities for career advancement in Japan. Mr Hizatsuki said Japanese employees have become comfortable working with foreign colleagues.

Paywall alert:

In Japan’s Countryside, Century-Old Firms Learn to Embrace Foreign Workers

Japan’s regional economies are facing severe labor shortages. Their survival depends on their ability to persuade foreign workers to stay.

www.nytimes.com