Society Japan's rural businesses adapt to foreign workers

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.

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