Japan saw its biggest year-on-year jump in foreign workers since records began, government data showed yesterday, as the country seeks to address labor shortages exacerbated by its aging population.
In October last year, the nation’s foreign workforce stood at 2.3 million — an increase of around 254,000 people, or 12.4 percent, from a year earlier, Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare data showed.
That marks the biggest jump since records began in 2008, and is the latest in a series of annual record-breaking increases.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The total has jumped around threefold from a decade ago, in 2014, when the number of foreign workers stood at 788,000.
The number of businesses employing at least one foreign worker also hit a record high of around 342,000, up 7.3 percent from a year ago, data showed.
Japan has the world’s second-oldest population after Monaco, according to the World Bank, and its relatively strict immigration rules mean it faces growing labor shortages. The aging nation will need 6.88 million foreign workers in 2040 to meet its growth targets, according to an estimate by the Japan International Cooperation Agency.
Yesterday’s data showed Vietnamese, Chinese and Filipinos were the top three nationalities in Japan’s foreign labor force. Japan also saw a surge in foreign workers from Myanmar, Indonesia and Sri Lanka last year, many of whom were blue-collar workers or students rather than high-skilled professionals.
Among the most common jobs held by foreign workers were positions in the manufacturing, hospitality and retail sectors.
A “technical intern” program continued to account for a sizeable portion of the foreign workforce, at 20.4 percent. The state-sponsored scheme is ostensibly an attempt by Japan to give participants from countries such as China and Vietnam specialized experience to use in their home countries.
However, critics have long called it a “backdoor” source of foreign labor in a conservative nation loath to officially acknowledge it is open to immigrants.
The intern program has also been long dogged by allegations of discrimination and physical abuse.
STRONG INTEREST: Analysts have pointed to optimism in TSMC’s growth prospects in the artificial intelligence era as the cause of the rising number of shareholders The number of people holding shares of chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) hit a new high last week despite a decline in its stock price, the Taiwan Depository and Clearing Corp (TDCC, 台灣集保) said. The number of TSMC shareholders rose to 2.46 million as of Friday, up 75,536 from a week earlier, TDCC data showed. The stock price fell 1.34 percent during the same week to close at NT$1,840 (US$57.55). The decline in TSMC’s share price resulted from volatility in global tech stocks, driven by rising international crude oil prices as the war against Iran continues. Dealers said
PRICE HIKES: The war in the Middle East would not significantly disrupt supply in the short term, but semiconductor companies are facing price surges for materials Taiwan’s semiconductor companies are not facing imminent supply disruptions of essential chemicals or raw materials due to the war in the Middle East, but surges in material costs loom large, industry association SEMI Taiwan said yesterday. The association’s comments came amid growing concerns that supplies of helium and other key raw materials used in semiconductor production could become a choke point after Qatar shut down its liquefied natural gas (LNG) production and helium output earlier this month due to the conflict. Qatar is the second-largest LNG supplier in the world and accounts for about 33 percent of global helium output. Helium is
DOMESTIC COMPONENT: Huang identified several Taiwanese partners to be a key part of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin supply chain, including Asustek, Hon Hai and Wistron Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), addressing crowds at the company’s biggest annual event, unveiled a variety of new products while predicting that its flagship artificial intelligence (AI) processors would help generate US$1 trillion in sales through next year. During a two-and-a-half-hour keynote address, Huang announced plans to push deeper into central processing units (CPUs) — Intel Corp’s home turf — and introduced semiconductors made with technology acquired from start-up Groq Inc. The company even said it was developing chips for data centers in outer space. At the heart of Huang’s speech was the message that demand for computing power
China is clamping down on fertilizer exports to protect its domestic market, industry sources said, putting an additional strain on global markets that were already grappling with shortages caused by the US-Israeli war on Iran. China is among the largest fertilizer exporters — shipping more than US$13 billion of it last year — and it has a history of controlling exports to keep prices low for farmers. Shipments through the war-blocked Strait of Hormuz account for about one-third of the sea-borne supply. This month, Beijing banned exports of nitrogen-potassium fertilizer blends and certain phosphate varieties, sources said. The ban, which has not
RSS