Chinese exploited in ‘intern’ outrage

themselves only used as cheap labor and trapped in indentured servitude.

As of June last year, there reportedly were 210,000 foreigners working in firms and farms across Japan as, what Tokyo calls, trainees, among whom the Japanese Ministry of Justice has confirmed that 85,000 are Chinese.

The program, which allows foreign trainees to stay in Japan for three years, was introduced by the Japanese government in 1993.

However, the program has been widely criticized as a platform to attract cheap labor from overseas.

With little legal protection, the foreign trainees are often underpaid, and illegally placed as oyster shuckers, construction workers and other unskilled positions. Many of the indentured workforce are exposed to substandard, sometimes deadly working conditions.

Lu said some Chinese trainees employed at other Japanese construction companies are often scolded and even beaten by their bosses.

“I’ve heard that a Chinese trainee became a vegetable after getting his head seriously wounded by a falling excavator,” Lu said, adding the trainee has been hospitalized for months but his company has done nothing to help him.

“I don’t know what will happen to him next,” Lu added.

The Chinese embassy in Japan said it will take strong measures to protect the legitimate rights of Chinese nationals working under the intern training program.