Trainees Disappear and Apply for Refugee Status in Japan

Japan offers opportunities for foreigners to come and train skills under the program "Skill Training System for Foreigners".

In the recent months, however, quite a few trainees desert the training sites and disappear. Some 400 of them have applied for recognition of refugee status. Among the trainers from Myanmar, in particular, almost all of the 100 trainees have disappeared and applied for refugee status.

The chain of events evidently does point to some problems lying behind the training program itself. In fact, there are a few loopholes found in the entire scheme.

While offering foreign trainees to come and train skills, the program affords labor-short companies to obtain cheap labor. The trainees often work for less pay, in some cases without overtime. Data show some 4800 trainees are said to have deserted last year.

Furthermore, the law on refugees stipulates that refugees may apply for recognition of refugee status and half a year after application are permitted to work. An enlightened few trainees learned to switch from traineeship to refugee ship and found places to work; some more followed suit and then hundreds of them chose to "disappear" to seek jobs as refugees.

According to NHK, experts point out the program itself calls for total scrutiny.

A 20-years-old young man from Central Myanmar had come as a technical trainee at a factory in Tokai. He saw off a number of countrymen disappear and finally last February he himself left the factory and applied for refugee status.

Right now, he has two part-time jobs and earns three times as much as he used to as trainee, 300 thousand yen per month. He confided, "As a trainee my pay was often less than 100 thousand yen. A friend of mine taught me how to apply for refugee status. I want to make as much as I can while in Japan and go home to start my own business."

Every law has loopholes. It's high time this trainee program was totally renovated.