世論 What Japan Thinks

I’ve often heard about how a lot of companies, Toyota in particular, employ a good number of foreign workers – Toyota is heavily into employing South American staff – but I’d never seen any figures to back up these assertions. There are also suggestions that a lot of firms in the Toyota supply chain, for instance, employ illegals, but I suspect this is purely (mainly?) rumour and speculation.

However, today I saw some data on a large American-owned multinational with manufacturing facilities in Japan (printed matter, so no web link to the article, and the company name is omitted just in case…) that said that within Japan 16% of their staff (how many people in total are employed by the company in Japan was not noted, and their web site does not say either, but I suspect it is a good few thousand) are non-Japanese; of the 16%, 20% were from the Philippines, 19% were Korean, 16% Indian, 13% from the USA, 12% Chinese and 20% from 22 other countries including Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia and Venezuela.

These numbers are interesting and surprising as the total foreign population of Japan is barely 2%, so at first glance this might boast of the company’s commitment to diversity, but the data is also worrying as I wonder how many of these workers are doing a 3K job on the rather dodgy trainee visa scheme? How representative is this company of all the firms in Japan, I know not either.