Vietnamese interns in Japanese supermarkets

Convenience store chain Lawson is training hundreds of Vietnamese students in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City so they can work for the company after studying abroad in Japan.

Working in a convenience store is a popular part-time job for Japanese students. At a training center run by the Lawson convenience store chain, many young employees are learning how to greet customers before heading to the company's thousands of stores across Japan.

However, the difference is that these employees are Vietnamese, not Japanese. And the place where they are trained is Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, not Tokyo. They will be trained for about a month before going to Japan so that they can both study abroad and work part-time here.

Japan's labor market is in dire need of workers as its population ages and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's liberalization policies increase demand, so Lawson has begun training Vietnamese students before they leave their home country.

A Lawson store in Japan. Photo: Kyodo

Their move shows one result of the Abenomics stimulus campaign: more people are coming to Japan on short-term visas.

Since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took office in late 2012, the number of foreigners living in Japan has increased by nearly 10% to 2.2 million. Of this, the number of “technology interns” alone has increased by 27% and the number of foreign students has increased by 36%.

While permanent immigration remains tightly controlled, the figures also show the efforts of Japanese companies to control wage inflation, with the influx now accounting for 10-15% of all jobs created since Abenomics began.

Lawson said it wants to recruit 100 Vietnamese students in the first year of the program. This number will increase in the future. "Our goal is to help them easily find part-time jobs at Lawson once they arrive in Japan. Of course, they must have some Japanese language skills first," the company said.

Lawson said the program is part of a broader effort to address Japan’s labor shortage. When the unemployment rate was below 3 percent, there were an average of 1.74 part-time jobs for every applicant. The last time Japan had that rate was in 1992.

"In some ways, I think the increase in immigration is the answer to the labor shortage here," said Mitsuhiro Fukao, an economics professor at Keio University.

One of the sectors attracting immigrants is the “technology trainee” visa, which allows workers from developing countries to come to Japan and train for up to three years at high-tech companies. Since Abenomics began, the number of such workers has increased from more than 41,000 to more than 192,000.

“Some are real interns. But some are cheap labor in disguise,” Fukao said. Nearly half of them come from China. But the number in Vietnam is also exploding, tripling since 2012.

The number of students coming here has also increased sharply, from more than 65,000 to more than 246,000 people. And their visas also allow part-time work.

While short-term immigration has helped ease some of the pressure on the labor market, Japanese companies are keen to increase the number of permanent immigrants to offset sluggish economic growth due to population decline.

This is a controversial issue. Mr Abe has implemented a number of programs to allow skilled workers into Japan. But so far they have attracted only a few thousand people. Politicians are not keen on doing more. But a shortage of workers, especially in areas like nursing, could change that.

“I think anti-immigration sentiment is waning due to the labor shortage in the country,” said Fukao, who suggested reintroducing a plan that was mooted under former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to issue work visas based on applicants’ Japanese language skills.

According to VNE