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Update: Number of foreign workers at Japanese companies by geographic background

March 15, 2007
By Ken Worsley


In response to a commenter on the earlier post regarding the increase in the number of foreign workers at Japanese companies over the past decade, I’ve gone back to the statistics from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare and made a chart showing the number of foreign workers when broken down by where they’re coming from over the past ten years. Clicking the chart on the right will bring up the full size results.

There are some interesting results here: First, until 2004, the greatest number of foreign workers at Japanese companies hailed from Central or South America. In general, 90% of this group consisted of people of Japanese ancestry.

Since about 2000, however, the number of workers coming from East Asia has exploded, nearly tripling from 33,003 in 2000 to 100,257 last year. At the same time, the number of workers from Southeast Asia also nearly tripled, from 13,128 in 2000 to 32,284 in 2006.

Although the number of workers from Central and South America has increased from 57,907 in 2000 to 64,909 last year, the 2006 figure is still lower than it was in 1997, when it stood at 65,264.

Should the current economic recovery, increases in production output and willingness of foreign workers continue to hold over the coming year, we should be looking at further increases in all three populations for 2007.

Filed Under Economic Reports, Labor and Wages 

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Comments

5 Responses to “Update: Number of foreign workers at Japanese companies by geographic background”

  1. John S on March 15th, 2007 10:31 pm

    So other than some ups and downs, the number of Nikkei Central/South Americans hasn’t changed much over the last decade. Any idea on what the policy is on this? Are there such a limited number or has there been a cap put on it?

  2. Garrett on March 16th, 2007 3:02 am

    I was surprised by that, too. I’d gotten the impression that the number was increasing.

  3. mike on March 16th, 2007 3:20 am

    I think they’ve caught wind of all the social problems that have come about. I get the impression that the government considered these people to be temporary and didn’t expect them to have kids enter schools or want things like pensions. They seem to think they’ve created a monster, and they’d rather ignore it than try to solve the problem they’ve created.

  4. Ken on March 16th, 2007 1:18 pm

    John, here’s an article with a bit of the history of immigration policy in Japan from someone at Keio…not exactly comprehensive but looks like it could point you in the right direction.

  5. Japan News for March 16, 2007 » Japan Probe on March 16th, 2007 3:34 pm

    […] Japan Economy News has examined the latest increase in the number of foreign workers at Japanese companies and created an interesting graph that shows the geographic origin of such workers over the past decade. [Link] […]

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