December 7, 2018

Japanese Communist Party lawmaker Nihi Sohei at a House of Councilors Committee on Judicial Affairs meeting on December 6 revealed that more than 85% of the Vietnamese trainees and interns fleeing their jobs came to Japan after paying Vietnamese mediators illegal or unfair commissions.

Cross-party Dietmembers of opposition parties carefully examined the interview records in 2017 about 2,870 foreign trainees who deserted their workplaces. According to Nihi, 1,061 or 37% of them were Vietnamese.

Nihi also revealed that 85.1% of the 1,061 runaway Vietnamese had had to fork out more than 400,000 yen in commissions to sending organizations in their home country, and that 65% were even found to have been charged commissions of more than one million yen.

Based on an agreement made between Japan and Vietnam on industrial trainees and technical interns, deposits or commissions above 400,000 yen are prohibited.

Nihi criticized the Japanese government for its intent to revise the Immigration Control Act in disregard of the malfunctioning bilateral accords in order to establish a new system as a continuation of the existing foreign trainee program.

Justice Minister Yamashita Takashi in response said that the ministry will inspect suspected Japanese companies and will publicize the inspection results by the end of March next year. Regarding the collection of unfair commissions, he said that the government will ask the government of Vietnam for cooperation and "will conduct investigations as much as possible".

Nihi responded, "It sounds like you, by saying 'as much as possible', are reluctant to do so. You, the government, must thoroughly investigate supervising organizations and companies receiving foreign trainees." By saying this, he demanded the scrapping of the Immigration Control Act revision bill.

Past related article:
> 67% of ‘runaway’ foreign trainees paid less than Japan’s minimum wage [December 4, 2018]