TOCHIGI PREFECTURE, Japan — Four years ago, Hizatsuki Confectionery hired its first foreign workers.
The company, in a mountainous region north of Tokyo, has been baking and frying glutinous dough into rice crackers since 1923. Then it was known as Teikoku Senbei, or Imperial Rice Crackers.
Today, the company’s third-generation president, Takeo Hizatsuki, has encountered an existential challenge that his father and grandfather never did. Hizatsuki Confectionery can’t find enough Japanese employees.
A shrinking and rapidly aging population has forced Japan, which for centuries was mostly closed off to immigrants, to allow foreign workers to enter the country and potentially stay for good. Most come from other parts of Asia, including China, Vietnam and the Philippines.
That transition to employing more foreign workers has proceeded gradually at big companies in major cities over the past decade. But in parts of the countryside, where labor shortages are particularly acute, some of Japan’s storied businesses like Hizatsuki Confectionery are just now figuring out how to accommodate foreign workers for the first time.
These are areas of the country where few speak languages other than Japanese, and communities tend to be more wary of integrating newcomers. Whether companies can persuade foreigners to stay may dictate their survival.
For small and medium-size businesses, the backbone of Japan’s regional economies, “foreign workers are indispensable,” said Yuki Hashimoto, a senior fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry, or RIETI, in Tokyo. “Without them, they will collapse.”
Japan lacks a national system for helping foreign workers with essentials like language assistance. Local businesses and municipalities are quickly fashioning their own methods of long-term support.
For Hizatsuki Confectionery, the company’s experience with foreign workers began in 2020, when Hizatsuki, the president for the past two decades, decided to hire 10 workers from Vietnam.
He recalled in an interview that his Japanese employees were deeply unsettled by the change. “I told them: ‘To be able to feed the Japanese people, we need to be able to survive. And to be able to survive, we need to accept foreign workers.’”
Over the past four years, Hizatsuki said, he established various policies aimed at retaining the workers from Vietnam, as well as others from Indonesia, who now make up two dozen of the company’s 210 employees.
Hizatsuki has started using a translator at the company’s factory so he can check in with his foreign employees directly. He also raises the base wages for his foreign and Japanese workers by the same amount each year, which some other companies in Japan decline to do.
Hizatsuki plans to promote a non-Japanese worker to deputy line manager and then line manager within three to five years, moves that he hopes will show other foreign employees that they have opportunities for career advancement in Japan.
Japanese employees at the company have become comfortable working with their foreign colleagues, Hizatsuki said.
The need for his policies to work is real: In two years, he plans to pass the business on to his son. Hizatsuki estimates that in the next generation, about half the snackmaker’s employees will need to be foreign workers.
Last year, Japan approved policies that made it possible for a wide range of foreign workers to stay in the country long-term.
That was a big shift for a country that had sought to keep immigration at a slow drip because of fears that any surge in foreign populations could set off social unrest. The changes underscore how severe the decline in Japan’s working-age population has become. Shigeru Ishiba, who became Japan’s prime minister Tuesday, has advocated employing more foreigners to help fill labor shortages.
Under previous policies, limited numbers of foreign workers were allowed in for just a few years and paid significantly less than their Japanese counterparts. Many chose to leave jobs after confronting nebulous support systems and hierarchical company structures that left them few chances for career advancement.
Now, as Japan begins to create more pathways for foreigners to stay indefinitely, the problem is that companies have no experience to build on, Hashimoto said.
“Japan has long been closed off,” she said. And until recently, she added, “it was work for three to five years, and that’s it.”
Across the country, some businesses are beginning to create policies — including wage increases and visa and language assistance — that are necessary to retain foreign workers over longer periods, Hashimoto said. But at other companies, she added, “the long-held view of foreign workers as just temporary aid will remain.”
On a weekday morning in July, Tran Vinh Trung fried eggs and slid them onto plates next to chunks of baguette, tomato slices and sausages. Trung’s wife poured Vietnamese-style coffee through aluminum filters, while their two children set the table in the living room.
Two years ago, Trung, 47, moved from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to work at Daiwa Steel Tube Industries, a manufacturer in Tochigi prefecture, north of Tokyo, that makes steel tubes used in scaffolding and other applications. Trung is one of six foreign employees at the 92-year-old company.
Trung’s wife, 20-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son joined him last year in Japan, setting up in a small apartment in Utsunomiya, Tochigi’s capital city.
Daiwa Steel encourages foreign employees to bring their families to Japan, partly because Shinichiro Nakamura, its president, hopes that will motivate them to stay in the country longer.
Since taking over the business from his father two decades ago, Nakamura has put into effect a number of policies aimed at supporting its much-needed foreign workers. They range from small gestures — such as picking them up from the airport — to larger benefits, like helping them find housing.
Nakamura also rotates foreign workers through different positions within the company so that they acquire new skills and experience in both blue-collar and white-collar jobs. Trung, who had previously worked in the company’s human resources division, recently joined its product-sales division as a deputy manager.
Still, Nakamura says that even with the systems he has created, foreign workers often say they want to stay in Japan for no more than three to five years.
Their families are often overseas, and some struggle to find a sense of belonging in long-insular Japanese communities. Nakamura acknowledges there are limits to what a business can provide.
“It’s tough being overseas,” he said. “Maybe that is just human nature — to want to be in the environment you were born in. We are happy to support family visas because if they want to put down roots here, it’s always a good sign.”
Over the past year, Trung’s family has begun to settle in. His visa can be renewed indefinitely, and he and his family say they have no immediate plans to return to Vietnam.
Still, they are unsure how long they will stay.
Trung’s son is in high school and has made friends on his soccer team. His daughter is studying Japanese and has a part-time job at a potsticker restaurant that she found through a connection at the Catholic church the family attends.
Trung’s wife found a job at a local baked-goods factory, where she works alongside several Filipino and Vietnamese employees. But she said she missed home. She prefers Vietnam’s open-air markets to Japan’s frigid grocery stores, and she wishes she could be closer to her elderly mother.
The family took a trip to Vietnam over the summer, and days before departure, suitcases were laid out in the living room, ready to go.
Also in the room was a paper pinned to the wall by Trung’s son, who wants to study medicine after he graduates from high school. In Japanese characters, the paper spelled out “University of Tokyo.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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