(In)visible newcomers: Foreign workers and internal urban-rural migrants in Japan's countryside

Abstract

Rural Japan is facing a severe population decline and labor shortage. Japanese central and local governments are trying to revitalize rural areas by attracting new residents to live and work in the countryside. However, support for migrants and their experiences varies greatly depending on their nationality. While a complex support system for internal urban-rural migrants exists, most migrants from Southeast Asia are mostly invisible because they do not have the same resources as internal Japanese migrants. This paper compares two programs that hire people to temporarily work in Japan's countryside to find out why some migrants are more visible than others and what this means for rural communities. The Community-building Support Staff Program aims at attracting people from Japan's urban areas to move to the countryside and work there for three years to revitalize the region. The Technical Intern Training Program is a labor rotation system for temporary workers from East and Southeast Asia. I argue that the hierarchization of different groups of migrants results in the invisibility and the marginalization of foreign workers in rural areas, making them more vulnerable than migrant workers in cities.