In the wake of the government's effort to accept more foreign workers into Japan from next spring, a talent war to secure Vietnamese workers has intensified among local governments.
However, the surge in demand for Vietnamese employees has brought about other problems, such as the emergence of malicious middlemen connect to Vietnamese students and interns who commit crimes or go missing after coming to Japan.
"It'll be too late [to makes moves] after the government policy is adopted," Chiba Gov. Kensaku Morita said. Morita traveled to Ho Chi Minh City from Nov. 18-21 to visit a human resources development agency that sent nearly 1,500 Vietnamese technical interns and students to Japan last year.
Through his visit, Morita sought to lay the groundwork for securing personnel in the nursing care sector, which suffers from a labor shortage, before the formal acceptance of more workers.
"We want to help them feel comfortable working in Chiba," Morita said. He also conveyed the prefecture's policy of providing housing aid to foreign workers and requested the agency dispatch workers to Chiba.
"We'll do our best as long as the prefecture's measures become more concrete," the agency's president said.
The Tokyo metropolitan area, which has a large elderly population, faces a serious labor shortage in the nursing care sector. The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry estimates that Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba prefectures will face a personnel shortage in the sector of 100,215 in fiscal 2025.
In July, the Yokohama city government dispatched senior officials to Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang and elsewhere in Vietnam to sign a partnership memorandum through which it will secure nursing care staff for Yokohama. Other prefectures such as Saitama, Gunma and Aichi entered into a similar agreement with the central and city governments in Vietnam on the training and use of personnel.
The number of Vietnamese workers in Japan last year rose to 240,000 -- second-highest behind Chinese -- up nine-fold over five years, according to the health ministry survey. Vietnamese workers are in high demand to replace Chinese workers, as wages in China have risen. The Vietnamese government actively dispatching workers overseas as a primary means of earning foreign currency.
"I've heard from companies that the Vietnamese are faithful and diligent like Japanese," Morita said.
Concerns about crime, disappearances
Last year, however, 3,751 Vietnamese technical interns went missing, while 5,140 were implicated in criminal cases, according to the National Police Agency. Both figures were the highest among all foreign nationals.
In one case, two Vietnamese men who came to Japan in 2013 and 2014 through student visas and other means went missing and were later arrested for shoplifting at large retail stores in Fukushima and Ibaraki prefectures. The two stole merchandise worth 600,000 yen (5,300 dollars) and were later indicted.
One of the men reportedly told the Fukushima prefectural police that he "exchanged the stolen items for money to pay back debts and for other purposes."
Behind-the-scenes involvement of malicious middlemen can lead to such crimes, as technical interns and students may arrive in Japan deeply in debt.
Vietnamese rules require brokers charge commissions to interns of no more than 3,600 dollars for a three-year contract. However, one broker told The Yomiuri Shimbun that he charged about 2,000 dollars more than the limit and collected the receipts from interns before they left for Japan in order to erase evidence of wrongdoing.
Read more from The Japan News at https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/
