The Indebted and Silent Worker: Paternalistic Labor Management in Foreign Labor Policy in Japan

This paper analyzes the characteristic of labor management in the Japanese labor market through the Technical Intern Training Program (TITP)-one of Japan's foreign labor policies to supply labor force from Asian neighbors into domestic sectors. Previous studies on TITP were mainly focused on institutional and industrial analyses. These studies often focus on how trainees are inserted into restructured labor market to augment labor shortage amid global economic competition. On the other hand, this paper focuses on the 1) ideological analysis of the framework of government policy and 2) its function on actual labor management in TITP. This perspective seeks to contribute to an understanding of the mechanism of migrant control by the state and labor management by the employer. As a result, this paper shows, how the state and employer manage the "silent workers" by using paternalistic labor management and the On (<SIC>) ideology of indebtedness.