The amendment to the immigration control law enacted by the Diet on Saturday morning, which formally opens Japan's doors to foreign workers to engage in unskilled labor, left out much of the new program's details, such as the number of workers expected in each industrial sector, specifics of the skills required of the workers who qualify for the new visa statuses, the standards of their employment contracts, as well as measures to help them settle in society, including language support. Those details will be set by the government in ordinances not subject to Diet approval before the new system is implemented next April. Even though the amendment marks a major turnaround in government policy on immigrant workers, discussions fell short of what was needed because the government and the ruling coalition rushed the bill through the Diet.

The government insisted that it can lose no time since the domestic manpower shortage is becoming increasingly serious as the population rapidly grays and declines. In fact, Japan's economy already relies heavily on workers from overseas to the point that it can no longer do without foreign labor. Even as the government officially restricted workers from abroad to those with high professional skills, participants in the Technical Intern Training Program as well as students — whose purpose in coming to Japan is not to seek employment — have provided cheap unskilled labor and account for a major portion of the growing ranks of foreign workers.

The Diet deliberations on the immigration control law amendment once again shed light on the problems of the technical intern program, including widespread labor abuse such as excessively long working hours and unpaid wages. The program, which was launched in 1993 to transfer job skills to participants as they work in businesses and farms in this country, has been expanded over the years to cope with the growing domestic manpower shortage. As the number of the technical interns increased to roughly 258,000 last year, up sharply from 134,000 five years earlier and accounted for nearly a quarter of the foreign workforce, thousands of them have "disappeared" from their jobs each year, which testifies to their often harsh working conditions. A close look by opposition lawmakers at Justice Ministry files on those workers reportedly showed that nearly 70 percent of them were paid less than the legal minimum wage. Ministry data showed that a total of 69 interns died in the three years to 2017; the causes including accidents, illnesses and suicides.