Care, Social (Re)production and Global Labour Migration: Japan's ‘Special Gift’ toward ‘Innately Gifted’ Filipino Workers

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Acknowledgement

An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 2008 Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA) Annual Conference in Vancouver, Canada. I would like to thank the following for their valued comments: the participants in the CPSA panel, Stephen Gill, Natsue Okamura, Deepa Rajkumar, Adrienne Roberts and Yuki Tsuji, as well as the anonymous reviewers of this journal.

Notes

This article is largely drawn from the ethnographic research that I conducted from February to August 2007 in Japan and the Philippines, including interviews with students in Filipino care-giving schools, licensed Filipino care helpers residing in Japan, state officials, business groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

According to the popularly used definition, while the free trade agreement (FTA) refers to the regulations to smooth the exchanges of goods and services between certain countries or among a region, the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) is the treaty to decide the rules for the trades of not only goods and services but also those of intellectual properties and migrant labour-power as well as investment. What is crucial to highlight is that the EPA recognises the movements of humanity as the ‘object’, that is, the resources to promote profits under the free trade regime (Asahi Shimbun 2007).

While Japanese Congress ratified JPEPA in December 2006, the Philippine side finally ratified the agreement in December 2008 after prolonged debates in the Congress due to several concerns, including the controversy over the ‘tariff reduction of wastes’.

‘What is considered socially acceptable for care work’, as Kate Bezanson and Meg Luxton (2006) point out, will vary in different time and space. Nicola Yeates (2004a) regards the concept of ‘care’ as dealing with various tasks and activities to endorse the personal health and welfare of people who are not able or inclined to do so by themselves. Furthermore, she underlines the dualism inherent in ‘care’ – that is, physical labour (‘caring for’) and emotional labour (‘caring about’). Following these discussions, while this article primarily focuses on ‘elder care’ in Japan, it will use the notion of ‘care’ by taking its complexity into account .

Under Japan's Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act (alias Immigration Control Act), the entry and residence of ‘foreigners’, including those who are to be employed, are regulated by the basis of status-of-residence system, which categorises the activities that a ‘foreigner’ is permitted to perform. The escalated inflows of the so-called ‘unskilled’ immigrant labour from abroad against the rising value of the yen after the Plaza Accord in 1985 and the rapid globalisation of the Japanese economy triggered the disputes about whether Japan should embrace these inflows. As a result of these heated discussions, although amending the Immigration Control Act in 1989, the Japanese state basically maintained its principal stance that facilitates the entries of skilled workers and professionals but prohibits those of unskilled workers (Mori 1997; Hanami and Kuwabara 1989).

According to the International Organization for Migration's World Migration Report 2005, the number of migrants has more than doubled since 1975, and there are now an official estimated 175 million migrant workers globally. Of these, almost half are women (48.6 per cent in 2000). As Jean L. Pyle (2006: 285-6) adds, ‘[t]he female share of emigrants rose mot rapidly from 1978 to 2002 in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, become well over 50% for these three countries’. Here, the important point to be highlighted is that both the Philippines and Indonesia are the major sending countries of transnational care labour not only in Asian region but also globally.

Interview with a MHLW official, 8 June 2007.

Here, it needs to underline the gaps in meanings and qualifications between the Japanese kaigo fukushishi and Filipino care-givers. Although detailed discussion about these gaps is beyond the scope of this article, to avoid the confusion, the care workers who hold Japan's national certificate are only referred as ‘kaigo fukushishi’. For these gaps, see Suzuki 2007.

This depends on the course that Filipino candidates enrol in. However, since the fees for care-giving school in Japan need to be provided by candidates, most of them will most likely involve in the ‘Japan National Examination Course’. For this course, the obtainment of the care-givers' certificate issued by the TEADA is mandatory.

The series of the reports on ‘Economic and Fiscal Management and Structural Reform’ is available from the website of Council of Economic and Fiscal Policy (CEFP): http://www.keizai-shimon.go.jp/english/index.html [Accessed 3 May 2008].

Interview with a MHLW official, 8 June 2007. The Japan Association of Certified Care Workers (JACCW) also posits that, while considering the introduction of ‘foreign’ care workers as a possible option for the future, the priority should be placed on the improvement of working conditions in the care giving sector to mobilise the potential care workers. According to JACCW, there were 465,000 certified care workers by 2005 (with the increase of 65,000 every year). And, the MHLW claims that there are approximately 200,000 potential care workers who hold the certificates but currently are not practicing their professions (JACCW 2005; Mainichi Shimbun 2008).

According to these official statistics, by 2055, the population rate of 65 years or older will reach 40.5 per cent, one in every 2.5 of Japan.

Currently about 1,100,000 workers are engaged in the care giving sector but, according to the MHLW, the rapid growth of the elderly will require new 400,000 to 600,000 workers in the next 10 years. Elsewhere, the MHLW also estimates that by 2030 the number of total labourers will drop by 10 million from its current level to 56 million, and one in every 20 will have to be employed in the caring industry in 2030 to maintain the current level of care provision (Mainichi Shimbun 2008; Vij 2007).

Japanese female labour participation is continuously increasing in the past four years (approximately one half of women over age fifteen – 48.5 per cent – worked in 2007 (MHLW 2008).

According to the JACCW, reflecting the scandal of the largest elder care providing company in Japan and the improving employment within the recently reenergised Japanese economy, the number of the students is decreasing at the care-giving schools. In Spring 2008, about 80 per cent of the courses at all colleges and junior colleges that train care workers were already under-enrolled, and one half of the care training schools meet only less than 50 per cent of their student quota.

Interview with a JICWELS official, 30 July 2007; quoted in Suzuki 2007: 367.

Interview with an AOTS official, 4 July 2007. The official addressed that the capacity of AOTS to handle 600 care workers in two years is highly questionable and, more importantly, the field of care giving is new for AOTS to teach for ‘foreign’ trainees. So, the official was suspicious about how much AOTS will be capable of assisting Filipino candidates to prepare for kaigo fukushishi's written exam in Japanese.

It should also be noted that the some interest-groups in the Philippines claimed the conclusion of the EPA with Japan as ‘quislingism’, especially highlighting the ‘tariff reduction of wastes,’ which may promote Japanese companies to export toxic waste (Manira Shimbun 2007).

Japanese state's revision for the increased regulation over the entry of Filipinos with entertainment visas stemmed from US State Department's ranking of Japan as Tier 2 watch list with regard to human trafficking within its report in 2004. After this revision, while 82,741 Filipinos entered into Japan with entertainment visas in 2004, its number was dramatically reduced (8,607 in 2006), and this reduction could be decreased the remittances sent by Filipino entertainers in Japan (Fujimoto 2007; Ito 2005).

This is about one per cent of the total population in the Philippines. According to POEA, this indicates that the average of about 2,500 Filipinos leave the country every day, and this number does not include the so-called ‘undocumented’ Filipino workers, approximately three million around the world. Indeed, the total amount of remittances from overseas Filipino workers reached US$12.7 billion in 2006 (Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training 2007).

The deployment statistics of care givers overseas has been rising steadily from 2001 (465), 2002 (5,383), 2003 (18,878), to 2004 (20,394). But since 2005 (16,146), its number has been decreased, largely due to the increased regulations over the entry of care-givers in Canada. Interview with a staff at CHP Care-giving School, 18 May 2007. The statistic data is available from Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), http://www.poea.gov.ph/html/statistics.html (Accessed 3 May 2008).

One official of TESDA also mentioned that there are 894 care giving programs across the Philippines. Interview with a TESDA official, 21 May 2007.

According to TESDA training regulations, a care giver is defined as ‘a worker who is qualified to provide personal care independently or with minimal supervision, to children, elderly or people with special needs (disabilities)’ and who ‘provides personal care and services to people who are in need of such care at either the client's home (without employer's supervision) or at an institution’ (TESDA 2002, cited in Ito et al. 2005: 275).

This analysis is based upon Parreñas's notion of ‘partial citizenship’, but at the same time endeavours to overcome the failure of Parreñas herself to concretely illustrate how Filipina migrant domestic workers' rights are constrained in their host societies.

Johnny and the other names of Filipino care workers/care givers/care helpers and care-giving students who I quote in this article are all pseudonyms.

Interview with Nobuyuki Takahashi, 12 May 2007.

For the issue of transnational families among Filipino migrant workers, see Parreñas 2005b.

Interview with Carmina B-Dimayuga, 25 May 2007.

Interview with an official at the Japanese Embassy in the Philippines, 21 May 21 2007.

Interview with Nobuyuki Takahashi, 12 May 2007.

Through the revision of the Immigration Control Act in 1989, Nikkeijin (Japanese descendants up to the third generation and their spouses, mainly of Brazilian and Peruvian origins) are permitted to enter, work and live in Japan with no job restrictions, by obtaining the status of a ‘long-term’ resident. See Japan Immigration Association 1990, cited in Yamanaka 1993: 77.

Interview with Takaki Kojima at IPS Tokyo Care-giving Academy, 12 June 2007. For the story about Hakubi, see Tanaka 2007.

According to Suzuki (2007), the Filipinos who hold herupa certificate reached some 800 in the Tokyo metropolitan area alone in 2007.

Although this regulation restricts Filipino care workers' freedom to choose their employment opportunities, there is also a concern that the entry of Filipino care workers into the care-giving jobs at Japanese home may generate many problems, including sexual misbehaviours against these workers. Interview with the General Secretary of Tokyo Care and Welfare Labour Union, 21 June 2007.

Interview with Masayuki Ishida, the adviser of Fil-Jap Nakayoshi-Kai Organization that supports Filipino herupa, 7 May 2007.

Interview with Takaki Kojima, 6 June 2007.

I owe some ideas here to Chiho Ogaya.

Interview with Junta Shinozawa, the advisor of LFCAJ, 23 June 2007. Also, the information about the LFCAJ is available from: http://www.ja-phil.com/index.html [Accessed 3 May 2008].

Interview with one of the Japanese NPO representatives, 15 June 2007.