Japan Attracting Job-Seeking Brazilians Again

Sao Paulo, Jan. 10 (Jiji Press)--Another wave of Brazilians of Japanese descent is moving to Japan in search of jobs. Such "dekasegi" (working away from home) Brazilian workers in Japan peaked in number in 2007, when there were 317,000 Brazilians there, before falling due to the global financial crisis of 2008 as well as the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. But the number is believed to have bounced back in 2016, the first increase in nine years, according to diplomatic sources and others. The rebound apparently reflects a deep recession in Brazil as well as worker shortages in Japan ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. A staffing service company in Sao Paulo, home to the world's largest community of people of Japanese origin, has been seeing increasing inquiries about jobs in Japan since around the middle of last year. "Many of the inquiries are from people losing jobs amid the recession," said Hideto Miyazaki, the 66-year-old president of the company. They are interested in jobs in Japan that offer wages as much as six to seven times the level in Brazil, depending on overtime, according to Miyazaki. Job offers from Japan are also increasing as the country is struggling with labor shortages amid a declining and aging population. Offers are coming not only from Aichi, Shizuoka, Gunma and other prefectures with track records of accepting large numbers of people of Japanese descent, but also from Ishikawa, Shimane and some other prefectures where there are few Brazilians. Offers come mainly from automobile, electronics parts and food-processing factories. "Wages are rising, and job supply and demand are aligning," Miyazaki said. The worst recession to hit Brazil in 90 years has been affecting high-paid workers as well. There are many highly educated people hoping to move to Japan for work, including even dentists, according to an official at personnel service firm Avance Corp. In the past, dekasegi Brazilian workers in Japan ran into a host of problems, such as unpaid wages. The situation has changed recently, however, as companies in Japan have been striving to improve working conditions for them to increase staff. Companies that treat dekasegi workers badly are shunned. Information about such firms spreads quickly through the grapevine because exchanges among such people are more frequent than before, Miyazaki said. "I think dekasegi workers will increase further in 2017," he said. END