Japan to Accept Foreign Agricultural Workers in Special Zones

Tokyo, Dec. 12 (Jiji Press)--The Japanese government on Monday adopted plans to accept foreign agricultural workers and expand the scope of children accepted at small nurseries in national strategic special zones. Based on the decision, made at the day's meeting of the Council on National Strategic Special Zones, headed by Prime Ministry Shinzo Abe, the government will submit a bill to revise the law on such zones to next year's ordinary session of the Diet, Japan's parliament, in order to realize the steps. Specifically, the government will ease residential requirements for foreigners having certain experiences of being engaged in farming jobs or special agriculture skills. The revised law is also expected to include a provision to prevent foreign agricultural workers from being treated in an unfair manner in terms of pay and other conditions. The government aims to help farms expand their management scales and increase productivity through the promotion of the hiring of foreigners at a time when the industry is suffering from serious labor shortages. The village of Ogata in the northeastern prefecture of Akita and the central prefecture of Aichi have been urging the government to ease regulations on foreign workers in the farm sector. Foreign agricultural workers will likely be accepted from spring 2018 or later. Under the revised law, small nurseries will be able to accept children aged zero to five, compared with the current age range from zero to two. The government hopes that the deregulation measure will help double-income parents find places to leave their children aged three or over and therefore will contribute to reducing the number of children on nursery waiting lists. The advisory council also started to consider setting up new special zones with no regulations established in advance, in order to promote experiments requiring coordination among various parties, including delivery services using drones and tests of self-driving cars and buses on public roads. END