What Subaru does not tout is that its boom is made possible in part by asylum seekers and other cheap foreign laborers from Asia and Africa. They work at the automaker and its suppliers at Subaru's main production hub, here in the Japanese town of Ota, two hours north of Tokyo. Many are on short-term contracts. At Subaru, some foreign workers earn about half the wage of their Japanese equivalents on the production line. At the automaker's suppliers, workers are often employed through brokers who charge up to a third of the workers' wages. ... Subaru's parent company, Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd, said its suppliers are responsible for their own labor practices and it was not directly involved in supervising working conditions. Obeying the law and company guidelines are a prerequisite to doing business with Subaru, the company said in a written response to questions from Reuters. The company also said it had no power to monitor the behavior of labor brokers. "We ask that the suppliers do not discriminate and that they respect human rights and follow the laws and regulations as stated in our guidelines," Fuji Heavy said. Subaru itself employs 339 trainees from China under a government program intended to equip workers from developing countries with industrial skills. Trainees are often indebted to dispatch agents back home and cannot change their employer once in Japan. The program has been criticized by the United Nations and by the U.S. State Department, which said in its recently released annual report on human trafficking that some trainees "continued to experience conditions of forced labor." ... Nippatsu said any questions about its workers should be directed to the labor brokers who recruit them for the company and sign them on contracts. "It's the dispatch companies' problem," Nippatsu spokesman Hiroaki Saito said in a telephone interview. "We don't employ them directly." ... Subaru said the trainees in Ota were treated equally with Japanese workers and given the chance to learn skills on the job. The automaker also said that work-related documents were translated into Chinese and that it had established an environment in which these workers could speak freely. Some trainees tell a different story - of being warned by their live-in manager that speaking about their working conditions could mean all of them would be fired and sent back to China.