"Over 7,200 Japan firms employing foreign trainees broke law", 16 August 2023

Illegal practices were uncovered at 7,247 workplaces in Japan that employed foreign trainees last year, the government said recently, apparently substantiating criticism of companies participating in the controversial, decades-old program for their alleged human rights infringements.

The most common violations involved breaches of safety rules, with the second most common being unpaid wages, according to data based on the labor ministry's on-site inspections at 9,829 companies alleged to have engaged in misconduct...

As of the end of 2022, there were around 325,000 foreign trainees in Japan, up from some 276,000 in 2021...

In late April, a government panel proposed scrapping the trainee program for foreigners and switching to a new system in order to address the prevalence of cases involving alleged unpaid wages and other human rights violations.

Critics say that although the existing program is ostensibly in place to transfer knowledge and skills to developing countries, in practice it has been used as a cover for companies seeking to import cheap labor from abroad as the working-age population in Japan continues to shrink.