Unsustainable convenience
The big three convenience stores in Japan are 7-11, Family Mart and Lawson. There are others, but these three are the market leaders. 24-hour/7-day a week convenience stores have been a feature of Japanese life for decades. I myself have found them very convenient day and night, and I am accustomed to the knowledge that a convenience store is always nearby and always open. They provide a far broader range of goods and services than convenience stores in North America do. Newcomers to Japan might even find it comical, not just odd, the things we can do at a Japanese convenience store. You can practically live your whole life out of a convenience store. Now, there is a problem brewing with Japan’s convenience stores. The demographic changes here - a rapidly aging population combined with a very low birthrate resulting in population decline - have resulted in a labor shortage. This labor shortage means that unemployment in Japan is extremely low, as there are plenty of jobs available for high school and college graduates. However, it also means that some industries’ operations are being squeezed because of a shortage of workers. First among these are the convenience stores, followed by restaurants, construction, nursing homes and hospitals.
I first learned about problems with convenience store labor in January 2019 when I read that some stores were thinking of curtailing their operating hours due to lack of available staff. I was shocked! I’d never imagined convenience stores closing. I’d also never imagined how many staff it takes to operate a convenience store 24-hours, 7-days a week. (About 25-30 people, apparently.) Then, no sooner did I first learn of it in the media than it came true that some stores began “experimenting” with shorter business days. That means, closing for a few hours late at night. Then soon after that story I read another story about some stores experimenting with unstaffed, self-service stores. It seems that, no matter what, things will be different in the future. The convenience store is a highly visible tip of the iceberg.
Japanese want foreigners to come, work, and then go away.
For some time already I’ve noticed and commented on the foreign composition of convenience store staff. These days when I enter my local Family Mart I can be sure of being served by Russians, Indonesians or Chinese. (The Russian clerks always try to chat in English. They ask me where I’m from because they think I’m American and they want to chat with an American. Personally, I don’t want to chat with them at all. I mean, I’m not their friend.)
The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe introduced a new visa law in 2018 that came into effect on April 1, 2019 that allows more foreign workers into the country on short-term work visas. This is a rehabilitated “trainee visa” law from the 1990s that gave short-term visas to many foreigners that was quickly abused and became a kind of modern indentured servant thing. Many “trainees” were abused by their employers. The old trainee visa law also resulted in a lot of illegal visa-overstayers in the country. In the mid-1990s Tokyo was crawling with illegal Nigerians and Iranians, Thais and Chinese. So, introduction of the new visa protocol was much debated and heavily resisted. Social conservatives (predictably) raised the specter of increased foreign crime, a divided society, deterioration of social values, etc. And, of course, visa-overstayers. (Japanese conservatives excel at framing Japanese as the victims of foreign barbarians. One female government legislator even publicly suggested setting up foreign ghettos for foreign residents, arguing that we would feel more comfortable living in communities of other foreigners. Seriously.)
Many small businesses - like convenience stores, again - welcome and need foreign workers, and the danger now exists that some businesses might become overly-dependent on them. Hospitals and nursing homes are in desperate need of nurses, but the language-requirement for nurses is so high that even native Japanese have trouble passing the language test (and not just because it involves a lot of technical vocabulary).
Despite this labor shortage, though, Japan is not prepared to allow mass immigration into the country. The new visa law is designed as a controlled protocol for short-term work visas only. Japanese want foreigners to come, work, and then go away. Go away!