Recruit a foreign craftsman for a career, not for a term
Japanese construction has treated foreign workers as a supply that arrives and leaves on schedule. Now that skilled worker routes allow long stays, a general contractor should design a ten-year career and carry its cost, rather than leave it to the smallest firms in its supply chain.
For most of the past thirty years, Japanese construction has treated foreign workers as a temporary supply. Young men from Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere came as technical interns, worked for a fixed term under a small subcontractor and went home just as they became useful. The programme was described as a transfer of skills to developing countries, and many in the industry knew that description did not match what happened on site. My position is that a general contractor recruiting foreign craftsmen now should plan for a career of ten years or more, with a route to foreman and a family life in Japan, and that the cost of making that route real belongs with the general contractor rather than with the subcontractors at the bottom of the chain.
The habit the intern programme taught us
When I advised small specialist firms in Nagoya in the early 2000s, a few had begun taking technical interns. I saw the arithmetic from their side. A formwork firm with fifteen workers paid fees to a supervising organisation, housed the interns, trained them, lost them at the end of the term and started again. The firm had no reason to invest in anything beyond the term, and the interns had little reason to learn more Japanese than the site demanded. Some firms treated their interns well. Others did not, and the reported cases of unpaid wages, withheld passports and workers vanishing from their placements were not invented.
The government has since introduced the specified skilled worker system, under which construction workers who pass skills and language tests can work in Japan and, at the higher level, renew their status without a fixed limit and bring their families. It has also legislated to replace the technical intern programme with a scheme intended to develop and retain workers rather than send them home. I do not want to overstate what any scheme will do. Rules permit a career; they do not create one. The habit the old programme taught, of treating each foreign worker as a fixed-term unit, will outlast the programme unless employers decide differently.
What a ten-year route requires
At Asakage Craft Works, the subsidiary we set up in 2021 to employ craftsmen directly, we recruited our first workers from Vietnam and Indonesia in 2022. We designed their employment around a question I would ask any employer: what would this person need in order to still be with us, and leading a crew, in ten years?
The answer had five parts. Pay on the same scale as Japanese colleagues at the same certified skill level, which the rules require in any case, paid monthly rather than by the day. Japanese lessons during paid working hours, because a worker who cannot read a safety instruction or argue with a foreman will never become one. A defined route to the higher skill level, with the test preparation and supervisory experience it needs. Housing we lease directly, at a charge we publish, rather than through intermediaries who set their own. And foreman training that does not depend on nationality.
By March 2026 we employed 68 foreign craftsmen. Nineteen have reached the higher skill level, four have become foremen, and several have brought their families to Nagoya. Two of our Vietnamese foremen now train Japanese apprentices, which has done more for the standing of the programme among our Japanese craftsmen than anything I have said about it.
A ten-year route also changes what the rest of the company has to do. Site managers had to accept foremen whose spoken Japanese was good but whose written reports needed checking, and we gave them time in the schedule to do it. Our safety division translated its core instructions into three languages and then, at the craftsmen's request, simplified the Japanese versions instead, because the workers wanted to learn the words their Japanese colleagues actually used. Families raised questions HR had never handled: school places, clinics that would see a child without an interpreter, what a spouse may do while living here. None of this is expensive. It is simply invisible to a company that expects its foreign workers to leave.
Not everything has gone well. For our first intake we relied on a sending organisation whose charges to workers in their home country we had not examined closely. Several workers arrived owing sums that would have taken a year to repay. We reimbursed what we could establish, about ¥9 million, and we now audit recruitment costs in each sending country before taking anyone on. Debt at the start of a career makes a worker afraid to complain, and on a construction site a worker who is afraid to complain is a safety risk, quite apart from the injustice.
Why the general contractor should carry the cost
The obvious objection is that general contractors do not employ craftsmen. Our partner firms do, and our partner-firm association objected to Craft Works for precisely that reason. Its members feared we would compete with them for workers. They were right to raise it, and we agreed not to recruit from partner firms for three years and to open our training yard to their apprentices without charge.
The economics of the trades mean that the smallest firms cannot fund a ten-year route on their own. A firm of fifteen people cannot pay for language lessons in working hours, test preparation and foreman training out of the margin on a formwork subcontract. If general contractors want a skilled workforce on their sites in ten years, they will have to pay for its development, either directly, as we have chosen to do for part of it, or through subcontract prices that explicitly fund training, Japanese lessons and longer employment. Leaving the cost with the lowest tier means it will not be met, and the workers will leave on the old schedule.
There is a fair worry that a general contractor which employs some craftsmen directly will gradually hollow out its partners. We have tried to prevent that by training their apprentices alongside ours and by sharing what we learn about recruitment in each sending country. I cannot yet say whether that is enough, and our partner-firm association reviews it with us every year.
I would ask any contractor's board to look past the headcount of foreign workers on its sites and put three questions to management. How many are on a route that allows them to stay, and how many have reached it? What did each of them pay, in their own country, to arrive? And who on our sites is paying for their Japanese? The answers will show whether the company is building a workforce or renting one.