About 25 percent of foreigners in Japan failed to get jobs, while nearly 40 percent who were looking for accommodation were turned down, according to the latest study commissioned by the Japanese Justice Ministry.
The poll, released on Friday, is the first ever such survey in Japan. It was carried out by the Center for Human Rights Education and Training in November and December last year, and comes as Tokyo gears up for the 2020 Olympics and the number of foreign employees sharply increases.
The number of foreign residents in Japan now constitutes about 2.3 million – or 2 percent of the population – and a record 20 million foreign tourists visited in 2016.
There were 18,500 foreign residents contacted by the pollsters, and 4,252 of them participated. Over 50 percent of them were Chinese and Korean, and more than 40 percent had lived in Japan for over 10 years, the Japan Times reported.
A fifth of the 2,788 respondents who looked for work over the past five years said they were getting less money than their Japanese counterparts aiming for the same position.
Over 17 percent said that they couldn’t get a promotion due to their nationality, and around 13 percent said that their working conditions were worse than those of their Japanese colleagues: for instance, the Japanese had shorter hours and more days off.
