Amidst Nursing Shortage, Japan Turns to Foreigners

More and more of Japan’s senior citizens are calling places like the Shisei Gakusha home. The care facility has a few hundred full-time residents; and on top of that some thousand elderly people are day visitors.

The nursing home’s president, Masaki Hashimoto, says that although Japanese families traditionally take care of their elderly relatives these days, families are much smaller and women, who used to stay at home, now work. He says that many families have no choice but to place elderly people into homes.

Hashimoto says that even though Japan is number one for life expectancy, a long life does not necessarily lead to happiness because of shortcomings in the nursing care system.

An ageing population

According to government figures, 20 percent of Japan’s population is aged 65 and older. At the same time, the nation has a record low in the number of children under the age of 15, just 13 percent of the population.

Analysts say that means Japan will have neither the tax base to support its greying population nor the workforce needed to care for them. Martin Schultz is a senior economist at the Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo.

"Japan's society has a major ageing problem -- this means there need to be services for aged people. This is usually not a high wage, high productivity sector; in many countries this sector is covered by immigration, by low wage immigrants."

Controversial solution

Later this month, just under 300 trained nurses from the Philippines will arrive in Japan to receive language training before being placed in hospitals and care centres. Their recruitment, which is a part of a free trade agreement between Tokyo and Manila, has come under fire from the Japan Nursing Association. It says that these Filipino nurses might not have sufficient training or understanding of Japanese culture to work here.

But some foreign nurses here say concerns are exaggerated. The 59-year-old Filipino Lourdes Salvan worked in a Japanese hospital for seven years as a midwife, and for two years as a private caregiver. She says the language and cultural differences never prevented her from doing her job:

"I don’t think so, because it’s not the language alone, it’s the way of your service that matters much. Actions speaks louder than words, if you can’t express it in Japanese, you do your action and they will understand."

The president of the Shisei Gakusha nursing home, Masaki Hashimoto, is optimistic that more Japanese will pursue careers as caregivers. He has reservations about the current deal with Filipino nurses, but concedes there are not many other options at the moment.

"I don’t think this current immigration system is designed to fix the problem for the long term", Hashimoto says. "But this nursing shortage cannot be resolved by Japanese alone, without foreign staff there just are not enough people to take care of the elderly."

Author: Jason Strother (Tokyo)
Editor: Anne Thomas