Speaking in Japanese and bowing, 24-year-old Siti Maesaroh offers a tray with a mug and two bowls to a fellow student pretending to be an elderly person, before asking him if he wanted chopsticks and a spoon to eat with.
The role play is an example of the type of training being offered by vocational institutions across Indonesia catering to students seeking to fill job vacancies in Japan.
“I think the reason Japan chooses us is because Indonesian youth are very capable of caring for the elderly,” said Maesaroh, who is attending the Onodera User Run school in Indonesia’s capital Jakarta.
The school, established in 2022, also offers Japanese language training for its students seeking to enrol in a Japanese government programme to employ foreigners with special skills to work in sectors like caregiving.
Japan is one of the world’s most rapidly ageing societies, with people who are 65 or older now accounting for 28% of the population, according to United Nations data.
Births in Japan fell to fewer than 800,000 for the first time last year, according to official data, as Japan’s working-age population shrinks.
Hiroki Sasaki, labour attache at the Japanese embassy in Jakarta, estimates that only about 130,000 of the 340,000 special skilled job vacancies in Japan have been filled, so a foreign workforce is becoming increasingly necessary.
As of December 2022, there were over 16,000 Indonesians working under Japan’s special skilled worker scheme, the second-highest number behind Vietnam. — Reuters
