Hard times may await Japanese on working holidays in Australia

A fairly new addition to the lexicon of foreign word borrowings in Japanese is waa-hori, short for "working holiday."

Those who travel to Australia to take part in this program, warns the headline in Weekly Playboy (Sept 23), risk being treated like rubbish. 

Australia permits non-immigrants between the ages of 18 to 30 years to work legally for up to one year. Which, increasing numbers of young Japanese have been learning, is easier said than done. 

"For the first two and a half months I planned to study to boost my English skills, while working in a cafe or restaurant," said a 28-year-old former nurse named Yuri. "I handed out my English resume to various establishments but didn't get a single call for an interview."  

Well then, how about hunting for work via the internet?

"Naturally, the first thing I did was to send out mails with my resume attached, but as that went nowhere, I had to start knocking on doors," Yuri relates. 

Finally after approaching some 150 places, Yuri finally landed a job at a Japanese restaurant owned by an Indonesian. She received the Australian minimum wage, which at that time was $23.23 (about ¥2,416) per hour. 

"But about a month after I started, the owner decided to close the place for renovations and laid off the entire staff," she sighed.  

If foreign holiday workers desire a one-year extension, they are required to put in three-month stints on farms or in such sectors as forestry, fishing or mining. A 29-year old woman named Kaori found a job picking grapes after translating a help-wanted ad posted online from Chinese. 

"The pay was based on the volume we picked, so it wasn't very good," she relates. "And when we needed to go to the toilet, you either had to get someone to drive you to one, or else squat down in the grass. And they didn't even call you by your name, just by a number. I was 2014." 

And workers' dormitory, she said, jammed 100 people into a space designed to accommodate half that figure. 

A woman named Mayumi, age 29, pointed out that while Australia's minimum wage is around ¥2,400 per hour, about twice that of Japan, rents and consumer prices are much higher than Japan's. 

"It's a rough situation, both financially and psychologically," she said. "On Japanese-language SNS here I've seen posts warning about swindlers who target Japanese. It would seem that Japanese in desperate straits make easy marks." 

Word on the street is that some Japanese are left with no choice but take on jobs for below the minimum wage, because they're easily expendable. 

Weekly Playboy asked Tomoyuki Matsutani, now a chef at a popular Japanese restaurant in Sydney, what he thought of the working holiday program. 

"Actually I am one of those Japanese who first came here on the working holiday program, back in 2005," Matsutani told the magazine. "After being in Australia for nearly 20 years, I've sensed major changes in the types of Japanese coming here for waa-hori. 

"First there's an oversupply of labor. Young people come here from all over the world, and since many businesses have sufficient workers, nothing appearing on anyone's resume is going to help them find work. 

"Also, because of the devaluation of the Japanese yen, fewer tourists have been visiting from Japan these days, so demand for Japanese-speaking workers has dried up. 

"That makes for a big disadvantage for the many Japanese who are not good at speaking English," Matsutani added. 

Matsutani admits that while he himself was not good at English, he had nearly 10 years of experience back home, where he could  refine his work skills. 

"So within my first year here I was able to find a real job and able to obtain a working visa," he said. "Whether food preparation or driving heavy machinery, if you want to go to Australia for work it's better to have some marketable skill. And, of course, you have to be tenacious. With the right attitude, things will open up for you." 

Because many Japanese who come to Australia lack English, job skills and tenacity, they've developed an unfavorable image, making things more difficult for Japanese to find work, Matsutani observed. 

"To be frank, I myself would be more favorably disposed toward Japanese, but from the perspective of an employer, hiring people who come here starting completely from scratch is a problem for me."  

Still, few would deny that overcoming the various challenges can help mold young people's character.  

"Yes, the going had been rough for a while," reflects the above cited Mayumi. "Still, it was something I never could have experienced in Japan. I'm hoping that experience will mean something for my future." 

There's an old saying in Japanese that goes, "The school of hard knocks is a good teacher." So even if the going does get rough at times, asks Weekly Playboy, can the waa-hori experience really be all that bad?

© Japan Today