A volume edited by our coinvestigator Prof. Daiji Kawaguchi has been taken up by the leading daily on economic matters in Japan "Nikkei" in its section on books and reading.
In an article entitled "How Will the Increase of Intake of Foreign Workers Change Japan - Multilevel Analysis", published on January 26 (p.27) , the author poses the question of the economic and social impact that the government's decision coming into effect in April to open the doors for the importation of foreign blue-collar labor will have on Japan. With regard to that problem, the author introduces three recent books on labor and immigration by Japanese and foreign authors, among which is Prof. Kawaguchi's "Japanese Labor Market", published in late 2017.
The book presents Prof. Kawaguchi's research results in the field of labor economics and contains a chapter on the impact of foreign immigrants and laborers. In it, the Nikkei points out, Prof. Kawaguchi warns that in Japanese labor surveys there are no questions or items that allow us to distinguish between domestic and foreign laborers.
The author concludes the article by saying that books such as Prof. Kawaguchi's, which offer multilevel analysis of the impact of foreign labor, will help ground the discussion about the economic and social benefits and costs of foreign labor, and, thus, help avoid extreme arguments that favor either a full opening or a full closure of the Japanese labor market to foreigners.