Japan’s Disposable Workers : Net Cafe Refugees

Japan / 2014 / BD / Colour / 10min

Shiho FUKADA

Shiho Fukada is a visual journalist based in Boston and Tokyo. For the last decade she has shot and produced stories for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNN, and others. She currently pursues under-reported stories both in video and photography. Her focus is on the disenfranchised and marginalized in Asia.She started her career as a news photographer in New York. In 2008, she moved to Beijing, working as a regular contributor to various publications in China, Iraq, India, Nepal, and Vietnam.After a decade of living in the U.S., she brought her attention back to Japan, her home country. Her multimedia work “Japan’s Disposable Workers” (2014), depicting the plight of Japanese workers during the decades of economic stagnation, received World Press Photo, Multimedia award and was nominated for an Emmy. Her film “Stray-Bullet” (2015), featuring a 12-year old girl who was shot and paralyzed from the neck-down in Brooklyn, New York, which was published in The New York Times “Op-Docs,” received PDN Storytellers - Grand Prize. She has a BA in English Literature from Sophia University in Tokyo and a diploma in Multimedia Journalism from Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines.

Synopsis

The number of temp workers have steadily climbed in Japan, from 16% in 1985 to 34% in 2007. As more and more companies continue to replace costly full-time employees with cheaper temp workers, an income gap between lifetime workers and their poorer “temp” colleagues has also widened significantly - they earn up to 40% less than those on full contracts. This has swollen the ranks of an insecure economic underclass, reducing part-time workers to second-class citizens. Called “Internet café refugees” by the Japanese media, they hop from one job to another, sleep at 24-hour internet cafés because they have no money to pay rent between jobs.