Japan's labor inspectors are checking more workplaces that employ foreign technical trainees, and most of the ones they inspect keep failing the check.
The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare said inspectors visited 13,148 workplaces employing technical intern trainees in 2025, the highest count in the ministry's five-year comparison series and up from 11,355 a year earlier. Of those, 9,619, or 73.2%, had labor-law violations, a rate that has barely moved since 2022 even as the number of inspections climbed. Twenty-six of the most serious cases were referred for prosecution.
For specified skilled workers, a separate visa category for foreign employees, inspectors checked 8,082 workplaces and found violations at 6,179 of them, a 76.5% rate, and referred nine cases for prosecution.
Machinery, not money, is the biggest problem. Across both worker categories, the single most common violation was failing to meet safety standards for machinery under the Industrial Safety and Health Act, cited at 22.8% of all technical-intern workplaces inspected and 20.7% of all specified-skilled-worker workplaces inspected. That outranked employers who skipped required physician reviews of health-checkup results and those who shorted overtime pay.
Construction fared worst among the intern-heavy sectors the ministry tracks: 2,252 of 2,808 construction workplaces inspected, or 80.2%, had violations, versus 71.8% in food manufacturing, 68.6% in machinery and metals, 75.4% in agriculture and 72.5% in textiles and apparel.
| Sector | Workplaces inspected | Violations found | Violation rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Construction | 2,808 | 2,252 | 80.2% |
| Food manufacturing | 1,738 | 1,248 | 71.8% |
| Machinery and metals | 3,523 | 2,416 | 68.6% |
| Agriculture and livestock | 589 | 444 | 75.4% |
| Textiles and apparel | 505 | 366 | 72.5% |
Formal complaints from technical interns to labour standards inspection offices fell to 108 in 2025 from 112 the year before, with 93 concerning unpaid wages or overtime, 15 about dismissal procedures and seven about pay below the minimum wage. In the fiscal year to March 2025, 71,985 organizations carried out technical-intern training, a legal-entity count the ministry distinguishes from the workplace figures above, a scale marker for how widely these violations could be spread across Japan's foreign-labor-dependent industries.
Inspectors target workplaces already suspected of breaking labor rules rather than sampling employers at random. The figures measure enforcement activity and its results, not the prevalence of violations across every business in Japan that hires foreign staff.