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Siti Maesaroh, 24, offers a tray with a mug and two bowls to a fellow student claiming to be an elderly person while speaking in Japanese and bowing, before asking whether he wants chopsticks and a spoon to eat with. Role-playing is an example of the type of training provided by vocational institutes throughout Indonesia to students wanting to fill job openings in Japan.
“I think the reason Japan chooses us is that Indonesian youths 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, which opened in 2022, also provides Japanese language training to students interested in enrolling in a Japanese government program that employs foreigners with unique abilities in fields such as caregiving. Japan is one of the world’s fastest-aging societies, with those aged 65 and up accounting for 28% of the population, according to United Nations estimates.
According to official figures, births in Japan fell below 800,000 for the first time last year, as Japan’s working-age population decreases. According to Hiroki Sasaki, labor attache at the Japanese embassy in Jakarta, only approximately 130,000 of Japan’s 340,000 special skilled employment positions have been filled.
As a result, he believes that a foreign workforce is becoming increasingly important. As of December 2022, over 16,000 Indonesians were working under Japan’s special skilled worker scheme, ranking second only to Vietnam. With 280 million inhabitants, Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country, and the school’s principal, Kamila Mansjur, said sending personnel to Japan to care for the elderly helped both countries.
“In Indonesia every year we have an increase in the population of about three million. Yet here we have our challenge which is a lack of jobs,” she said.
