Foreign workers in Japan became one of the main topics of all parties in the Feb. 8 Lower House election, which took place just after a Jan. 23 Cabinet decision calling for 1,231,900 foreign workers by March 2029 in 19 sectors facing acute labor shortages. While some parties argued for strictly monitoring foreign nationals or setting quotas on their numbers, especially at the local level, an artificial-intelligence engineer-led party that went into the election with no seats and emerged with 11 proportional representation seats proposed the increased use of AI to replace workers, including foreign nationals, as a solution to concerns about more foreign workers. Team Mirai, founded in May and led by Takahiro Anno, won four seats in the Tokyo block and three in the South Kanto block, along with one seat each in the Tohoku, North Kanto, Tokai, and Kyushu blocks. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right. With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories.

The Chinese government unveiled a program to woo foreign talent just as the US cracked down on H-1Bs with a $100,000 fee. The move immediately provoked xenophobic backlash. While President Donald Trump makes it harder to hire skilled foreign workers in the US, Chinese leader Xi Jinping is trying to lure them in. On Wednesday, China officially launched a new visa program designed to make it easier for young professionals and people with degrees in science and technology from top universities to study and do business in the country. While many of the details of the K visa program have yet to be announced, Chinese authorities have said that applicants won't be required to obtain an invitation letter from a specific company, meaning the visa isn't tied to individual employers.

Less than a month before Donald Trump returns to office, two of his most ardent allies have plunged into a fierce online debate over immigration, specifically the government's visa program that allows American companies to hire so-called "highly skilled" foreign workers. The clash started on Monday with Laura Loomer, the far-right social media character known for her virulent racism, condemning Trump's decision to name Sriram Krishnan, a tech investor who was born in India, as a senior adviser on artificial intelligence. Tech leaders, including Elon Musk, weighed in to defend the practice of hiring foreign workers, specifically through the government's H-1B visa program. The debate has since devolved into a relentless string of petty insults--Loomer likened tech billionaires to "termites" at Mar-a-Lago; Musk called Loomer a troll--as well as accusations of censorship on X as retaliation. At a different point, Vivek Ramaswamy chimed in to register his support for hiring foreign workers.

They're called the Sampo Generation: South Koreans in their 20s and 30s who have given up (po) three (sam) of life's conventional rites of passage -- dating, marrying and having children. They've made these choices because of economic constraints and in the process have worsened South Korea's demographic imbalances. Last year, when the country registered more deaths than births for the first time in recent history, then-Vice Finance Minister Kim Yong-beom pronounced the milestone a "death cross." "I Live Alone" is one of South Korea's most popular reality TV shows. It follows the single lives of movie actors and K-pop singers engaging in mundane activities such as feeding their pets or eating ramen in the middle of the night -- all alone.

Today, I'm extremely happy to announce Amazon SageMaker Clarify, a new capability of Amazon SageMaker that helps customers detect bias in machine learning (ML) models, and increase transparency by helping explain model behavior to stakeholders and customers. As ML models are built by training algorithms that learn statistical patterns present in datasets, several questions immediately come to mind. First, can we ever hope to explain why our ML model comes up with a particular prediction? Second, what if our dataset doesn't faithfully describe the real-life problem we were trying to model? Could we even detect such issues?

A new work permit introduced by Japan for overseas workers to help alleviate chronic labor shortages in certain industries has made an unexpectedly poor start, with only 3,987 of them obtaining the "specific skills visa" in the first year of the program, or less than 10 percent of the government's target. The weak start has exposed the insufficient preparations for the program launched in April 2019. With the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic unavoidable, the new system is already at a turning point. There are two ways for foreign workers to obtain the new visa. One is to pass an exam that measures Japanese language proficiency and the skills needed for the industry in which the applicant wants to work. In the other route, for the Type 1 visa for less sophisticated jobs, people who went through technical training in Japan for three years or more can change their visa status to specific skills without taking the exam.

The use of multilingual translation tools is expanding in Japan, where foreign workers are expected to increase in the wake of April's launch of new visa categories. A growing number of local governments, labor unions and other entities have decided to introduce translation tools, which can help foreigners when going through administrative procedures as they allow local officials and other officers to talk to such applicants in their mother languages. "Talking in the applicants' own languages makes it easier to convey our cooperative stance," said an official in Tokyo's Sumida Ward. The ward introduced VoiceBiz, an audio translation app developed by Toppan Printing Co. that covers 30 languages. The app, which can be downloaded onto smartphones and tablet computers, will be used in eight municipalities, including Osaka and Ayase in Kanagawa Prefecture, company officials said.

There's no denying that Japan, amid a severe labor crunch and a shrinking population, will need to rely more on foreign workers in the coming years, and that's especially true for small and midsize companies. Because of language issues and cultural differences, smaller firms often struggle to integrate foreign workers. But once they overcome those hurdles, many find that the addition of foreign perspectives can lead to new opportunities. Sakae Casting Co., a small aluminum cast manufacturer in Hachioji in western Tokyo, learned this the hard way. But its experience may be an example of what other firms will have to go through in the coming years.

The central government plans to ease language requirements for foreign technical interns in the nursing care sector as part of its efforts to bring in more laborers from abroad, government sources have said. Japan opened up its nursing care sector to foreign nationals willing to work as trainees from November 2017. But the number of such trainees has seen sluggish growth apparently due to Japanese-language proficiency requirements, which have been set higher than those for interns in other sectors. Currently, care workers must have either reached the N4 level on the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test before entering the country or pass N3 a year after they arrive. Those who fail the N3 test have to return to their home country.

The workforce in 2040 is projected to be 20 percent smaller than in 2017 due to overall population decline if the economy sees no growth and women and the elderly continue to have difficulty landing jobs, according to government study released Tuesday. A study group of the labor ministry, releasing the first official projection for the size of Japan's workforce in 2040, called for additional policies to boost employment and promotion of artificial intelligence as measures to sustain productivity. The study did not take into consideration the expansion of the foreign workforce in 14 fields, including construction and nursing care, from April this year. The panel on employment policies set up by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry estimated that the number of workers in Japan will stand at 60.82 million in 2025 and 52.45 million in 2040, down from 65.3 million in 2017. The number of male workers in 2040 will fall by 7.11 million from 2017, while that of females will decrease by 5.75 million.