Korea Looks to Japan for Work, and Tells Japan Its Politicians Aren't Listening

Why This Topic Landed in Japan

Accepting foreign workers is a standing domestic argument in Japan in which employment, social security and public safety are debated as one bundle, so every report about conditions in a sending country restarts it. This time the framing was explicit — they are coming because things are hard over there — which produced refusal and self-deprecation in the same breath.

The shelter story ran the other way. It began with a post on 31 July about the Kumamoto earthquake noting that, more than forty-eight hours after the quake, evacuation centres looked the same as they had a decade earlier and did not meet international minimum standards. A Korea-born X user living in Japan then argued that this is what happens when politicians do not take the public seriously, and because the criticism arrived from outside, the anger it drew was aimed at domestic politics rather than at the messenger.

The Busan piece sat awkwardly beside both. Korean media reported that a term for missing Busan after a trip there was spreading among tourists, citing 208,984 visitors from Taiwan, 197,958 from China and 130,217 from Japan. It is a separate story from the job market, and it was consumed on the same day simply as another piece of Korean messaging aimed outward.

Key Reaction Themes

• A flat refusal — The most common line rejects arrival itself, citing the load on jobs and social security.
• Acceptance with conditions — A recurring variant welcomes the highly qualified and tells everyone else to stay away.
• Turned back on Japan's own young — Several readers inverted the argument: if young Japanese won't work, let someone else do it.
• Distrust of a media-made trend — The "Busan fever" report was treated almost uniformly as manufactured promotion, with the note that Japan does the same thing to itself on YouTube.
• Full agreement on the politics — The charge that voters are taken lightly met almost no resistance, and merged with existing complaints about the Finance Ministry, entrenched power and shelter budgets.

What Japanese Netizens Are Saying

Young Koreans squeezed by the job market look to Japan

Refusal, conditional welcome and self-mockery shared a single thread.

Sources: Yahoo! news, 2ch

Comments:

• "Japan is going to end up repeating Spain."
• "Having no choice but to work in a country you hate must be humiliating. Try harder in your own country."
• "Talented university graduates are welcome. Anyone at or below Japanese F-rank level, don't come." [Translator's note: "F-rank" is Japanese net slang for the lowest-tier universities, which admit almost everyone who applies.]
• "Absolutely do not let them in."
• "Getting into university in Korea is supposed to be insanely hard, and it's the qualification you need to become an official or a bureaucrat or to join Samsung, right? So is it the ones who failed the entrance exams who come to Japan?"
• "If you're coming to Japan, go to America instead. Why Japan? It's abroad either way."
• "Will they do the care work and the traffic flagging for us?"
• "In academic ability, drive, mental toughness and how popular they are, they beat Japanese guys hands down, so I think it's fine."
• "Most of them quit straight away. In the end only the ones who are easy to get on with and can read the room stay."
• "Young Japanese don't work, so why not let Koreans in and have them do the labour? You lot are NEETs anyway, right? No complaints then."

The "Busan fever" trend reported by Korean media

The report that something was trending was itself read as advertising.

Sources: Chosen Nippo

Comments:

• "Japan has loads of gross articles like this too. You're two of a kind, get along."
• "What is it with this country — is it on some different timeline?"
• "It must be trending, given it got turned into an article on an aggregator."
• "The old media takes it seriously and reports it, so before long it'll end up like K-pop."
• "They lie like it's the most natural thing in the world, lol"
• "For what it's worth, YouTube is flooded with videos hyping Japan up in exactly the same way."
• "Even Japanese women who love travelling to Korea have probably never heard of it, lol"
• "Busan fever originated in Korea, of course. It's depicted in the all-purpose mural too." [Translator's note: the "all-purpose mural" is a long-running Japanese net joke about Korean claims to have originated things.]
• "If you already love travelling to Korea, you're possessed already."

"Taken lightly by the politicians" and the state of the shelters

Criticism from outside was routed straight into domestic grievance.

Comments:

• "It's because corruption among politicians and bureaucrats never stops. The Finance Ministry especially — that lot don't think they bear any responsibility."
• "I have various thoughts about it, but there's no question we're taken lightly by the politicians..."
• "Who is going to pay good money to maintain shelters that normally go unused?"
• "If they can't secure the space, do they throw out the people who don't fit? Are they stupid?"
• "Not raising our voices at the state — that's it, that's the thing, isn't it. Because we prize harmony, speaking up reads as an act that disturbs it. And beyond that there's the disillusionment with the country, that nothing changes even if you do speak up. Writing this, it occurred to me that this disillusionment might also be a cause of the falling birth rate."
• "Rather than put budget into shelters, they'll send it to some ministry whose actual work nobody understands."
• "I don't think 'a change of government will fix everything!', but it's certain that when power gets locked in place, collusion and corruption take hold."
• "They seem to ignore the season, the temperature, the climate. Go into something like that tent in midsummer and you'll die."
• "Where did the cardboard beds they used at the Olympics go?"
• "Shelters are under local government jurisdiction. Changing who's at the top of the country won't make the shelters any better."