Japan is closed to immigrants, but many farmers there are hiring temporary Chinese workers to ease a growing labor shortage. Harvesting in Kawakami .

By NORIMITSU ONISHI

KAWAKAMI, Japan - After a day’s work in the lettuce fields, the young Chinese men began arriving at their favorite gathering spot here, a short concrete bridge in the center of town. Soon, more than a dozen were leaning against one of the railings, some lighting Chinese cigarettes.
Some Japanese crossed the bridge on foot, followed by a young Japanese man the Chinese recognized on sight. “Japanese-” one of the Chinese workers joked.
“Japanese, of course,” the passer-by said without slowing down. “You can tell by looking.”
The brief exchange was a subtle recognition of the conspicuous presence of 615 Chinese living temporarily in Kawakami, a farming community of about 4,400 Japanese residents about 160 kilometers west of Tokyo. Five years ago, unable to find enough young local residents or to draw seasonal workers, Kawakami’s aging farmers hired about 40 Chinese on seven-month contracts.
Now half of the town’s 600 farming households depend on temporary workers from China. And Kawakami expects to hire more foreign workers next year, not only from China but also, for the first time, from the Philippines.
With one of the world’s most rapidly aging populations and lowest birthrates, Japan is facing acute labor shortages not only in farming towns like Kawakami but also in fishing villages, factories, restaurants and nursing homes, and on construction sites. Closed to immigration, Japan has admitted foreign workers through various loopholes, including employing growing numbers of foreign students as part-timers and temporary workers, like the Chinese here, as socalled foreign trainees.
But that practice has left some businesses continually scrambling for a dependable work force and the foreigners vulnerable to abuse. The labor shortage has grown serious enough that a group of influential politicians in the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party recently called for the admission of 10 million immigrants in the next 50 years.
The foreign work force in Japan rose to more than one million in 2006 from fewer than 700,000 in 1996. But experts say that it will have to increase by significantly more to make up for the expected decline in the Japanese population. The government projects that Japan’s population, 127 million, will fall to between 82 million and 99 million by 2055. Moreover, because the population is graying, the share that is of working age is expected to shrink even faster.
Here in Kawakami, farmers could depend on Japanese college students or part-time workers during the planting and harvesting seasons until five years ago. Then hardly any came, and those who did stayed only a few days, finding the work too hard.
“Some stayed the night, and in the morning I’d find them gone,” said Noriko Yui, 72, who was working in her field with two Chinese workers on a recent afternoon. “The Chinese have perseverance.”
Her two Chinese workers, Li Shude, 24, and Jiang Cheng, 25, share a small, standalone room behind Ms. Yui’s house, where they sleep on two single beds put together. They, like the other Chinese workers here, are paid $775 per month, or $5,425 over their seven months here. But most of the Chinese interviewed here said they had paid about half of the total to the agency that had arranged their employment here.
Mr. Jiang, who grows corn and Chinese cabbage back home, said he would use part of his earnings to buy pigs and chickens.
“I like the environment here,” he said. “The air is clean, and I’m not homesick because there are many other Chinese here.”
The large presence of the Chinese workers has unsettled some Japanese here even as they have become increasingly dependent on them. Some vaguely mentioned the fear of crime, though they acknowledged that crime rates had not risen.
For many residents who had not seen a single foreigner in this area until a few years ago, Kawakami has changed fundamentally. “Though I’m in Japan,” said Toshimitsu Yui, 57, who works in construction, “I feel this is not Japan anymore.”