Rights awareness of temporary migrant workers in Japan: Disbelief in the realisability and deservingness of pregnancy rights

Abstract

In Japan, workers on the Technical Internship Training Program (TITP) are de jure protected by the employment and equality laws applying to Japanese workers. However, increasing reports of interns hiding their pregnancies owing to the fear of dismissal and deportation have been framed by the Japanese government as interns’ misunderstandings or lack of awareness about their rights to maternity leave and protection from dismissal. Yet, how interns perceive and narrate pregnancy rights has not been addressed in the literature. To address this gap, semistructured interviews were conducted with seven women who came to Japan on the TITP to better understand how pregnancy rights may be interpreted by interns. Interviewees’ narratives of disbelief in the realisability and deservingness of pregnancy rights complicate rights awareness beyond simply knowing the existence of rights. Informed by the concept of hermeneutical injustice, disbelief is theorised as underpinned by intersectional oppressions reinforced by the TITP. In contrast to the government’s framing of unclaimed pregnancy rights as interns’ misunderstandings, the narrations of disbelief express the modus operandi of the TITP, in which pregnancy rights are rendered unrealisable and undeserved and pregnant interns are effectively deportable.