Temporary Labor Migration and Skill Transfer in Japan: Migration Experiences and Outcomes of Technical Intern Trainees from Vietnam and China

This paper examines Vietnamese and Chinese technical intern trainees going to Japan under Japan’s Technical Intern Training Program (TITP), focusing on their migration experiences, skill enhancement, and outcomes. It aims to explore the reasons why TITP failed to achieve its stated objective—international skill transfer. Guided by human capital theory, this paper tries to make sense of the different migration expectations and experiences of Vietnamese and Chinese technical intern trainees under different institutional arrangements and contributes to the debate of temporary labor migration and international skill transfer. This paper argues that the government of a temporary migrant labor-sending country must exercise sufficiently good socio-technical infrastructural governance to steward labor-export policy and industrial policy to match national development goals in order to make international skill transfer possible.