Japan Pays Foreign Workers to Go Home, Forever - NYTimes.com

In 1990, Japan — facing growing industrial labor shortage — started issuing thousands of special work visas to descendants of these emigrants. An estimated 366,000 Brazilians and Peruvians now live in Japan.

The guest workers quickly became the largest group of foreign blue-collar workers in an otherwise immigration-adverse country, filling the so-called three-K jobs (kitsui, kitanai, kiken — or hard, dirty and dangerous.)

Critics denounce the program [of paying workers to return to South America] as short-sighted and inhumane, and a threat to what little progress Japan has made in opening its economy to foreign workers

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