How the Northeast is answering the call from an ageing Japan

Japan and Japanese culture, from anime to cosplay festivals, where youngsters  dress up as their favourite anime characters, are a big draw among the young in the Northeast. Janet, too, loves films made by Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio, and names My Neighbour Totoro as one of her favourites.

Janet’s family of four lives in a rented apartment in a buzzing Aizawl neighbourhood. Her father, who worked as a driver and a carpenter, passed away a few years ago, and one of her younger brothers works as a driver while the other is still in school. She describes her mother C Lalrinmawii, 61, as her “close friend”.

“I only earn Rs 10,000 a month from my job at the store, so I run a business selling induction stoves, steamers and mosquito nets over WhatsApp and Facebook. But with the new job in Japan, hopefully, in about three months, I should be able to send a good amount of money home,” she says. Janet hopes her move to Japan will help her work towards her “biggest dream” — a home for the family.

Serene Malswami poses in front of the Tsūtenkaku tower in Osaka, Japan

More than 4,000 kilometres away, 27-year-old Serene Malswami is living that dream. Now in her third year of working as a caregiver in an old-age home in Kanazawa, the capital city of Ishikawa Prefecture in central Japan, Serene, a nursing graduate, moved there as an SSW or ‘Specified Skill Worker’ when she was 24.

Much before she landed in Japan, Serene had set her heart on the country. She had grown up watching anime on the channel Animax, with Attack on Titan her favourite series. “Our local cable channel aired Studio Ghibli  dubbed in Mizo language and I watched all of them,” she says, speaking on the phone from Kanazawa.

Yet, when she landed, Japan felt very different from home. Having grown up with close community bonds — “In Lunglei, I knew everyone” — in Kanazawa, she didn’t see even her neighbours for the first six months. Thankfully, she says, she had for company her cousin who works in the same senior living home and shares the apartment with her. “Work’s good… we do a lot of talking, but when we get home, it’s lonely because no one’s coming around,” she says.

She also took her time adjusting to food. “Everything is so sweet! I really missed some chilli in my food.” But the toughest was her struggle with the language.

“We studied and learned Japanese back in India, but that was basic school-textbook level. To actually speak on a daily basis with people in Japan was a completely different thing. At first, we couldn’t actually understand what they were saying and would simply smile most of the time. But people at the workplace were good to us. They would speak slowly and in simple Japanese so that we could follow them,” she says.

By her third month in Japan, Serene had settled down. She now buys dal from an Indian store that she chanced upon, has travelled to Tokya, Osaka and other parts of the country, and goes on hikes in the countryside around Kanazawa on her days off. After a few months on the job, her Japanese too improved considerably.

The work, she says, is not easy and the shifts can be long, including 17-hour night shifts on some days. But it all felt worthwhile when she started sending money home to her parents and younger siblings.

As a trained nurse working in Lunglei, Serene says she earned Rs 15,000 a month. “Now I am able to send Rs 50,000 to Rs 60,000 every month, which is a lot for us. Here, I manage to live a comfortable life. I buy things I like, and travel when I have time off from work,” she says.

In March, when she visited her family in Mizoram’s Lunglei town for the first time since she left, everything felt different. “The food we had, the social gatherings, it all felt so different already,” she says.

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As Japan confronts low birth rates and an ageing society, it grapples with crippling labour shortages in several sectors.

In a 2016 research paper on demographic change, policy researchers Akim Enomoto and Hannes Bublitz wrote, “…For every Japanese teenager under 15, there will be three seniors aged 65 years-plus in 2040.”

Referring to the “2040 problem”, economist Oguro Kazumasa wrote that population projections indicate “that the working population (aged 20 to 64) will decrease from 66.34 million in 2025 to 55.42 million in 2040… This projection indicates that the Japanese economy could face serious labour shortages unless Japan proactively accepts immigrants.”

It’s this population pressure that saw Japan introducing the SSW residence status in 2019, opening an organised pathway for blue-collar foreign workers to get a working visa in the country.

A spiral-bound copy of a pre-intermediate textbook produced by The Japan Foundation.

In March this year, Japan’s Immigration Services Agency and Ministry of Health, Labour & Welfare stated that the country expected to accept 8.05 lakh Specified Skill Workers by the end of March 2029. The highest demand for workers under the SSW programme is in industrial product manufacturing (1.99 lakh), manufacture of food & beverages (1.33 lakh) and nursing care (1.26 lakh). By March 2029, Japan is also expected to accept another 4.26 lakh foreign workers under the training-based Employment for Skill Development (ESD) programme to be launched next year, replacing an earlier Technical Intern Training Program (TITP). At the end of 2025, there were 3.9 lakh with SSW status in Japan and 4.56 lakh with TITP status.

India accounts for a small slice of this foreign worker pie, and the Northeast even smaller. According to data from Japan’s Immigrant Services Agency, China was the foreign country with the most number of residents, across different categories, in Japan at the end of 2025 (9.3 lakh), followed by Vietnam, South Korea, the Philippines and Nepal. As of December 2024, there were 53,974 Indian nationals residing in Japan and in August 2025, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs announced a joint “aspirational target of the exchange of more than 5,00,000 personnel in both directions in the next five years, including 50,000 skilled personnel and potential talents from India to Japan”.

As SSW and other programmes open a door, young people in small towns in the Northeast are starting to fill up classrooms to learn Japanese and prepare for the tests that promise a pathway into Japan. The opportunity comes knocking either through placement agencies that come to colleges or when they hear from friends who are already working in Japan.

Over the last few years, state governments in the Northeast and government universities in the region have backed this employment pathway. In October last year, the Assam government announced a programme subsidising SSW training fees for an initial batch of 180 students, as well as their relocation if they get placed. A Japanese Language Centre was started at Manipur University this year for language and skills training for the SSW pathway, with an initial capacity of 250 students. Mizoram University and the state’s Labour, Employment, Skill Development & Entrepreneurship department have signed MoUs with training centres to facilitate this pathway.

Mizoram Minister of Labour, Employment, Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Pu Lalnghinglova Hmar says that the state government sees the SSW as a “good opportunity” for the youth. “Since this is about migrating for work, we make sure they are going through proper, legal channels, with proper documentation. Japan is a good place to go for our young people,” he says. He calls it a “win-win situation”. “Japan has a demand with its ageing population. India, and Mizoram, with its young population is able to deliver the services they are looking for.”

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At a training centre tucked behind a café in Aizawl, two batches of students turn up five days a week for four-hour classes. The centre, run by Japan Centre of Excellence (Jaceex), a private organisation that provides training and facilitates placements in Japan, offers classes for the Japanese language test and the skills test.

Since last year, when the centre was set up, 14 students have been placed as SSW in Japan — 10 of them as caregivers.

Rajeev Gupta, the founder of Jaceex that also has centres in Manipur and Assam, says they have facilitated the movement of 52 youngsters — 45 women and seven men — to Japan since 2023, most of them from Manipur and Mizoram. Another 75, he says, are currently in training across Jaceex’s centres.

The fee for the training course is Rs 75,000. Once students clear the SSW exam, there are additional charges for placements and getting the documentation done.

At the centre in Aizawl, Mizoram, where students are training for an exam that will qualify them for jobs in Japan

The 43 students at the Aizawl centre range from fresh college graduates to people with some years of experience working outside Mizoram.

At 21, Mawi, who is from the Indo-Myanmar border town of Moreh in Manipur, has already accumulated a world of experiences. She was an undergraduate student in Moreh College when the conflict between Manipur’s Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities began in 2023.

“It was my grandfather’s dream for me to become a graduate but the college stopped functioning properly in 2023. When that happened, I started working as an assistant teacher in schools, but they paid very little, just a few thousand rupees. In normal times, the most obvious place to go looking for work would have been Imphal, but that was not possible because I’m Kuki. I’m the eldest of four siblings and need to support my family, so I left Moreh last year,” says Mawi.

An employment agency placed her as a live-in domestic worker with a family in Hong Kong, but she returned to India less than six months later because things didn’t go as expected.

She briefly worked as a domestic worker in Noida, then in a guest house in Guwahati. After these experiences, Mawi — lively, well-spoken, and affectionately teased by her language class batchmates as the “brightest” among them — says she is clear that she wants to work and grow in “a professional environment”.

While the numbers headed to Japan are still nascent, Gupta of Jaceex believes that the demand for workers, especially in caregiving, “where the work is person to person and cannot easily be automated”, far exceeds the number of students who are training and moving.

Vanlalruata Ralte, who runs the Aizawl centre, says, “There is a lot of demand for girls in caregiving jobs, but many families here are hesitant to send their daughters away. But the interest is slowly growing. It helps that it is easier for people from here to assimilate in Japan because of our physical characteristics.”

David, 40, is among those training at the Aizawl centre. After years of trying to land on his feet, the MBA degree holder from a private institute in Sikkim is now hoping to work as an agriculture worker in Japan.

Having grown up on a diet of Japanese media and ‘samurai culture’, David says he has always longed to visit Japan. But if he is leaving home, it’s only because of the lack of employment opportunities in Mizoram.

“Everyone aims for government jobs. I have written all kinds of exams, from the Mizoram Civil Service to Group B officer roles, but I haven’t cracked any. I’ve done administrative work under government projects on a contract basis. But none of those got regularised, so I now run a small laundry business here,” he says.

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With her daughter preparing to leave in a couple of months, Janet’s mother Lalrinmawii calls parting with her a “sacrifice”. What gives her comfort is the belief that Japan is a safe place. Besides, she says, “Caring for the elderly is very good work. It is like a missionary job, helping people.”

Janet with her mother, Lalrinmawii