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The story
Backlash erupted after the head of soba/udon chain Yudetaro praised foreign employees as “excellent,” sparking a heated back-and-forth in a 5ch thread.
The president reportedly holds the position that foreign trainees should be paid the same wages as Japanese employees, and the thread’s discussion expanded from there — touching on why Japanese workers tend to shy away from low-wage jobs, and suspicions that management in labor-short industries like trucking would rather import cheap labor than raise wages.
What people said
If anything, the staff who actually piss me off are almost always Japanese.
Though I guess that's my own bias talking.
Their work ethic seems solid, but they barely speak Japanese…
Makes me nervous whether paperwork like certificates is even being handled correctly. You need at least one native-level speaker on staff or it's a real problem.
The Lawson near me has a Japanese owner and that's it — every other staffer is South Asian.
Foreigners who land jobs in food service and other customer-facing industries are basically the elite, since Japanese-language communication skills are such a high bar. And at Yudetaro they're paid the same as Japanese staff anyway.
Wait, there are Japanese people who can't even speak Japanese?
It's not about being smart or good at the job —
obviously they'd rather have someone who works cheap and keeps their mouth shut.
That's not even true anymore.
The ones working now out-earn Japanese employees. Quit outing yourself as an out-of-touch boomer.
If it's elites lining up to come work here, they can toss 'em out just as fast, lol.
Lol, acting like some kind of master strategist.
His point being: isn't this really just about keeping labor costs down with cheap workers instead of ever raising wages?
But what other option is there, really?
Hiroyuki calls himself a businessman and criticizes other business owners for not paying decent wages, but he's never once disclosed what he pays his own employees, has he?
And for that matter, KADOKAWA — which Hiroyuki has championed — has also been called out for stiffing its writers on payment.
Of course a business owner would think that way.
If someone has the sales ability to actually drive revenue, they end up holding the leverage instead.
Management is just exploiting that, calling cheap workers who grind away without complaint "excellent" while squeezing them.
There's zero downside for the company even if those workers flee or turn to crime.
Before complaining about "Japanese people," ask yourself if you ever even tried.
The Yudetaro president's actual stance is: "It's the law that foreign trainees must be paid the same as Japanese employees. Companies that ignore that and pay trainees less shouldn't be allowed to hire them at all, and the government needs to enforce this properly."
Japanese people don't apply precisely because the pay and conditions are bad.
The second you're demanding foreign workers get brought in instead, you're no better than the people you're criticizing.
Fully self-service convenience stores have been trialed for over a decade now and still never rolled out — that tells you everything.
I'm just glad Lawson has self-checkout at all.
Though it's annoying that items with discount stickers can't go through self-checkout.
The irony is that convenience stores haven't even managed to go self-service because Japanese people's own civility (民度) is too low — so they're relying on foreigners to make up for it.
But then they can't muster any respect for Olympic gold medalists either.
They're just stressed out and taking it out on whoever's nearby.
Complaints about society online are, at the end of the day, just people offloading their frustration with their own inadequacy onto someone else.
Which is another way of saying Japanese workers who complain and demand higher pay are garbage employees.
So it's not about minority rights at all — they're just being valued as convenient, easily-used pieces on a board.
Inventing an opinion someone never actually stated and then attacking them for "secretly thinking that" — classic move from the anti-foreigner crowd.
The real problem is that Japanese people won't take on troublesome jobs even when the pay is good.
Yeah, construction's exactly like that too.
Trucking's another one. If you want to raise pay for drivers and sorters in logistics, the only way to fund that is by raising shipping fees — but Japanese customers immediately complain "shipping's too expensive!" So then (even though it's backwards) companies end up hiring foreign workers willing to work cheap just to hold shipping costs down. If you don't want foreign drivers, you need to be willing to accept shipping fees going up 20-30%.
Background and Key Points
Yudetaro is a nationwide soba/udon chain, and the “foreign employees” in question are mostly on Japan’s Technical Intern Training Program (技能実習制度) — the visa scheme that brings in labor from Vietnam, Nepal, Indonesia, and similar countries for sectors chronically short of workers, including food service, construction, and trucking. Crucially, Japanese labor law already requires trainees to be paid the same wage as Japanese staff doing equivalent work; the loophole isn’t the law but enforcement, which is exactly the point the Yudetaro president was making — his “excellent” comment was paired with a call for the government to crack down on companies that underpay trainees, not a boast about cheap labor. That nuance is why the backlash reads as ironic to some posters. It’s also worth knowing Japan is phasing this program out in favor of a new “Employment for Skill Development” system by 2027, precisely because of years of exploitation scandals tied to it.
The thread didn’t really split over whether foreign workers are competent — nearly everyone conceded that. It split over motive: is “excellent” a genuine compliment, or corporate code for “won’t complain about bad conditions,” with the implication that Japanese workers who do complain get labeled difficult? That reading, amplified by a comment attributed to Hiroyuki (the 2channel founder turned pundit, frequently invoked in these threads as a contrarian authority), pushed the discussion toward wages versus automation versus import-cheap-labor as competing fixes for sectors like trucking and construction.
What’s easy to miss: nobody in the thread mentions that equal-pay-for-trainees is already the legal baseline, not something Yudetaro is generously offering — so framing this as corporate generosity, or as exploitation, both slightly misstate the starting point.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Sad News] Yudetaro Gets Absolutely Slammed Just for Saying Foreign Employees Are Excellent.”
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