“The Plight of Bhutanese Students in Japan.” Representatives of Bhutanese Parents’ Committee of The Learn and Earn Program’ speak to media in Tokyo in February 2019. Screencap from the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan YouTube Channel. It all started as a very promising opportunity for Bhutanese students. Since 2017, the government of Bhutan has sent around 800 Bhutanese students to Japan under the “Learn and Earn” program as part of a drive to increase employment opportunities for citizens of the kingdom in the Himalayas. The program, which is supervised by Bhutan's Ministry of Labour and Human Resources (MOLHR), matches students who travel to Japan and enroll in Japanese language schools with collateral-free loans provided by Bhutanese financial institutions, expecting that they will work to pay back the investment. However, the reality was far from what the students expected. Students complained that they faced extortion, threats and hard times during their stay in Japan. In December 2018, a 24-year-old Bhutanese student committed suicide and several students contracted tuberculosis. Bhutan's overseas training and employment programs were first launched in October 2013 to bring about full employment for Bhutanese citizens. As part of the strategy, the government of Bhutan arranged a trainee program with Japan where Bhutanese students would be trained in Japan and bring back valuable skills that would make them employable once they returned home. At the program's inception, Bhutan's People’s Democratic Party (the political party in power at that time) had pledged to create 82,000 jobs by 2018. The Bhutanese initiative takes advantage of Japan's “300,000 Foreign Students Plan“, an initiative launched in 2008 aimed at increasing the number of foreign students or trainees in Japan from 140,000 to 300,000 students by 2020. However, foreign trainees such as those coming to Japan from Bhutan on the Learn and Earn program typically end up as sources of cheap, exploitable labor, with little in the way of support from their Japanese hosts. Many Bhutanese students in the Learn and Earn program took on loans, notably to cover the cost of round-trip air tickets to Japan, mandatory Japanese-language training, and housing. However, as Japanese employers pay trainees very low monthly wages, students needed to work at least two jobs and live in squalid conditions, in order to repay the loans. Students were contractually obligated to invest a considerable amount of time and high tuition fees on Japanese-language classes to achieve the N2 level in the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) required for job placements. Given their poor living conditions and diets, many trainees became sick from physical and mental stress. There were also reports of Learn and Earn participants being subjected to forced labor, and passport theft and illegal wage deductions by Japanese employers. Five hundred Learn and Earn students are reportedly ready to file cases. Nagwang Tobgay, the legal officer of the Parents’ Committee of The Learn and Earn Program’ laid down the allegations in a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan in Tokyo in February 2019: The parents alleged that Bhutan's Ministry of Labour conducted no research into working and living conditions in Japan for students before launching the program. The Labour Ministry had to suspend registration for the Learn and Earn program within five months of its introduction because of the overwhelming number of applicants. Learn and Earn participants from Bhutan are also supposed to be received and assisted in Japan by Support for New Departure (SND), an organization affiliated with the Japanese government. The parents allege that SND did nothing to help the Bhutanese students, who instead faced extortion and threats from employers and others. Prior to the 2019 press conference in Tokyo, questions had already been raised about the Bhutanese government's plan to send students to Japan. After the student's suicide in 2018, the Bhutan Employment Overseas (BEO), selected as and licensed by Bhutan's Ministry of Labour in order to feed participants into Japan's Learn and Earn program, came under scrutiny in Bhutan. The country's Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) called for the cancellation of BEO's trade license, which the ACC deemed to have been illegally granted. In August 2018, Japanese journalist Idei Yasuhiro (出井康博) published an expose of the program in Foresight magazine which was translated into English by Bhutanese activists. In the report, Idei noted that: The Japanese Government set up “the foreign students 300,000 plan” back in 2008.