The Flight of Japan's Immigrant Workers

Kenpoku Fashion is a small textile company in Japan's Iwate prefecture, in the coastal city of Kuji, nearly 200 miles north of the epicenter of the country's Mar. 11 earthquake. The firm produces the company uniforms—matching jackets and pants emblazoned with corporate logos—that are ubiquitous in Japanese factories and offices. The uniforms are enjoying considerable international visibility right now, as Tokyo Electric Power executives and government officials wear them during often gloomy press conferences, to project an air of competence and esprit de corps.

While Kenpoku's Kuji plant escaped major damage, the disaster took a different sort of toll. Before Mar. 11, a quarter of its 32 employees were Chinese workers in Japan on temporary visas. According to Hitomi Kudo, a manager at the plant, a few days after the quake the Chinese workers started worrying about the risk of radiation poisoning from the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant. Some were convinced that large portions of Iwate and Miyagi prefecture were already under water, others that Mount Fuji was going to explode. Within a week, seven of the eight had gone back to China.