Being and becoming the “ideal migrant”: the making of Filipino technical trainees through the Japanese language

Abstract

While labor migration has long shaped language policies and practices in the Philippines, particularly through the centrality of English, Japanese is emerging as another language of economic aspiration. As Filipinos increasingly pursue labor opportunities in Japan, sociolinguistic discourses of mobility extend beyond English to include Japanese. This study investigates how Japanese language education within the Technical Internship Training Program (TITP) contributes to the production of the “ideal migrant.” Drawing on Japanese language course materials and interviews with a sample of Filipino technical trainees, the analysis traces how the “ideal migrant” is discursively constructed and how trainees internalize this figure over time through language instruction and workplace socialization. The core issue is not merely the trainees’ limited Japanese proficiency, but that the structure of Japanese language instruction within the TITP is designed to preserve employer authority, cultivate dependency, restrict mobility, and reinforce asymmetrical relations. As Japanese lessons explicitly and implicitly inculcate compliance, predictability, and deference, Filipino technical trainees gradually come to embody behaviors that reproduce their own precarity. Japanese therefore functions as a language of labor governance, strategically mobilized to regulate migrant conduct and align workers with the linguistic and affective expectations of both Japanese employers and the Philippine state.