How Japanese black companies oppress workers (2014)

Why don't they just emigrate? Work culture seems to be better just about everywhere and on top of that, salaries in Japan are shit, and anyone with half the Japanese work ethics will be a dream employee in U.S. or let alone Europe which is full of entitled, lazy slackers.

At least in IT, it's not even necessary to emigrate- foreign owned companies offer significantly better salaries and working conditions.

The sticking point is English ability. It's genuinely a very difficult thing to learn a second language to the point of being workplace-functional in it, and an additional level of daily stress and mental effort to do everything in your non-native language. The culture here doesn't exactly reward risk-taking and failing in public, and unfortunately becoming proficient in a language requires that you stumble through things a lot while you practice. Furthermore, most Japanese people have experienced fairly ineffective methods of teaching English in schools and ended up rather demoralized about their ability to learn it. (And if you're currently in a job that demands a lot of overtime, when do you study?)

But isn't it kinda mandatory for any IT person to speak usable English, worldwide? Even if super closed societies where language education sucks beyond imagination, like Russia, they mostly do.

Not really, no. Being able to read it is harder to avoid, but usefully communicating in it is not needed in many places.

> Why don't they just emigrate

This is why you see plenty of Japanese (and Korean) expats across China and ASEAN. A mid-level Japanese employee can become a senior manager in Thailand or Vietnam while earning a similar salary to Japan ($20-40k).

Not really in Japan. Everything is available in Japanese if it's not Japanese made in the first place. Complete lack of English skill + wide coverage of industry is probably a huge moat for Japan even in IT.

Well, it's true that most my my colleagues can read English well enough to get the gist of docs and Stack Overflow, but when it comes to speaking, they don't know how to pronounce a lot of the words, to the point of being very difficult for the listener to understand, and struggle to put together a coherent sentence (particularly in the short timeframe needed to have a smooth conversation). They also find speaking English to be highly stressful and generally avoid it as much as they can.