As Japan confronts population ageing, it is coming to rely on foreign care workers to care for seniors. Treating credentialed care work as the ideal, the country’s emerging system relies on multiple measures for employing foreign care workers, producing a range of linguistic and skill requirements. This article uses process-tracing to explain why policy changes since 2014 support multiple options for these workers’ employment in the formal care sector – the main alternative to family care. The analysis has implications for the training and recruitment of practitioners from abroad.

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