TOKYO — Japan has flatly denied that it agreed to recruit 100,000 workers from Bangladesh every year, after the claim spread across Bangladeshi media and social media in the wake of Prime Minister Tarique Rahman's visit to Tokyo. Toshihiro Kitamura, press secretary of Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, dismissed the reports as unfounded in a post on X on Thursday, October 29, saying the issue of accepting 100,000 Bangladeshi workers each year was not discussed or agreed upon at the October 27 summit between Rahman and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.
Source: The Voice News
Kitamura pointed readers to the Japanese foreign ministry's official account of the summit. That account records talks on economic cooperation, investment, regional connectivity and security — and no worker-recruitment number at all. "No such fact exists, including within the discussions during the Japan-Bangladesh Summit meeting on October 27," Kitamura wrote, as reported by bdnews24.
A Bangladeshi plan was reported as a Japanese promise
The reports that triggered the denial cited Bangladesh's Ministry of Expatriates' Welfare and Overseas Employment and described a plan to send 100,000 workers a year — technical trainees, skilled workers and professionals — to meet Japan's labour demand. But a sending country's plan and a receiving country's agreement are two different things, and Tokyo's statement underlines that Japan never signed up to the number. Japan's foreign-worker system does not run on country quotas at all: numbers depend on employer demand and on applicants meeting eligibility rules, including language and skills tests.
The figure also has an older root that helps explain the confusion. At a human-resources seminar in Tokyo in May 2025, a Japanese business grouping said it was prepared to welcome more than 100,000 Bangladeshi workers over five years — a business statement spread across half a decade, not a government promise of 100,000 every year.
What actually exists between the two countries
There is a real framework — it is just smaller and slower than the viral claim. Bangladesh and Japan signed a Memorandum of Cooperation on Employment and Skills Development on October 17, 2026, covering recruitment, skills development and worker protection, with recruitment scheduled to begin on April 1, 2027 for an initial five years. Bangladeshi nationals can already seek work in Japan through the Specified Skilled Worker (SSW) programme and the Technical Intern Training Programme, under a labour-migration memorandum dating to 2019 — routes that remain gated by Japan's stringent language-proficiency and skills requirements.
At the summit itself, the headline economic number pointed the other way: Takaichi highlighted the potential for ¥1 trillion in Japanese private-sector investment in Bangladesh over the next five years, expected to generate around 200,000 jobs in Bangladesh itself. For the lakhs of Bangladeshi — and, by extension, South Asian — workers who watch Japan as a destination, the clarification matters: Tokyo's door is open through the SSW and the new framework, but there is no 100,000-a-year allocation waiting for anyone, and claims of one should be treated as what Japan says they are — false.
Sources: Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs press secretary Toshihiro Kitamura, post on X, October 29, 2026, via The Voice News, October 30, 2026; bdnews24 reporting via EuropeSays, October 30, 2026 — the denial, the quota-free system, the October 17 agreement and the May 2025 seminar figure; Japan-Bangladesh summit readout (October 27, 2026) — the ¥1 trillion investment potential and 200,000 jobs.