“You must be having so much fun there!”

At 5pm on Christmas Eve, Swarnim clocked out of his eight-hour shift at a bento line in Nara Prefecture. Around him, the city was alight with holiday cheer, but he scarcely noticed as he hurried to catch a train to Takasuki for another job from 9pm.

Throughout that day, he had only got an hour-long break for lunch. By 8am on Christmas morning, he was in Kyoto, an 11-minute train ride away. His graveyard shift had ended two hours earlier, and he grabbed a meal and a brief nap in the waiting room at the station before boarding his train. 

“Tonight I have plans to go see Purna Bahadur Ko Sarangi,” said Swarnim.  The Nepali film पूर्णबहादुर को सारङ्गी was being screened at Kyoto City International Exchange Hall.

“It’s good to post a picture of yourself smiling, it makes you forget you’re stressed,” he continued, tallying up the likes and comments on his Facebook. “It will also be a relief to those back home who will see my photo and think that I am happy here.”

What the Facebook posts of tens of thousands of other Nepali student-workers in Japan do not show is how hard they have to work to afford the cost of living and school fees. Swarnim had spent 32 of the last 36 hours over Christmas on his feet.

Ramhari, another Nepali on a student visa, cuts a frail figure as he wields a vacuum cleaner in one hand while holding up the belt of his loose-fitting pants with the other. He has lost 12kg since arriving in Japan three months ago.

He looks like an entirely different person from the healthy, smiling young man in a phone photo taken 10 weeks ago when he arrived. He had made an ecstatic video call home: “I got a job within five days of arriving here!”

The 25-year-old had been earning Rs35,000 a month at his banking job in Nepal, and the prospect of earning more in Japan had drawn Ramhari here.

Nepali students earn more than Rs100,000 a month in Japan cleaning hotel rooms or in food packaging, but the pay is less than half of what is required for room rent, food and school fees. They also have to service the loan they took back home to come to Japan.

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With some exceptions, Japan is not the land of riches that many Nepalis imagine it to be. It is relentless hard work, and the savings are not what they had expected. There are also cultural adjustments like punctuality and cleanliness for the estimated 200,000 Nepali students-workers in Japan, the largest South Asian group in the country.

Milan Karki from Bhaktapur has worked as a supervisor in Kyoto for two years and says Nepalis in Japan face problems because they do not understand how much importance Japan places on being timely. Many Japanese companies pay workers by quarter-hour, and some even pay by the minute. 

“Nepalis often overlook the significance of time here,” says Karki. “Being one minute late for work is equivalent to being 15 to 30 minutes behind, which means one person can reduce the efficiency of an entire company.” 

At the meat factory where Rakesh works, the clock chimes every hour to let workers know how much time has passed since they punched in. On a recent visit to his workplace, as the clock announced the passing of an hour, the 27-year-old grinned. “That's another thousand yen in my pocket."

Rakesh is a vegetarian, even the whiff of meat was off-putting back in Nepal. Now, he works two jobs at a fish and beef packing company, and has got used to the smell. “I had never imagined I would be able to touch beef, but the money is in the cow,” he says, shrugging matter-of-factly.

Unique, 22, from Lamjung has been in Japan for just over a year, and has been working in Kyoto at the Yamato company, Japan’s largest logistics and courier service provider. Many Nepali work at Yamato despite it being one of the most difficult jobs for students. They are at the loading docks or at the warehouse cataloguing and packaging goods. 

"I had to carry things heavier than my body weight on my first day,” he said. “I told myself I just had to survive that one night, and then I would never be back here again.”

But the prospect of earning up to 1,700 yen ($11) every hour was too good to pass up. “I placed money over my own physical health, and chose to keep showing up at work,” added Rakesh who works seven-hour shifts at the company for four days a week. Japanese regulations stipulate that students cannot work more than 28 hours a week, so Nepali students mostly work part-time.

Bringing in Nepalis and other nationals as ’students’ is also Japan’s way of calibrated migration to fill service sector jobs which local people do not want to work in with cheap labour. Most places where students from Nepal work have Nepali ‘haken’ temporary employees who serve as interpreters between Nepali students and their Japanese counterparts and superiors. 

The language gap has also made it difficult for Nepalis to find less physically demanding jobs. “Nepalis here are working like mules, and they are more like manual workers than students,” said Milan Karki, a student. “If they put a bit more effort into learning Nihongo (Japanese), they could be getting much better jobs than the ones they are currently doing.”

The irony is that Nepalis in Japan on student visas barely have enough time to study, let alone learn the language. Those who have lessons in the morning work during the evenings, and those who go to school during the evening work day shifts. It is rare to find a Nepali student here who does not work just to get by, and save enough to send home. 

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Students mostly fall into exhausted sleep in their classrooms, or on public transport while they travel from classrooms to workrooms. Many students fake sick leave from school to work extra shifts, but are not allowed time off from their jobs when they actually fall ill. 

Often, months will pass with pending school fees, barely enough food, and just snatches of rest. All the while, they will be too busy to pick up calls from home, and when they do get a chance to talk to family, they find themselves making things up about their health and well-being.  

Many back home are envious of the students posting photos of themselves playing in the snow, walking by the beach, or like Swarnim watching Purna Bahadur ko Sarangi. The comments from folks back home are: ‘You must be having so much fun!’ 

Little do they know.

Names of some students have been changed.