Southern Tagalog workers denounced Ferdinand Marcos Jr’s touted promise of investments by Japanese companies in the Philippines, saying these will not bring genuine development to the country.

Marcos is in Japan for a 4-day official visit. On May 28, he boasted of the promised investment of four large companies set to pour ₱56.3 billion into the country. This will supposedly create 10,000 jobs in the construction, manufacturing, and fishing sectors. Two of these companies, the Furukawa Electric Co. Ltd. and Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd, already have operations in Cabuyao, Laguna.

But according to Pagkakaisa ng mga Manggagawa sa Timog Katagalugan (Pamantik, or Southern Tagalog Workers’ Unity)-Kilusang Mayo Uno, Japanese companies have been operating in the Philippines since the 1950s. This was less than a decade after the Second World War, when imperialist Japan brutally occupied the country, massacred Filipinos, and raped women.

“Marcos is boasting that this foreign investments will bring development, but where is this development?” the group retorted in a statement. The Philippines has not developed and will not develop because Japanese companies do not transfer their skills and technology to Filipinos, it said.

“(Japan) factories here are only for the assembly of small parts, which we then export back to Japan. They assemble them there and then sell back to us their Toyota and Honda cars and motorcycles, or Fujitsu and Hitachi air conditioners at higher prices,” it said. “The profits they extract from companies here are not reinvested here but are brought back to their country to be repatriated to their mother companies.”

According to the group, the jobs created by Japanese companies are “insufficient and pay cheap wages.”

“The wealth created by workers in Japanese companies here in Southern Tagalog such as Fuji Electric, Daiwa Seiko, Technol Eight, and others is enormous, yet workers do not share even a fraction of it,” the group concluded.