A story from union member Theron Muller
When I first came to Japan in 2000 it was to work for Aeon, the private English teaching company. They explained that everyone in Japan needed to be enrolled in health insurance and so gave us private travel insurance cards.
Two years later, after I was married and became self-employed, the bill came due; when I went to enroll in the public insurance systems in Japan, they asked where my contributions from 2000 were. To this day I’m still behind on my pension payments because of this.