Yoshinoya Holdings Co. announced on May 9 that it will stop checking the nationalities of job applicants seeking to attend the company’s recruitment events in prescreening to remove them from the process.
The move comes in response to public backlash over its rejection of a university student from a company recruitment event for its subsidiary, the beef bowl restaurant chain Yoshinoya Co.
It rejected the student on the grounds that the person was a foreign national, despite failing to contact the individual to confirm the fact.
According to Yoshinoya Holdings, it had emailed multiple students to stop them from participating in the event. But the company said it has since emailed or phoned all of them and apologized.
It also informed them of future recruitment events the company will hold, and some of them said they want to attend these events, according to the company.
“We would like to prevent a recurrence of this incident,” a representative for Yoshinoya Holdings said.
When the incident first came to light, Yoshinoya Holdings cited previous cases where it had to cancel job offers for foreign nationals studying in Japan because they were unable to obtain work visas. It admitted it has been screening out applicants it assumed were foreign nationals from its recruitment events since 2021.
However, the company will warn foreign students at these events about the possibility they may be unable to obtain work visas after receiving a job offer, it said.
The latest flap comes in the wake of another scandal just weeks ago, when the company fired a managing director for making derogatory remarks about young women.
