Or they could allow 25,000 immigrants in with generous incentives to be truck drivers.
On a maybe more serious note, and in direct contradiction to what I would've thought and thus wrote above, according to what I've just been told (I mentioned this story to a Japanese person who works in shipping) truck drivers and bus drivers get a really good wage in Japan but still they can't attract people into the job.
1. Truck driving requires extensive (and expensive) training and licensing. You can't just hire some immigrants to do it for you. Driving such a large vehicle on narrow, crowded roads requires a lot of skill and training, and is very dangerous. This creates a large barrier of entry into the career. Who's going to pay for this training? 1.a. With immigrants, how do you train them when they don't speak the language? And if you train them in another language, how do they function when they can't talk to anyone they work with (customers), or the occasional police interaction? Are you suggesting that Japan needs to pay immigrants to go to language school for 2 years before starting truck-driving school? This career isn't that highly-paid.
2. Truck driving is hard on your body, particularly your back. Check out American truck drivers nearing retirement age and look at their general health.
3. Truck driving usually takes you far from home for long durations (probably not quite as bad in Japan since it's a smaller country than the US). Most people want to go home to their families after work.
Face it: truck driving is a shitty job. The more it can be replaced with automation, the better.
Nobody is paying to pay truckers for training when they can instead convince the trucker to train themselves, pay for their own truck, but be limited by contract to be an "independent contractor" that can only take on contracts for one company at a loss
The article is about Japan; I only briefly compared to America. I think what you're describing (truckers owning trucks) might be unique to America, but I'm not sure. Even there, a lot of trucking companies do not use independent truckers, but just hire them as employees. Walmart for instance absolutely does not use independent truckers; their trucks all have "Walmart" painted on the side.
Anyway, I've heard in the last 5 years or so in America that there's a bigger and bigger trucking shortage, so I'm guessing that scheme you refer to probably isn't working out so well any more, and companies are going to have to buy their own trucks and hire truckers as regular employees.
there are so many eager truck drivers, they have to put bollards around large gatherings of people now.