This article asks how Japan’s Technical Intern Training Program (TITP) has promoted a transfiguration of employer into predator who utilizes fraudulent economic strategies to exploit trainees under the abusive conditions. Situating Japan’s case within the global dynamics of temporary labor migration as well as drawing on the critical discussions about the ‘informal economy’, I argue that the formation and expansion of the unequal capital–labor power relations, facilitated by the processes of informalization under the TITP in Japan and the sending countries, has constructed trainees a...