Whenever you see pointless licensing it's usually a symptom of union or cartel like behavior used to limit supply by limiting access to the old boys club. If I

Whenever you see pointless licensing it's usually a symptom of union or cartel like behavior used to limit supply by limiting access to the old boys club. If I were part of a union I would want to limit access to that union so that the supply stays low and my salary stays high. So you can think of what's going on in japan as a sort of recruiting union formed to keep out the rif raff and keep wages artificially high. Licensing does have a very good side however and that side is that it guarantees that the holder of a license jumped through the right educational hoops to get that license. For example nobody wants to get treated by an unlicensed quack doctor... so it's a case by case situation whether or not something should be regulated. Doctors are also a good example of the other side of the coin when regulation starts to produce a cartel where doctor supply is throttled. There's no other country that makes MD licensing harder to achieve than the US and by sheer coincidence doctors in the US are also one of the highest paid in the world. Also ask any doctor, they will tell you that 4 years of unrelated undergrad that includes all chemistry up to organic chemistry is all useless to the actual job along with the majority of stuff they learn in med school as well. Sorry for the unrelated rant on doctors but it's actually a very common phenomenon and is basically exactly what is happening here for recruitment in japan.