Event

This talk focuses on our ongoing research project on career opportunities among overseas Japanese workers. Japanese career trajectory is characterised as long-term employment in the same company with a job-rotation-based promotion system followed by a seniority-based wage. In the lost decades since the 1990s, however, the share of non-standard employment has increased, and the sustainability of the Japanese employment system is questioned. Under the depressive Japanese labour market prospect, a slightly growing number of young and middle-aged Japanese people want an alternative way of career formation, even though their population size is small. Company-dispatched workers from Japan (chu-zai-in) have represented most of those who worked abroad. As sending the staff to overseas branch organisations is becoming costly, however, Japanese companies gradually shift to hiring local people to reduce personnel costs. Nevertheless, they still prefer Japanese employees, and hiring agents are pivotal in bridging Japanese companies and Japanese people who want to work overseas. Accordingly, our primary questions are: (1) How can Japanese workers overseas experience upward mobility in the local societies? and (2) How are their working experiences perceived and evaluated after returning to Japan? Based on our motivation, we conducted quantitative and qualitative social surveys. One is the three-year longitudinal survey targeting Japanese people working outside Japan from 2019 to 2022. The other is the in-depth interview for Japanese workers and hiring agents from 2018 to 2022. Throughout the survey, our tentative finding is that there is a niche for Japanese workers to get a relatively good job by bridging the company-dispatched Japanese workers and local staff. Meanwhile, it is not positively evaluated in Japanese companies after returning to Japan. I will introduce preliminary descriptive results from quantitative and qualitative data in my talk.

Kenji Ishida is a sociologist and an associate professor at Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo. His primary research interest is how the opportunity for status attainment is organised in Japan. In addition to domestic Japanese people, his research target stretches to immigrant-rooted children in Japan and Japanese expatriates overseas. Furthermore, he currently works on issues of social networks (e.g., social isolation) and time use (e.g, time pressure and multitasking) in Japan. One of his recent publications is about the formation of anti-immigration sentiment with a Japanese longitudinal dataset. Also, he published an article describing the perception of Japanese self-employed workers overseas about the difficulties of doing business in Japan. His methodological approach is chiefly quantitative, but he conducts fieldwork and in-depth interviews.