Ronan Sato, a graduate student in
applied statistics at Oxford University in England, has always been
keen to work in his native Japan. But at a careers fair for overseas
Japanese students, he found that corporate Japan did not reciprocate his
enthusiasm.
In meetings with a handful of
Japanese financial trading firms at the forum in Boston last November,
none would offer him a job without further interviews in Tokyo.
So Sato, who received three
offers on the spot from non-Japanese corporations, accepted a position
in Tokyo with a big British bank.
“I really wanted to gain
experience at a Japanese company, but they seemed cautious,” Sato said.
“Do Japanese companies really want global talent? It seemed to me like
they’re not really serious.”
Notoriously insular, corporate
Japan has long been wary of embracing Western-educated compatriots who
return to the homeland. But critics say the reluctance to tap the
international experience of these young people is a growing problem for
Japan as some of its major industries — like banking, consumer
electronics and automobiles — lose ground in an increasingly global
economy.
Discouraged by their career
prospects if they study abroad, even at elite universities, a shrinking
portion of Japanese college students is seeking a Western education. At
the same time, regional rivals like China, South Korea and India are
sending increasing numbers of students overseas — many of whom, upon
graduation, are snapped up by companies back home for their skills,
contacts and global outlooks.
“Japanese companies here are
missing out on the best foreign talent, and it’s all their fault,” said
Toshihiko Irisumi, a graduate of the University of Chicago Booth School
of Business and former Goldman Sachs banker. He runs Alpha Leaders, a
Tokyo-based consulting firm that helps match top young talent with
employers based in Japan. “They really need to change their mindset.”
A United States-born graduate of
Brown University who has a dual citizenship in Japan, one of about a
dozen foreign-educated Japanese nationals interviewed for this article,
said she was told she “laughed too much” in interviews for a technology
job in Tokyo.
Others with Western educations
recall being treated with suspicion by Japanese recruiters, who referred
to them openly as “over spec” — too elite to fit in, too eager to get
ahead and too likely to be poached or to switch employers before long.
What is more, Japanese students
who study overseas often find that by the time they enter the job hunt
back home, they are far behind compatriots who have already contacted as
many as 100 companies and received help from extensive alumni networks.
And those who spend too long overseas find they are shut out by rigid
age preferences for graduates no older than their mid-20s.
In a survey of 1,000 Japanese
companies taken last June on their recruitment plans for the March 2012
fiscal year by the Tokyo-based recruitment company Disco, fewer than a
quarter said they planned to hire Japanese applicants who had studied
abroad. Even among top companies with more than a thousand employees,
less than 40 percent said they wanted to hire Japanese with overseas
education. That attitude might help explain why, even as the number of
Japanese enrolled in college has held steady at around 3 million in
recent years, the number studying abroad has declined from a peak of
nearly 83,000 in 2004 to fewer than 60,000 in 2009 — the most recent
year for which the figures are available from the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development.
In some ways, the Japanese
snubbing of Western graduates is a testament to the perceived strength
of their own universities, seen by many here as more prestigious than
even the best U.S. and European schools — despite their mediocre showing
in various global college rankings.
At U.S. universities, only
21,290 Japanese students were registered last year, less than half the
number a decade ago. U.S. universities last year had 73,350 students
from South Korea, even though it has less than half of Japan’s
population,
“There is an awareness that
Japan’s competitiveness is falling, and we need a more global
workforce,” said Kazunori Masugo, head of the Senri International School
in western Japan and a member of a central government committee on
education and training. Lessons at Senri are taught mostly in English
and the school sends a handful of students to colleges in the United
States and Europe each year.
“But the environment in Japan is
such that if you go overseas to study, you have to be prepared to go
your own route, find your own way,” he said.
Ryutaro Sakamoto, who paid his
way through the University of Toronto and returned to Japan at age 30
with a business degree, found he was too old to apply through standard
recruitment programs. He sent resumes to the likes of Panasonic and
Sony, anyway, but never heard back. Eventually, the Japanese unit of the
U.S. insurance company Prudential was happy to put his bilingual skills
to use.
“In Japan, taking the time to study overseas sets you back in the shukatsu race,” Sakamoto said.
“Shukatsu” refers to the system
in which Japanese companies typically hire the bulk of their workers
straight from college and expect them to stay until retirement. Not
getting a job upon graduation is seen as a potential career killer.
So competition is fierce. In the
last three years, the percentage of new graduates in Japan who found
work was the lowest since the government started collecting comparable
data in 1996. As of Feb. 1, with two months left in the recruiting
season, a fifth of students in their final year at college had yet to
find jobs.
“Shukatsu is like Kabuki
theater,” said Takayuki Matsumoto, an Osaka-based career consultant.
“It’s difficult when you don’t fit the template.”
His advice to returnees: Don’t be too assertive or ask too many questions.
Kenta Koga, one of only a
handful of Japanese undergraduates to enter Yale in 2010, violated many
of the unwritten rules when he came back last summer for an internship
at a big Japanese advertising agency in Tokyo. As he made client rounds
with his boss, who was advising on the latest trends in technology or
social media, Koga, a computer science major, felt the urge to speak up.
“Some of what they were
discussing was old or plain wrong,” he said. But he was careful to steep
his language in the appropriate honorifics reserved for elders. “I’m
terribly sorry to interrupt,” he said he would murmur. “My deepest
apologies if you already knew this.”
Still, his supervisors were
annoyed. “You are being too scary and preventing other people from
speaking,” one boss said, according to Koga. On another occasion, he
said, he was censured for crossing his arms in front of senior
colleagues. He was eventually excluded from meetings and assigned
seemingly dead-end tasks. He now says he would never work for a Japanese
company.
Some Japanese companies have
made a point of reaching out to returnees. U-Shin, an auto parts maker,
attracted attention in February when it placed a prominent ad in Japan’s
largest business daily offering twice the normal starting pay to
candidates with overseas degrees.
“We plan to expand aggressively
overseas, so we need recruits who were themselves bold enough to go
overseas,” said Koji Tanabe, U-Shin’s chief executive.
But U-Shin seems the rare
exception. The Japanese financial giant Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi more
closely fits the norm. Each year, it hires about 1,200 fresh graduates.
Usually, fewer than 20 have studied overseas or are non-Japanese, said
Keiichi Hotta, a recruiter for the bank.
Hotta said careers were built
differently in the West. “We’re cautious because we emphasize continuity
and long-term commitment to the company,” Hotta said. “Especially in
finance, we don’t want people who are focused on short-term gains.”
No wonder some returnees play
down their exposure to Western ways. Norihiro Yonezawa, who studied for a
year at the University of Maryland, said he did not emphasize his
overseas experience or English skills when he interviewed — successfully
— for a coveted job at Panasonic.
“I didn’t want to come across as
a showoff. So I stressed how I worked hard and overcame that,” he said.
“And I made sure to emphasize that I would still fit in.”
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