February 3, 2020

While Singapore sees several career events each year, the sixth iteration of the ‘ASEAN Career Fair with Japan’ particularly stood out. Held on 3 February 2018, nearly all participating companies were Japanese, with most companies looking to hire employees for their home operations in Japan. What explains this drive by Japanese companies to hire foreign university graduates for employment in Japan, and how can we approach this phenomenon theoretically?

This is the premise of ‘Japanese Multinational Companies and the Control of Overseas Investments – The Role of Expatriates, Young Foreign Employees and Japan’s Soft Power’, by Associate Professor Hendrik Meyer-Ohle from the NUS Department of Japanese Studies and Dr Harald Conrad from the University of Sheffield. The authors posit that despite having built significant economic presence in other Asian countries, Japanese companies have not managed to project an image as attractive employers of white-collar managerial workers. Rather, the development of a ready pool of applicants for recruitment in Japan is related to the expansion of Japan’s cultural capital. To this end, a major aim of hiring of foreign young graduates is to internationalize Japanese headquarters from within, and to facilitate the investments of Japanese companies abroad in the long term. Such an internationalization, if successful, might eventually lead to the long-demanded localization of human resources in Japanese overseas subsidiaries.

In this way, A/P Meyer-Ohle and Dr Conrad show how linking human and capital flows can enhance current understandings of migration flows, as human flows into Japan are affected by the the aims of Japanese corporations to increase and control overseas investments. It would be interesting to explore whether the discussed links can be quantified, or which interdependencies might exist between such links.

Read the article here.