2012 Volume 67 Issue 4 Pages 153-172
Since the 1990s, many Japanese women have emigrated from Japan for work. Usually, they obtain jobs in Japanese subsidiaries, and their status is similar to that of a local staff member and not that of a representative of the Japanese parent company. Singapore has a large population of Japanese women who have moved there of their own will. In this paper, we investigate the structure of the labor market for locally hired Japanese women in Singapore in the mid 2000s. In the analysis, we focus on the supply side (the Japanese female workers), the demand side (the Japanese subsidiaries), and the intermediary organizations (recruitment agencies in Singapore). Japanese women normally decide to emigrate in their late 20s. This decision is closely linked with the desire to live overseas and communicate in English. Half-outdated sociocultural norms, including gender discrimination, often serve as factors that trigger their decision to leave Japan. Singapore is a popular destination for these women because the country boasts a high standard of living and a low crime rate, and is relatively generous when issuing employment visas to Japanese women. Japanese companies promote both the globalization of their business and the localization of human resources, thereby limiting the number of representatives they send from Japan; the cost of relocating employees is very high. However, Japanese companies have to retain some of the Japanese staff because their typical clients are other Japanese companies or, in the case of personal service businesses, Japanese people. Even if the locals can communicate with customers in Japanese, they cannot fully understand the tacit premises and connotations of Japanese communication. Since hiring Japanese emigres costs companies much less than dispatching representatives, the demand for them is increasing. Recruitment agencies play an important role in bridging the supply-demand gap of Japanese labor at the international level. The rise of the Internet has made it easier for both job-seekers to seek employment overseas and recruitment agencies to build online databases of those seeking employment. Because of the drop in the number of representatives sent from Japan, Japanese companies in Singapore the incentive to outsource their employment and screening process of locally hired Japanese staffs, which increases the business of the recruitment agencies. Outsourcing the screening process works to the advantage of Japanese companies since recruitment agencies have the technical knowhow when it comes to matching the appropriate candidate to the job profile, which eventually lowers the probability of employee turnover.
