Abstract
Offshore development should be an attractive prospect for Japanese companies, however, Japanese offshore company development is often associated with risk and frustration. Therefore, in recent years, more and more Japanese companies have been reluctant to undertake offshore development. One major reason for this negative outcome is that Japanese project staff were not sufficiently trained to the appropriate human resource level. In the first section, I clarify keywords: "culture", "intercultural contacts", "culture shock", and "competency". I next evaluate interactions between Chinese contacts and Japanese management staffs in IT offshore development. The study shows that Chinese bridge-system engineers working as project coordinators received high-level training for offshore projects and polished their linguistic competence, technological level, and cultural understanding, etc. In contrast, Japanese system engineers coordinating offshore projects were not adequately trained for the intercultural communication. In order to further promote trade between China and Japan, this issue should be resolved. The aim of this paper is to clarify the key points in human resources that are needed to improve intercultural training for emerging IT companies.
