In October 2008, at the height of the financial crisis when job markets were freezing up globally, Akane Natori easily found a position she liked.
“Things went so smoothly after applying online, and before I knew it, I had the job,” said Ms Natori, who was then a 26-year-old sales assistant at an import-export company in Tokyo.
There was just one catch: Ms Natori's new job — working in a call centre answering queries from customers in Japan — was in Bangkok. The trend is one that speaks volumes about the Japanese economy and the challenges younger Japanese face in a country where college graduates used to count on lifetime employment with the company they joined.
Under fierce pressure to cut costs, large Japanese companies are increasingly outsourcing and sending white-collar operations to China and Southeast Asia, where doing business costs less than in Japan.
But while many American companies have been content to transfer work to, say, an Indian outsourcing company staffed with English-speaking Indians, Japanese companies are taking a different tack. Japanese outsourcing firms are hiring Japanese workers to do the jobs overseas — and paying them considerably less than if they were working in Japan.
Companies like Transcosmos and Masterpiece have set up call centres, data-entry offices and technical support operations staffed by Japanese workers in cities like Bangkok, Beijing, Hong Kong and Taipei, Taiwan.
Transcosmos pays a call centre operator in Thailand a starting salary of about 30,000 baht a month, or $930 — less than half of the 220,000 yen, or $2,500, the same employee would get in Tokyo. That means a saving of 30 per cent to 40 per cent for customers, Transcosmos said.
Such outposts cater to Japanese employers who say they cannot do without Japanese workers for reasons of language and culture. Even foreign citizens with a good command of the Japanese language, they say, may not be equipped with a nuanced understanding of the manners and politesse that Japanese customers often demand.
Culture factor
“If you used Japanese-speaking Chinese, for example, the service quality does not match up with the expectations of the end customers,” said Tatsuhito Muramatsu, managing director at Natori's employer, Transcosmos Thailand, a unit of Transcosmos, which is based in Tokyo.
Statistics on exactly how many Japanese have taken jobs outside the country at lower wages are hard to come by, but the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said that there was a net outflow of 100,000 Japanese in the year that ended in September 2008, the most recent for which statistics were available. It was the highest number in the last 20 years.
The number of “independent businesspeople” and freelance contractors like Natori rose 5.69 per cent in that period, according to data from the Japanese Foreign Ministry.
Many large Asian cities — including Bangkok, Hong Kong, New Delhi, Shanghai, Singapore and Jakarta in Indonesia — have three to four Japanese job placement agencies each. Four Japanese outsourcing companies run call centres in Bangkok, which is a particularly attractive city for such operations because it has low costs but good amenities, offering a living standard that young Japanese enjoy.
Transcosmos runs the largest Japanese call centre in Bangkok, having nearly tripled its staff to 170, from 60 workers in late 2008. “We see ourselves growing to as large as 500 workers here,” Mr. Muramatsu said.
Masterpiece, another Japanese outsourcer, has operations in Bangkok as well as in Beijing and Dalian in China. Its workers handle jobs like mail-order service requests, processing of time sheets and other salary paperwork and following up on e-mail inquiries. The company has Japanese and Chinese employees, and, according to its website, is hiring people to establish another call centre in the Philippines.
Pressure to reduce costs
“Overcapacity and excessive competition haunt domestic Japanese industries that are battling for a shrinking economic pie,” said Takumi Fujinami, senior economist at the Japan Research Institute, a research organisation affiliated with Sumitomo Mitsui Bank. “That exerts perennial pressures to reduce costs. Japanese companies can't cut off existing employees on the lifetime roster, so they are squeezing the younger workers ever more tightly.”
Some overseas Japanese workers, like Ms Natori, are content with their jobs despite the low salaries. They say their lives abroad have given them a new sense of liberty.
Ms Natori, who was recently promoted from call operator to a supervisory position, said she saved more money in Thailand than she would in Japan.
“If you are willing to live off local Thai restaurants, you spend only 30 baht for rice with eggs, vegetables and meat,” she said. “My rent currently is only 6,000 baht, and utilities are at most an additional 500.”
She lives in a roomy studio in a condominium in central Bangkok with security and a swimming pool that is open 24 hours. Life is better in Thailand, she said, because she is free from some of the social and workplace pressures that ate into her private life in Japan. “The moment you step outside, you are in a foreign country here,” she said. “That allows me to have separate workplace and private lives. I am actually able to concentrate on work better because of the clear separation.”
Misuzu Yara (34) realised in early 2008 that job opportunities in Japan, especially in her native Okinawa, were diminishing. So when an acquaintance at Tempstaff invited her to join the new division in Jakarta as a local hire, she agreed.
“The salary as a local hire in Indonesia wasn't very different from what you'd get in Okinawa, actually,” she said. “Considering how important Asia is going to be for Japan, I figured it would be a good opportunity.”
Now, she helps find jobs for Japanese workers in Indonesia. Japanese companies in Indonesia generally offer Japanese local hires minimum take-home pay of $1,500 a month, plus a vehicle and sometimes housing.
“The number of inquiries grew markedly during 2008-9 from young Japanese workers who had difficulty finding jobs in Japan,” she said. — New York Times News Service
