Japanese Schooling and Identity Investment Overseas by Toh Glenn;

Author:Toh, Glenn; [Glenn Toh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Japanese managers and executives in Singapore and the question of internationalization

With regard to work performance, Japanese companies are generally said to have high expectations of their business executives sent on overseas postings, such expectations extending beyond their corporate lifestyles into aspects of the conduct of their personal activities (Ben-Ari, 2006; Thang et al., 2006).

[A]n employee stationed abroad … must subordinate his whole life during this period of his career. This happens in terms of family life (a woman must give up her career in order to become a supportive wife), and in terms of a general willingness to work long hours and accept an indistinct boundary between work and leisure.

(Ben-Ari, 2006, p. 222)

As expatriate managers are also expected to act as cultural mediators between Japanese management and local Singaporean employees and clients, there is often a fear in some Japanese companies that expatriate managers in such a role may become too well-adapted to local culture (turn native), and in the rather unnoticeable process of which, lose some portion of their innate Japaneseness. On account of this fear, there can be ‘a very strong and widespread conception among … expatriates that they must maintain the appearance – the demeanor, language and attire – of Japanese’ (Ben-Ari, 2006, p. 229), the point of deep concern being that ‘international business is perceived to pose certain threats to one’s “Japaneseness”’ (p. 230). As a further precaution to this feared loss of Japaneseness, it is not unknown for companies to summon their executives home to Japan for periods of rehabilitation or re-education on the pretext of updating them with the latest developments at home, the assumption for such a practice being that Japan is a ‘unique [and] somehow clean society that must be protected from external influences’ (p. 230). Ben-Ari argues that one outcome of such a cloistered ethos is that Japanese managers tend, for example, to wine, dine and play golf among a closed group of the same types of people. Realistic opportunity for Japanese expatriates working within such an ethos to be truly internationalized to some (or any) degree is fairly limited. This is not least because ‘Japanese individuals in Singapore live in a world populated by other Japanese’ (p. 235), while the purported ‘wishes of many managers for outside contacts – with locals and other expatriates – stand in tension with their actual behavior’ (p. 236). This latter tension may be seen here in the revealing intimations of a Japanese senior manager:

[Y]ou have this word ‘physical constitution,’ this kind of food is suitable for us (sic). Our body does not accept oily food like the Chinese food (sic). I also think that the Japanese food is very good because it does not have added elements of oil or chili sauce.… [W]hen you eat Japanese food you can taste the flavor of the food itself. When I go abroad and I find this kind of [Japanese] food … I eat it. Here in Singapore, you never know how they prepare the food and what kind of oil or other additives they put in it.

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