Comment by makeitdouble
3 years ago
> The vast majority of foreigners leave within 2 years and very few settle long term, that is not a phenomena I've seen so starkly in other places I've lived in Asia.
I'm looking at the OECD stats here: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=MIG
Looking at a before pandemic year (2018), that's 519 683 of migrants. Korea has 495 079, and that's basically on par with the UK and twice as much as France (provided France is twice as small in many metrics).
I don't give too much credit to the exact numbers, but Japan has a nonetheless a serious amount of foreigners, mostly from other Asian countries. They blend in much more than western foreigners so it's harder to tell from the look of it. To note there still is a culture shock and I had Chinese coworkers pretty heated up about many aspects, but they were pretty fast to understand how to make things work out.
I don't know your life, but if you traveled enough and got invited to work in a Japanese company, I'd assume you have a relatively high profile and the company inviting you wasn't some small scrappy business.
Big enough businesses are also traditionally slow and cumbersome, they have no incentive for speed and boldness, and if you touch any of the bigger companies making significant change just requires a ton of politics. I really believe that's basically the same everywhere. People might feel it's less static in Europe or USA because of more flashy colors, diversity and more buzz, but try looking at any company of the same size as Panasonic and look at what they're actually doing, and it's usually "not much more" (Think about Ford splitting out a separate EV division from the mother structure because nothing would happen otherwise)
On the people who stay long term, I think it's extremely difficult to judge depending on your position. In particular if you joined "expats" groups and made friends there, the probability a bunch of them leave after a while is usually higher.
I only sporadically met a few foreigners here and there, but 20 years later most of them have families and built a career. But they were not the type to spend their week-end in Roppongi bars either.
From [1], in 2019:
> Resident foreigners totaled 2.22 million -- an all-time high and 1.76% of the population
That doesn't compare to the UK at all, or France. There's also no point in pointing at the inflow without the outflow, as the article points out:
> The number of immigrants to Japan minus the number of people leaving the country came to 165,000, government data released Friday shows.
So, if those OECD figures you supplied are correct, the inflow was dwarfed by the outflow which again is nothing like the UK or France - as a proportion of population or as a total. I'm not surprised. As that great reference, Wikipedia writes[2] (also using OECD figures[3], and in a much better format for comparison):
> Japan receives a low number of immigrants compared to other G7 countries.[9] This is consistent with Gallup data, which shows that Japan is an exceptionally unpopular migrant destination to potential migrants, with the number of potential migrants wishing to migrate to Japan 12 times less than those who wished to migrate to the US and 3 times less than those who wished to migrate to Canada,[10] which roughly corresponds to the actual relative differences in migrant inflows between the three countries.[9] Some Japanese scholars have pointed out that Japanese immigration laws, at least toward high-skilled migrants, are relatively lenient compared to other developed countries, and that the main factor behind its low migrant inflows is because it is a highly unattractive migrant destination compared to other developed countries.[11] This is also apparent when looking at Japan's work visa programme for "specified skilled worker", which had less than 3,000 applicants, despite an annual goal of attracting 40,000 overseas workers.
“exceptionally unpopular migrant destination” eh? Again, colour me shocked.
From [4], just the title should be enough:
> Japan’s Labor Productivity Lowest in G7
but it would still be misleading because that sounds *better than the reality:
> Japan ranks twenty-first for labor productivity among the 36 nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
Japanese work culture fits the cliché very well and trying to deny it is a stretch of gigantic proportions. What some bloke you met managing to build a career in Japan has to do with Japanese work culture not being deadeningly slow and moribund, only you will know.
[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Japan-immigration/Japan-im...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Japan
[3] https://data.oecd.org/chart/5StJ You can click on the link at the top and compare even better by having it highlight the parts you car about.
[4] https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00619/japan%E2%80%99s-...