Japanese Migration to China

A few weeks ago I attended a fascinating talk at Waseda by Emer O’Dwyer, one of my 先輩 (seniors) also studying under Andrew Gordon at Harvard. She has been very helpful in giving me advice on the PhD program, and I was impressed by her recent talk. She presented her research on “Emigration, Settlement, and Economic Competition: Japanese and Chinese Experiences in Dairen, 1905-1927″. As her title suggests, she talked about both Japanese and Chinese moving into Dalian 大连 (Dairen is the Japanese pronunciation), a city on the Liaodong 辽东 peninsula in northern China, and she focused primarily on a period when there were significant changes in the demographics of the city as the Chinese population grew rapidly and Chinese businesses began to displace those of the Japanese.

The most important discovery I think Emer made was when she explored the Japanese reaction to the increasing dominance of the Chinese in the local market. I would have expected the usual anti-Chinese ethnic slurs and insults. Instead, she found in the many journals and other writings of the period a fascinating phenomenon: the Japanese were deeply impressed by the Chinese laborers and used the Chinese as a model to follow in correcting their own “lazy”,”decadent”, and “inefficient” ways. They even saw Chinese clothes as more simple and economical, while their own was “irrational” and “not modern” in comparison.

Some time after I heard Emer’s talk about emigration to Dalian, I saw an advertisement for the most recent issue of the Asahi weekly AERA (No. 32) which had its focus on 日本人「職の中国」へ大移動」 (Massive migration of Japanese to the “middle kingdom of work”). The main article focuses on Japanese labor migration to Dalian. A closer look at the numbers shows that the migration isn’t exactly “massive” but still has some very interesting features…

There are thousands of Japanese companies that are setting up shop in China. Just as with other foreign businesses, well-paid ex-pats often get cushy positions overseas at these companies. However, this article is not focusing on these better paid managers. Instead, it’s first article focuses primarily on the massive call centers (much like the famous call centers set up in places like India for US companies) that are to serve Japanese customers. However, many of these call centers are actually hiring hundreds, if not thousands of native Japanese laborers to work there.

Their salary? An average of around 20人民币 or 260円 (less than $2.50) per hour starting salary. These workers are getting paid much less than Japanese minimum wages to work in a “developing” country like China. Many of these laborers are women, and the articles tries to show that their motives and backgrounds are quite diverse. Some are looking for adventure, others want to learn Chinese, and others are leaving failed careers in Japan. Most of them, however, seem to be able to get by on this lower income due to the much lower costs of living in China. I actually have a good Japanese friend of mine from my days at Western who now works at a tech support call center for HP in Beijing, serving Japanese customers. After graduating from the excellent Tsuda women’s university, she left a short stint at Japan’s NTT, which unceremoniously dumped her in a “women’s track” job.

I have also spent 9 months working at an internet tech support call center at Norway’s equivalent of NTT, Telenor Online. It was a wonderful period, during which I acquired many great technical skills, made life-long friends, and realized that my home town of Stavanger apparently has no need for an Asian languages and history geek. What impresses me about my friend, and these Japanese, however, is that whereas my time in Norway was relatively well paid in extremely good working conditions, they are leaving Japan for the low-paid jobs in Dalian. That takes guts, and a strong desire to learn Chinese or integrate into a Chinese environment and work under what often turns out to be Chinese managers.

This migration seems to be heavily gendered. While the article mentions men occasionally, all of the pictures in both that article and another in the issue focusing on jobs in Shanghai are of Japanese women. It reminds me of the argument in the fascinating book Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams by Karen Kelsky which discusses the attempts by Japanese women to work at the edges (or off the edges) of their society, often taking jobs with foreign companies or in other “verge” or international jobs like translation, teaching, etc. (there is also a very controversial and interesting argument in the book about the sexual mirror of this “verge” argument and the stereotypes, misunderstandings, and other issues going in both directions in what she describes as a “sexual alliance” between Japanese women and Western men—a warning: Kelsky does not pull any punches in her argument’s portrayal of Japanese males, females, or of course, the Western males). This article, however, shows that it is not just “Western dreams” at work, it can also apparently be “Eastern dreams” that help Japanese women negotiate themselves on the “verge” and seek escape from the kind of life one woman describes in the article on Dalian「このまま日本にいたら、人生、先が見えてしまう気がした。」(“If I stayed in Japan and continued what I was doing, I felt like I could how my whole life would turn out.”)