Japan's reluctance to hire foreign national employees

I saw an article this evening as I was scrolling Twitter from the Japan Times, with the headline "45% of Japan firms interested in hiring foreign nationals: survey".

Initially I thought to myself – oh, that's encouraging to hear! – but then I stopped myself and thought well, what about the other 55% of firms here?

Pic Credit: Kate.Sade/Unsplash

The article specifically provides data from the survey results, with 45.5% of responding companies saying they are interested in employing foreign nationals, and 35% saying they are not. I assume the rest were undecided.

It was interesting examining the perspectives for and against the hiring of foreign nationals, too. The article had 68.1% of the side for hiring foreign employees driven by the goal of securing talented employees. Other points were needing foreign language skills (46.2%) or fulfilling labor shortages (42.9%). 30% also mentioned wanting to build on overseas connections as a reason for wanting a multinational workforce.

As for the side who didn’t want to employ foreign nationals, the reasons given were having no system to accept foreign national workers (33%), never having hired foreign nationals before (29.4%), and having enough employees already (27.5%).

I’m not going to lie – the reasons against hiring foreign nationals sound like a giant cop out. It fits with the narrative I often see and hear, that you’ll never be truly Japanese unless you’re of Japanese blood, no matter how long you’ve lived here, what your citizenship status is, or how good your grasp of the language is. It saddens me.

Part of why it saddens me is that I think Japanese society – and Japanese workplaces – lose out due to a lack of diversity. There have been numerous studies conducted over time about the benefits of a diverse workplace, with factors such as broadened perspectives, better decision making, and increased creativity just a few of the positives. With Japan’s aging population, the simple fact of the matter is that eventually, whether some people here like it or not, there is going to be a reliance on foreign employees, particularly in fields such as aged care. 

You may have read earlier this year about the Yoshinoya scandal where the company refused to allow a university student to attend a recruitment event because they incorrectly assumed they were a foreign national. The individual in question was, in fact, a Japanese citizen – but I'm assuming they had a name that wasn't of Japanese origin.

This is only one example that gained a significant amount of media coverage, but I'm sure there are thousands more where that one came from that haven't been thrust into the spotlight.

I do hope that over time we'll see a shift to this paradigm. Instead of fear preventing the integration of foreign nationals into workplaces, I hope it will be embraced as something that brings diversity, encourages broader perspectives, and promotes fresh ways of doing things.