Japanese People in Hong Kong - Attitude Towards Integration

Attitude Towards Integration

Japanese communities abroad have been described as "Japanese villages abroad ... whose residents make maintenance of cultural, economic, and political ties with Tokyo their foremost concern"; however, Wong's 2001 study of Yaohan employees refuted this notion in the case of businesswomen working in Hong Kong. Though the majority of Japanese coming to Hong Kong continued to be businessmen and their families, during the 1990s, there was a "boom" of single Japanese women emigrating to escape the male-oriented environment of Japanese domestic workplaces; unlike previous migration, which had often been targeted towards Anglophone countries, many of these women went to Hong Kong and other Asian cities in an effort to further their careers. Notably, in one survey, a third of the single or divorced women coming to Hong Kong during this period reported previous study abroad experience. Not only were single women more willing to emigrate, but Japanese companies in Hong Kong proved more willing to hire and promote women than those in Japan, partially due to the costs of employing male staff, which typically included allowances for children's education and other such expatriate benefits.

Within Japanese-managed companies, local Chinese employees sensed a definite power differential between Japanese managers and local managers of the same rank. Though many Japanese women came to Hong Kong intending to learn to speak Chinese (either Cantonese or Mandarin), upon arrival they found that communicating in English was not only sufficient for everyday life, but placed them in a privileged position vis-a-vis the local population.