Masterpiece, another Japanese outsourcer, has operations in Bangkok as well as in Beijing and Dalian in China. Its workers handle jobs like mail-order service requests, processing of time sheets and other salary paperwork and following up on e-mail inquiries. The company has Japanese and Chinese employees, and, according to its Web site, is hiring people to establish another call center in the Philippines.
“Overcapacity and excessive competition haunt domestic Japanese industries that are battling for a shrinking economic pie,” said Takumi Fujinami, senior economist at the Japan Research Institute, a research organization affiliated with Sumitomo Mitsui Bank. “That exerts perennial pressures to reduce costs. Japanese companies can’t cut off existing employees on the lifetime roster, so they are squeezing the younger workers ever more tightly.”
SENSE OF FREEDOM
Some overseas Japanese workers, like Natori, are content with their jobs despite the low salaries. They say their lives abroad have given them a new sense of liberty.
Natori, who was recently promoted from call operator to a supervisory position, said she saved more money in Thailand than she would in Japan.
“If you are willing to live off local Thai restaurants, you spend only 30 baht for rice with eggs, vegetables and meat,” she said. “My rent currently is only 6,000 baht, and utilities are at most an additional 500.”
She lives in a roomy studio in a condominium in central Bangkok with security and a swimming pool that is open 24 hours. Life is better in Thailand, she said, because she is free from some of the social and workplace pressures that ate into her private life in Japan.
“The moment you step outside, you are in a foreign country here,” she said. “That allows me to have separate workplace and private lives. I am actually able to concentrate on work better because of the clear separation.”
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