As a result of Japan’s post-war decades of economic growth, domestic companies were able to provide permanent employment to their core employees. Cheaper and dispensable labour – mostly women – filled contractual positions as administrative staff and clerks. This created a segmented labour market with a primary labour market of fairly secure employment and a secondary labour market with flexible jobs lacking career development and promotion opportunities. The characteristics of the primary labour market, which is the target of highly educated migrants and thus the focus of this chapter, are lifetime employment, on-the-job training, seniority-based pay and promotion, corporate unions, in-house careers and, as a consequence, limited inter-organisational mobility (Rebick, 2005; Waldenberger, 2016). As I demonstrate in this chapter, this distinctive employment system has peculiar effects on the career trajectories and labour market positioning of the highly educated early career foreign work force in the Tokyo of the 2010s.

In Japan’s primary labour market, socialisation in the company transformed the recent university graduate and prototypical white-collar worker-tobecome, the salary man, into a shakaijin, literally ‘society person’ (Dasgupta, 2003). This process started with the recruitment system, the so-called ‘job hunting’ (shūkatsu). This is the intensive period of job search activities, which usually begins over a year, or lately even earlier, before university students’ graduation. On 1 April of each year, new employees enter the companies and complete a series of in-house or boot camp training sessions before they are assigned to a team (Kosugi, 2007).

The idea of this company-based internal labour market (Doeringer and Piore, 1971) was to train generalists with utmost loyalty to the company. In order to assure high quality, firms tied their core employees to the company by lifelong employment, the seniority principle, which promises salary raise by length of employment and age, and financing schemes for loans. This system valorises general rather than specialised skills and length of stay in the firm. It thwarts job transfer and the possibilities of individual or non-linear career paths (Honda, 2019).