Paper short abstract:

This study examines how non-Japanese employees work as "social actors" in enterprises in Japan. The results indicated that the enterprises consider the non-Japanese employees as beneficial resources for overseas business development despite communication problems between employees.

Paper long abstract:

The Japanese government has presented guidelines to increase the employment rate of international students as highly-skilled professionals that promotes acceptance of more globally oriented human resources in Japan (Prime Minister's Office 2016). Revealing the reality of multilingualization and multiculturalization in the enterprises in Japan is required in order to establish an attractive symbiotic society in the worldwide competition for highly-skilled human resources.

Previous researches have shown the factors for non-Japanese employees' adjustment needed within an enterprise, however, the effect on the organization and the employees' mind of accepting them into dominant group have yet to be fully investigated.

This study examines how non-Japanese employees work as "social actors" (Byram 2008) in enterprises in Japan and how they develop their own career by utilizing the environment. Data was collected from a questionnaire surveys that were answered by a total of 412 enterprises in Japan and 115 non-Japanese employees working in Japanese enterprises.

The results of the study indicated that the enterprises consider the non-Japanese employees as beneficial resources which contribute to their overseas business development. The Japanese employees also recognize international employees' foreign vitality for activating multilingualization and multiculturalization within the workplace.

However, both Japanese employees and non-Japanese employees regard it as a vital issue that the difference in language and culture creates communication problems between them. Many companies do not yet have measures in order to solve the problems, so they tend to rely on ingenuity of individual site staff.

On the other hand, non-Japanese employees consider the communication between the other employees while establishing relationship as well as various training and courses promote their own career development.

As a result, this study suggests that intercultural communicative competence should be adopted in more meaningful way in current business Japanese education by identifying the communication problems and benefits.

References：

Prime Minister's Office (2016) Nihon saiko senryaku 2016 : Dai 4ji sangyokakumei ni mukete.　 https://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/singi/keizaisaisei/pdf/2016_zentaihombun.pdf

Byram, M. S. (2008). From foreign language education to education for intercultural citizenship. Multilingual Matters Ltd.

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