Paper short abstract:

Based on data from fieldwork, this paper will examine how Chinese culture is 'migrated' into business management of some Chinese enterprises in central Japan. "Chinese enterprises" here refers to those which are founded and owned by Chinese.

Paper long abstract:

The Japanese language uses the English terms "oldcomers" and "newcomers" to designate, respectively, immigrants who arrived before 1945 and those who have arrived since the second half of the 1970s. The oldcomers are, in the main, Koreans, but also include a small number of Chinese people, mostly from Taiwan. This paper is concerned only with the newcomers, originating mostly from mainland China. By "transnational Chinese entrepreneurs" I mean those people at the head of enterprises who connect the Chinese and Japanese societies and form, through their professional activities, a transnational social field—which, in this particular case, is a regional social field given the close proximity of the two countries.

This paper will probe into the following three questions: how is Chinese culture migrated in the process from a "newcomer" to a "transnational entrepreneur"? What are the cultural conflict and adaptation? What does migration of culture really mean in the business management for those transnational entrepreneurs? The paper will especially focus on how cross-cultural conflict often occurs between Chinese bosses and Japanese employees as the result of imposing one's own cultural meanings onto another and make an examination on the process of their cultural adaptation.