Roger Pulvers makes some valid points in his July 22 article, "Outsiders or not, that is the question," but misses the main one, which is that foreigners are excluded from the core workforce. In 10 years of living in Japan, I never met a gaijin salaryman. All the long-term employed Caucasians I knew worked either in the language/culture field (teaching, translation, media, etc.) or for foreign firms -- in other words, at the margins. None were full-timers at mainstream Japanese manufacturing or service companies, and even those at Japanese media companies were kept off the promotion ladder.
The blame for this situation is shared. For every Japanese who hates the idea of working with or, God forbid, under a foreigner, there is a gaijin who refuses to stay in the office until 9 or 10 each night. (Among all the Caucasians I knew who said they loved living in Japan, I never met a single one prepared to put in Japanese-salaryman hours.) Either way, the end result is indeed nonacceptance in its most basic form. Most long-term Westerners can get jobs in Japan only because their mother tongue happens to be English.
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