ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the characteristics and dynamics of the Japanese expatriate community in Singapore. The background to this analysis involves the expansion of Japanese enterprises into countries around the world in general, and into Asia in particular (Hatch and Yamamura, 1996). Kotkin (1993) estimated that there are over 600,000 Japanese expatriates around the world at any one time. Unlike tourists, these people reside in their ‘host’ countries for periods ranging between 2 and 5 years, and are overwhelmingly businessmen and their families. As a consequence of this trend, an overseas assignment is slowly becoming a mandatory step for advancement into senior posts in many Japanese companies. Partly as a reaction to this situation, recent decades have been marked by the publication of studies of families of executives who have returned to Japan and investigations of returnee schoolchildren (Kobayashi, 1978; White, 1988; Goodman, 1991). These studies further our understanding of the problems that people face upon coming back to Japan. However, as yet, apart from journalistic observations (Kotkin, 1993; Yanagihara, 1994) and some limited scholarly work (Inamura, 1982; Hamada, 1992; Befu and Stalker, 1996; Hurdley and White, 1999a,b; Sakai, 2000), relatively little has been published in English with regard to Japanese expatriate communities abroad. The present inquiry aims to fill this paucity through providing an ethnographically based delineation of the main features of the Japanese expatriate community in Singapore. Where possible, it makes use of previously published essays as well as cross-referring to the other chapters in this volume to place the analysis in a comparative perspective.
