In many ways, Yogendra Puranik is an immigrant success story.
Mr Puranik, 45, joined the first wave of Indian tech workers to head to Japan in the early 2000s. He became a Japanese citizen and won elected office in Tokyo in 2019, a first for anyone from India. This year he was hired as principal of a public school.
But as Japanese companies scramble to lure more highly skilled Indians like Mr Puranik to fill a gaping shortage of IT engineers, he is under no illusions about the challenges Japan, and those it attracts, will face .
Recruiters are calling it a critical test of Japan’s ability to compete with the United States and Europe for increasingly sought-after global talent. But lower wages and steep language and cultural barriers make Japan less attractive to many. Rigid business structures can frustrate new entrants. And Japan, which has long been ambivalent about the presence of foreigners, lacks an established system for integrating them into Japanese life.
“These foreigners are coming and there is no communication between the Japanese and foreigners,” Puranik said at his home in an Indian neighborhood in eastern Tokyo. “There is no inclusiveness.”
As it ages rapidly, Japan desperately needs more workers to fuel the world’s third-largest economy and close gaps in everything from agriculture and factory work to elder care and nursing. In line with this reality, the country has eased strict immigration restrictions in hopes of attracting hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, notably through a groundbreaking expansion of work visa rules approved in 2018.
The need for international talent is perhaps nowhere greater than in the technology sector, where the government estimates the labor shortage will reach nearly 800,000 in the coming years as the country pursues a long overdue national digitization effort.
Pushing work, education and many other aspects of daily life to online platforms, the pandemic has exacerbated the technological shortcomings of a country that was once seen as a leader in high-tech.
Japanese companies, especially smaller ones, are struggling to leave physical paperwork behind and use digital tools. Government reports and independent analysis show that Japanese companies’ adoption of cloud technologies is nearly a decade behind that in the United States.
India produces a huge pool of 1.5 million engineering graduates every year that could help Japan catch up digitally. When Indian workers answer the call, many speak with admiration of the cleanliness and safety of Japanese cities, saying their salary allows them to live comfortably, if not lavishly. Those who have studied Japanese language and culture can be lavish in their praise.
“The way it happens to anyone who comes to Japan, you fall in love,” says Shailesh Date, 50, who first went to the country in 1996 and is now head of technology for American financial services company Franklin Templeton Japan in Tokyo. “It’s the most beautiful country to live in.”
Yet the Indian newcomers mainly admire Japan from across a dividing line. Many of Japan’s 36,000 Indians are concentrated in the Edogawa section of eastern Tokyo, where they have their own vegetarian restaurants, places of worship and specialty shops. The area has two major Indian schools where children study English and follow Indian curricular standards.
Nirmal Jain, an Indian school teacher, said she founded the Indian International School in Japan in 2004 for children who would not thrive in Japan’s universal education system. The school now has 1,400 students on two campuses and is building a new, larger facility in Tokyo.
Ms. Jain said that separate schools were appropriate in a place like Japan where people tend to keep their distance from outsiders.
“I mean, they’re nice people, everything is perfect, but when it comes to personal relationships, it’s just not there,” she said.
Mr Puranik said compatriots often called him for help in emergencies or conflicts – the wandering father with dementia who ends up in police custody, the daughter who was accidentally stopped by border agents at the airport. He even once received a call from a worker who wanted to sue his Japanese boss for kicking him.
His own son, he said, was bullied at a Japanese school — by the teacher. Mr Puranik said he had spoken to the teacher repeatedly, to no avail. “She would always try to make him a criminal,” he said, adding that some teachers “feel challenged if the child does something different.”
A similar dynamic can sometimes be found in the workplace.
Many Indian tech workers in Japan say they face rock-solid corporate hierarchies and resistance to change, a paradox in an industry that thrives on innovation and risk-taking.
“They want things in a certain order; they want case studies and past experiences,” Mr. Puranik said of some Japanese executives. “IT doesn’t work that way. There is no past experience. We have to reinvent ourselves every day.”
The majority of Indian IT workers arrive in Japan without much knowledge of the language or culture, said Megha Wadhwa, a migration researcher and Japanese and South Asian studies expert at the Free University of Berlin and author of the 2021 book “Indian Migrants in Tokyo. ”
That can hinder their careers while their colleagues progress in their home country or in the United States or Europe. They soon begin to explore their options and often move elsewhere. In the United States, average tech salaries are more than double those in Japan by some estimates.
“After the rose-colored glasses are taken off, they know the real situation and feel quiet in Japan,” says Dr. Wadhwa, who has lived and worked in Japan for about 15 years.
Yet, in recent years, Japanese companies have taken decisive steps to tap into the pool of Indian engineering graduates, either by bringing them to Japan or by employing them in India.
Japanese companies such as Rakuten and Mercari, both e-commerce companies, have established themselves in India. The Japanese government has funneled aid to India to support the expansion of technology education.
Kotaro Kataoka, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, acts as a matchmaker between Indian students and technology companies. He said Japanese recruiters in India had gotten off to a slow start by focusing instead on East Asian countries such as Vietnam and China, which are considered more culturally similar to Japan.
But Indian recruits, he said, provide the independent, out-of-the-box thinking Japanese companies need to jump-start their innovation efforts. “They do what they want, but sometimes that random and uncontrolled aspect of Indian talent works well,” said Professor Kataoka.
Many Japanese argue that it is a tall order for a country with historically low immigration levels to match the flexibility and diversity of countries in North America or Western Europe.
Major US tech companies have been recruiting aggressively in India, offering immigrant-friendly work environments, escalating compensation packages and unprecedented career opportunities. Google, Twitter, Microsoft and Adobe have all had Indian-born chief executives.
Yet there are efforts to bridge the gaps in Edogawa. Mr. Puranik runs an Indian cultural center in his home where Japanese students take yoga classes and Indian and Japanese students come together for percussion lessons on the Indian tabla from a Japanese teacher. Mr. Puranik often receives Japanese students for lectures on Indian culture or immigration.
Japanese officials also provide venues and assistance for Indian cultural festivals attended by the wider community. Mr. Puranik said such symbolic gestures were nice, but it was more important to provide extensive Japanese language training and cultural instruction.
“There needs to be more interaction,” he said. “Summer festival and Diwali festival, yes, you can have that once in a year, that’s a nice bonus. But you cannot say that bonus is your salary.”
At the same time, many Indians in Edogawa say newcomers could do more to fit into Japanese life.
mr. Date, the head of technology at Franklin Templeton, said he and a few friends want to counter Indians’ growing reputation for being noisy — a pet peeve in a busy city of thin-walled apartments — and a widespread belief that they are unwilling to adapt to Japanese customs .
So their running group, the Desi Runners of Tokyo, decided to have members donate 10 yen for every kilometer they run. Last year, they donated 400,000 yen, about $3,000, to a charity in Edogawa, he said.
“We all agreed: we live here, we make money,” said Mr. date. “Maybe it’s time to give back to Japan.”
