Why Japan’s job market is attracting more Chinese university graduates

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in China, Jessica Zhang chose to look for work in Japan.

She is now studying Japanese at a language school in Kyoto on a student visa while working as a supermarket cashier. She plans to improve her Japanese to an upper-intermediate level, which many employers expect, before applying for a full-time job and switching to a work visa.

“I’m working by the hour now, and the pay is quite good by Chinese standards, though prices for daily necessities in Japan have soared over the past two years, so my family has to help me out a little,” she said. “But in the long run, at least I can support myself here. In China, I’d have no way out at all.”

With the tough job market in China leaving many people struggling to find decent work amid severe competition, super-aged Japan, an East Asian neighbour, is hungry for young workers and is attracting growing numbers of Chinese university graduates like Zhang.

According to official statistics from the two countries, around one in three people in Japan is aged 65 or older, roughly double the rate in China.

Unlike the less-educated Chinese who went to Japan decades ago to earn more than they could at home, many of the current wave are graduates from second- and third-tier Chinese universities who failed to find work in an increasingly competitive domestic job market. Their plight prompted them to turn their sights to Japan, which is relatively friendlier to young jobseekers.

Though diplomatic tensions have persisted since controversial remarks by Japan’s prime minister a year ago sparked a sharp drop in the number of Chinese tourists travelling to Japan, jobseekers and employment agents say the political environment is a secondary factor for young Chinese seeking long-term employment.

For Zhang and her family, Japan’s biggest attraction is its exceptionally high graduate employment rate, which was 98 per cent in April – the second-highest ever – according to government data released in May.

Japan also has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the developed world for people aged between 15 and 24 – just 3.5 per cent in September, unchanged from August. And that includes unemployed students who are actively looking for work.

In contrast, the unemployment rate among people aged 16 to 24 in China, excluding students, was 18 per cent in September.

China and Japan also represent the two extremes in a recent global labour demand analysis by consulting firm Bain & Co. While job postings fell in most of the 10 major markets tracked in the third quarter, China recorded the steepest year-on-year decline at 33 per cent, while Japan led the pack with 13 per cent growth, it said on Wednesday.

While Chinese employers scale back hiring amid a slowing economy, a record 12.7 million university graduates entered the Chinese job market this year, and the number is expected to exceed 13 million next year.

“Another reason I chose here is that there’s no IELTS requirement, which turned out to be quite hard for me,” Zhang said, referring to an English language test for international students. “I’ve also loved Japanese cartoons since I was little, so it’s a nice place for me to stay.”

Despite the diplomatic tensions, Chinese remained Japan’s biggest group of immigrants in June, totalling over 941,000 people, up 1.1 per cent from the end of last year, according to Japan’s Immigration Services Agency.

A Shanghai-based lawyer who spent many years studying and living in Japan said that, at the grass-roots level, many young Chinese were fans of Japanese culture, which added to the attraction of moving there.

He said many Chinese families were sending their children to Japan for work because their relatives or they themselves had once worked there.

“Their parents’ generation was part of the last big wave of Chinese heading to Japan in the 1990s, because wages at home were simply too low; today, they go because they simply can’t find work at home,” he said.

However, costs had risen in the meantime, with one parent saying an hour’s work in Japan could more than pay for a bowl of noodles 30-odd years ago, but not today.

Qi Liang, the head of the Yanhai Furi job agency in Dalian, which specialises in Japanese work visas, said most Chinese who obtained them chose to stay in Japan.

Compared with their predecessors, today’s jobseekers from China were better educated and more fluent in Japanese, he said, which meant they were no longer targeting the low-end jobs Chinese workers used to take, but rather white-collar positions in companies.

But geopolitical tensions following Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s remarks a year ago on potential Japanese intervention in a Taiwan crisis were having an impact, he added, with Beijing still demanding a retraction and applying economic and travel pressure.

The fallout had sharply reduced the number of short-term visitors from China and air links between the two countries, and Qi said that had indirectly affected the number of job openings in Japan’s tourism sector, a major employer of Chinese immigrants.

Mainland Chinese visitor arrivals fell about 55.5 per cent year on year in the first three quarters of this year, according to Japan National Tourism Organisation data.