High-Tech Japan Running Out of Engineers-စက္မွဳထိပ္တန္းဂ်ပန္မွာ အင္ဂ်င္နီယာေတြသန္းဂဏန္းေလာက္လိုေနျပီ-ဘာေႀကာင့္လဲ

အဆင့္ျမင့္နည္းပညာမ်ားကိုအသုံးျပဳျပီးအဆင့္ျမင့္ကုန္ပစၥည္းမ်ားအထူးသျဖင့္အီလက္ထေရာနစ္ပစၥည္းမ်ားကိုထုတ္လုပ္ျပီးစီးပြားေရးစူပါ
ပါဝါျဖစ္လာခဲ့တဲ့ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံရဲ့လူေနမွဳအဆင့္အတန္းဟာလြန္ခဲ့တဲ့အနွစ္နွစ္ဆယ္ေလာက္ကစျပီးကမၻာဖြံျဖိဳးတိုးတက္ျပီးနိုင္ငံအားလုံးနဲ ့
ေဘာင္တန္းခဲ့ျပီးတဲ့အခ်ိန္ကစျပီဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံကလူငယ္မ်ားဟာအေမရိကန္လူမ်ိဳးမ်ားကိုအတုခိုးလာခဲ့ႀကျပီးပိုမိုျပီးဝင္ေငြေကာင္းျပီးပိုမို
ျပီးတက္လမ္းလည္းရိွျပီးထင္ေပၚေႀကာ္ႀကားမွဳလဲရနိုင္တဲ့ ေငြေႀကးဆိုင္ရာေဆးဘက္ဆိုက္ရာနဲ ့အနုပညာဆိုင္ရာလုပ္ငန္းေတြဘက္ဆီကို
ပိုမိုစိတ္ပါ၀င္စားလာခဲ့ႀကျပီး ဒုတိယကမၻာစစ္ျပီးေခတ္ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံကိုျပာပုံဘဝက စူပါပါဝါအျဖစ္ပို ့ေဆာင္ေပးခဲ့တဲ့ အင္ဂ်င္နီယာပညာဘက္
မွာစိတ္ပါဝင္စားမွဳနည္းလာခဲ့ျပီးတကၠသိုလ္မ်ားမွာအင္ဂ်င္နီယာသင္တန္းသားမ်ားလဲအလ်င္အျမန္ေရာ့က်လာခဲ့ရာ အခုအခါမွာဂ်ပန္
နည္းပညာနဲ ့အင္ဂ်င္နီယာနယ္ပယ္မွာ အင္ဂ်င္နီယာလိုအပ္ခ်က္အလြန္မ်ားျပားလ်ွက္ရိွျပီး ဒစ္ဂ်စ္တယ္နည္းပညာစက္မွဳလုပ္ငန္းတခု
တည္းအတြက္ကိုဘဲ အင္ဂ်င္နီယာေပါင္း ငါးသိန္းခန္ ့လိုအပ္လ်က္ရိွေႀကာင္းသိရိွရပါတယ္။ အေသးစိတ္ကိုအဂၤလိပ္လိုဆက္လက္ဖတ္ရွဳ
နိုင္ပါတယ္။
May 17, 2008
High-Tech Japan Running Out of Engineers
By MARTIN FACKLER
TOKYO — Japan is running out of engineers.
After years of fretting over coming shortages, the country is actually facing a dwindling number of young
people entering engineering and technology-related fields.

Universities call it “rikei banare,” or “flight from science.” The decline is growing so drastic that industry has
begun advertising campaigns intended to make engineering look sexy and cool, and companies are slowly
starting to import foreign workers, or sending jobs to where the engineers are, in Vietnam and India.
It was engineering prowess that lifted this nation from postwar defeat to economic superpower. But
according to educators, executives and young Japanese themselves, the young here are behaving more like
Americans: choosing better-paying fields like finance and medicine, or more purely creative careers, like the
arts, rather than following their salaryman fathers into the unglamorous world of manufacturing.
The problem did not catch Japan by surprise. The first signs of declining interest among the young in science
and engineering appeared almost two decades ago, after Japan reached first-world living standards, and in
recent years there has been a steady decline in the number of science and engineering students. But only
now are Japanese companies starting to feel the real pinch.
By one ministry of internal affairs estimate, the digital technology industry here is already short almost half a
million engineers.
Headhunters have begun poaching engineers midcareer with fat signing bonuses, a predatory practice once
unheard-of in Japan’s less-cutthroat version of capitalism.
The problem is likely to worsen because Japan has one of the lowest birthrates in the world. “Japan is sitting
on a demographic time bomb,” said Kazuhiro Asakawa, a professor of business at Keio University. “An
explosion is going to take place. They see it coming, but no one is doing enough about it.”
The shortage is causing rising anxiety about Japan’s competitiveness. China turns out some 400,000
engineers every year, hoping to usurp Japan’s place one day as Asia’s greatest economic power.
Afraid of a hollowing-out of its vaunted technology industries, Japan has been scrambling to entice more of
its younger citizens back into the sciences and engineering. But labor experts say the belated measures are
limited and unlikely to fix the problem.
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In the meantime, the country has slowly begun to accept more foreign engineers, but nowhere near the
number that industry needs.
While ingrained xenophobia is partly to blame, companies say Japan’s language and closed corporate culture
also create barriers so high that many foreign engineers simply refuse to come, even when they are
recruited.
As a result, some companies are moving research jobs to India and Vietnam because they say it is easier
than bringing non-Japanese employees here.
Japan’s biggest problem may be the attitudes of affluence. Some young Japanese, products of a rich society,
unfamiliar with the postwar hardships many of their parents and grandparents knew, do not see the value in
slaving over plans and numbers when they could make money, have more contact with other people or have
more fun.
Since 1999, the number of undergraduates majoring in sciences and engineering has fallen 10 percent to
503,026, according to the education ministry. (Just 1.1 percent of those students were foreign students.)
The number of students majoring in creative arts and health-related fields rose during that time, the ministry
said.
Applications to the engineering program at Utsunomiya University, an hour north of Tokyo, have fallen onethird
since 1999. Starting last year, the school has tried to attract students by adding practical instruction to
its theory-laden curriculum. One addition was a class in making camera lenses, offered in partnership with
Canon, which drew 70 students, twice the expected turnout, said Toyohiko Yatagai, head of the university’s
center for optics research.
But engineering students see themselves as a vanishing breed. Masafumi Hikita, a 24-year-old electric
engineering senior, said most of his former high school classmates chose college majors in economics to
pursue “easier money” in finance and banking. In fact, friends and neighbors were surprised he picked a
difficult field like engineering, he said, with a reputation for long hours.
Mr. Hikita and other engineering students say their dwindling numbers offer one benefit: they are a hot
commodity among corporate recruiters. A labor ministry survey last year showed there were 4.5 job
openings for every graduate specializing in fields like electronic machinery.
“We don’t need to find jobs,” said Kenta Yaegashi, 24, another electrical engineering senior. “They find us.”
He said his father, also an engineer, was envious of the current sellers’ market, much less crowded than the
packed field he faced 30 years ago. Even top manufacturers, who once had their pick of elite universities,
say they now have to court talent. This means companies must adapt their recruiting pitches to appeal to
changing social attitudes.
So, Nissan tells students they can advance their careers more quickly there than at more traditional
Japanese companies. The carmaker emphasizes that it offers faster promotions, bigger pay raises and even
“career coaches” to help young talent ascend the corporate ladder.
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“Students today are more demanding and individualistic, like Westerners,” said Hitoshi Kawaguchi, senior
vice president in charge of human resources at Nissan.
On the more offbeat side, an ad for the steel industry features a long-haired guitarist in spandex pants
shouting, “Metal rocks!”
One source Japan has not yet fully tapped is foreign workers — unlike Silicon Valley, filled with specialists in
information technology, or IT, from developing nations like India and China.
According to government statistics, Japan had 157,719 foreigners working in highly skilled professions in
2006, twice as many as a decade ago, but still a far cry from the 7.8 million in the United States. Britain has
also been aggressively recruiting foreign engineers, as have Singapore and South Korea, labor experts say.
“Japan is losing out in the global market for top IT engineers,” said Anthony D’Costa, a professor at
Copenhagen Business School, who has studied the migration of Indian engineers.
Companies are scrambling to change tactics now.
For instance, Kizou Tagomori, director of recruitment at Fujitsu, said the computer maker and its affiliates
routinely fell about 10 percent shy of their annual hiring goal of 2,000 new employees. Fearing chronic
shortages, the company has begun hiring foreigners to work in Japan.
Starting in 2003, Fujitsu began hiring about 30 foreigners a year, mostly other Asians who had graduated
from Japanese universities. Initially, many managers were reluctant to accept them. Mr. Tagomori said they
are now gaining acceptance.
Fujitsu’s 10 Indian employees in Japan won over some of their co-workers by organizing a cricket team, he
said.
But Fujitsu remains an exception. In an economic ministry survey last year, 79 percent of Japanese
companies say they either have no plans to hire foreign engineers or are undecided. The ministry said most
managers still feared that foreigners would not be able to adapt to Japan’s language or corporate culture.
To combat these attitudes, the ministry began the Asian Talent Fund, a $30 million-a-year effort to offer
Asian students Japanese language training and internships in order to help them find work here.
“If these students do well, they can change Japanese attitudes drastically,” said Go Takizawa, deputy
director of the ministry’s human resource policy division.
Nonetheless, labor experts warn Japan may be doing too little, too late. They say the country has already
gained a negative reputation as discriminating against foreign employees, with weak job guarantees and
glass ceilings. Experts say Indian and other engineers will often opt for more open markets like the United
States.
Indeed, a growing number of Japanese companies are having more success by building new research and
development centers in countries with surpluses of engineers. Toyo Engineering, which designs chemical
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factories, said it and its affiliates now employ more engineers abroad — 3,000, mostly in India, Thailand and
Malaysia — than in Japan, where they have 2,500 workers.
With corporate Japan still reluctant to accept foreigners, a half-dozen staffing companies have stepped into
the breach by hiring Chinese and South Korean engineers to send to Japanese companies on a temporary
basis. One of the biggest is Altech, which has set up training centers at two Chinese universities to recruit
engineering students and train them in Japanese language and business customs. Of Altech’s roughly 2,400
engineers, 138 are Chinese, and the company plans to hire more at a rate of 200 per year.
One of the first it hired was He Xifen, a 27-year-old mechanical engineer from Qingdao University of Science
and Technology who joined Altech two and a half years ago. She said her friends back home envy her
because she works with advanced Japanese technology, and earns three or four times more than she would
in China.
While Japanese clients appear uncertain at first about how to deal with foreigners, she said, they quickly
catch on and she usually feels welcome.
“Foreign engineers are becoming accepted,” said Shigetaka Wako, a spokesman for Altech. “Japan is slowly
realizing that its economy cannot continue without them.”
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