Brokering Domestically Available Foreign Skilled Professionals in Japan

This chapter presents how Japanese semi-private and private intermediaries prepare foreign skilled workers or candidates already present in Japan to shape them for exchange in the domestic labour market. This preparation is important to ensure that market actors in the cross-border labour market between Japan and Vietnam have a shared understanding of the commodity (skilled migrants). Japanese intermediaries actively seek to access potential workers through various co-ethnic and other networks that are already available as a part of Japan’s migration infrastructure to facilitate migrants’ entrance to the labour market. Furthermore, intermediaries create distinct classifications for skilled migrant candidates and provide an array of differentiated supports to candidates based on their knowledge and familiarity with the Japanese work environment. The interviews with intermediary employees indicated that they also provide services to potential labour users—client firms—so that these users can process the required documents for the potential skilled commodity. As underscored in this chapter, intermediaries seek to minimise or fill the gaps in the existing understanding of the potential commodity to be exchanged in the labour market by training and approaching both potential labour providers (skilled migrants) as well as users (client firms).