Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

A JAPANESE FIRM IN MALAYSIA 131
financial hardship caused by the cutting of overtime levels that workers had come
to expect, and on the basis of which they had committed themselves to many
credit arrangements.
With monthly salaries of $1,200 the new graduates could not afford too much
luxury but they sought to distance themselves socially and in the workplace from
the workers. They rejected the fictive egalitarian approach of performing jobs with
the workers in order to motivate them, as Cheng the senior Chinese production
manager had done, 18 on the basis of their educational status. They were not willing
to walk around the factory and get a feel of production, a practice which is
regarded as extremely important by Japanese managers in Japan.
The new graduates had three roles to fulfil in their lives: (i) their professional
role in the company, that is their status as managers; (ii) their technical roles, as
science graduates, which were nevertheless not being developed because they
were there in a token role only as bumiputera numbers in the management levels;
and (iii) their social roles as young prosperous bumiputera in both the urban
community and the rural community of origin. In their lives it was this latter role
which ultimately assumed the most importance, and it provided the most difficulty
for them as their behaviour was required to be different in some aspects in the two
different contexts. The main common point in both urban and rural social contexts
for the young educated Malay middle class was their Muslim identity, expressed
through overt symbols of piety in speech, dress and ritual prayer. Otherwise there
were great paradoxes in the coexistence of the two spheres, such as being
expected to attend the weddings and funerals of a large number of distant relatives
in the village social context while, on the other hand, being expected to keep up
with a professional daily schedule of important meetings and appointments in the
urban context. The individual trying to cope with these two disparate and mutually
conflicting worlds suffered a schizophrenia in values and it was understandable that
Islam, which bound the two together as the key factor identifying the bumiputera
under the NEP and as the basis of kampung social relationships, came to be
embraced so fervently by the young middle class.
The Japanese management were not able to divert their loyalty towards the
company and the job and away from their religious and other social representations
in the critical community of their families and peers in the Malay middle class.
CONCLUSION
Employment in the Japanese joint venture gave the opportunity of social mobility
to different individuals to varying degrees. For the senior local managers, Chinese
and one Malay, the experience of employment consolidated the middle-class status
from which they had come. The fact that their parents had had sufficient means to
educate them to tertiary level at the end of the 1950s is proof of their families’ middleclass
status. The junior local managers came from two groups: the veterans and the
new graduates who had risen from the ranks. The veterans, in becoming
managers after being workers, owed their mobility to the Japanese, as it was