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

A JAPANESE FIRM IN MALAYSIA 133
clubs, but could not afford to join the prestigious clubs to which the senior
managers and Japanese belonged.
At the level of the middle class, we observe that all ethnic groups show an
increasing turning inward to the prosperity and lifestyle comforts of the nuclear
family, expressed in the use of income to upgrade housing, make of car and leisure
activities conducted in the context of prestigious clubs, resorts and expen sive
hotels. Significant investments were made also in children’s education in expensive
private institutions, often overseas. Specific to the Malay group were the remnants
of wider community patron-client relations of the peasant village type, and also
demonstrations of piety as a status device, through the performance of the haj at
an early age.
The workers aspired to middle-class lifestyles and bought cheaper versions of
the middle-class status items–the lounge suites, curtain materials, which were
ostentatious and flashy, but of cheap quality on closer examination. Their cars
were Proton Sagas or reconditioned Toyotas or Nissans. They used the middleclass
supermarkets and shopping malls as a place of recreation, taking their
children there and thus educating them unconsciously in middle-class lifestyles. As
a special treat, they would take the family to fast-food restaurants such as
Kentucky, or Pizza Hut, even though nicer, cheaper indigenous food was available
at roadside stalls.
How did the Japanese firm in Malaysia contribute specifically to this?
First at the macro level, by its role in providing substantial amounts of direct
foreign investment in the NEP era, Japanese capital and Japanese firms
contributed to the formation of a new managerial class in Malaysia. Again, owing
to the dynamics of the bumiputera focus of the NEP, a substantial number of these
new positions went to Malays. Hence this helped to create among the Malays a
new middle-class phenomenon, whose values and motivations contrasted with the
old middle-class Malays. A distinction between old and new middle class was not
so striking in the Chinese and Indian groups because their young professional
generation had largely urban origins anyway and were not a product of ‘hothouse’
education schemes for the children of rural peasants. The rural Chinese and Indian
children largely missed out on the benefits of the NEP although the urban Chinese
business group benefited greatly from it by acting as business partners for the new
class of Malay entrepreneurs.
Secondly, at the micro level, within the firm itself, transplanted systems of
Japanese management, emphasising lifetime employment, seniority wage
structures and systems of job transfer which are a feature of the enterprise union
system in Japan itself, gave security of tenure to managerial employees, even in
the face of demonstrated incompetence. This loyalty of the firm to the individual
employee translated back into a loyalty of the individual to the firm. Thus job
hopping was much less observable among Malay executives in Iroha, compared to
the situation in the professional job market outside. Employment in the firm also
gave first-generation professionals an introduction to middle-class lifestyles, hotel
dining, golf and other middle-class leisure activities, although these influences were