Michael D. Merner '84 experienced the vanguard of the so-called "bubble economy."

"[During the bubble economy] companies were poaching each other's employees with increasingly high salaries, including foreigners," Merner says in a telephone interview from his Tokyo office. "People were hiring up to whole teams not based on resumes or interviews but just on rumors."

"It was like the gold rush, [businesses] trying to take advantage of the situation," he recalls.

"It also created opportunities for people wanting to work in Japan without prior [business] experience. As long as they had a decent degree from a recognized institution and spoke enough Japanese to get around," he adds.

Merner says that he became interested in Japan almost by chance. He first visited Japan in the summer of 1982, and took an intensive summer course in Japanese the following summer. But the giddy economic climate permitted him to find a job, even though his language skills were limited.

After graduating, Merner arrived in Tokyo and started calling major Japanese banks and American investment banks.

While Merner had no previous business experience, less than two months after placing his call, he was working as an analyst in Morgan Stanley's Tokyo office.

"I was hired straight out of college because Morgan Stanley was doubling the size of its Tokyo office, not because I was great, but because they needed bodies," he says.

After the Japanese "bubble" burst in the early '90s, Japan entered a recession from which it has not entirely emerged.

Merner said that he does not recommend the way he obtained his first financial-sector job to Harvard students of the '90s who are currently seeking business jobs in Japan.

"Now, you need two or three years in New York first," says Merner, who has since left Morgan Stanley, obtained an MBA and is now running his own business in Japan. "Otherwise, you must be Japanese."

A Slackening Job Market

At the Office of Career Services (OCS), Judy Murray, the director for on-campus recruiting, says the number of Japanese companies that have come to recruit Harvard students has diminished since the late 1980s.

"Matsushita comes [to Harvard] every year," Murray says, referring to the Osaka-based electronics conglomerate. But Murray was unable to think of any other Japanese company currently recruiting. She says that "many more" Japanese companies came to recruit during the mid to late '80s. Job growth has shifted to Hong Kong, she says.

The increased circumspection of Japanese companies in hiring is also mirrored in the drop in the number of Harvard students studying Japanese.