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Yoshi Noguchi has been getting lots of goodbye letters lately.
They are from a growing number of Japanese managers who the executive recruiter had come to know over the years but are being sent home. By one estimate, as many as 10,000 of the 50,000 Japanese executives in New York City have been repatriated.
"It's significant enough to have created a trend," says Mr. Noguchi, a recruiter with Paul R. Ray & Carre Orban International.
It's but one example of Japan's about-face from New York. After pumping billions into the local economy, Japan's plunging real estate and stock values have prompted a retreat from the city. The falloff in real estate investment is the most obvious but it has spread into retailing, where at least one major Japanese department store has put a project on hold. The retreat has affected trading companies, which are putting the squeeze on American suppliers. It also involves financial services and construction.
"It's a recessionary market," says Hiroko Tsubota Gruson, who runs her own international executive search firm in New York. "The Japanese don't like to talk about it, but they too are concerned about extraordinary human costs."
POURED BILLIONS INTO AREA
Japan, of course, has poured billions in direct and indirect investment into the New York metropolitan area. More than 1,500 Japanese companies have established subsidiaries here in recent years, according to the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey. Some 60 Japanese banks have opened branch offices in New York. The Japanese own more than $5 billion worth of office space and have invested $7 billion in mergers and acquisitions.
While the...