Foreign company in Japan or Gaishikei

While this word will be used many times through this blog (and has been already), no Wikipedia page exists for it.

• The word Gaishikei (in Japanese 外資系) refers to foreign companies or multinational companies in Japan. The word comes from gaikoku (外国 the first character 外 being used there) which means “out of the country”, the country being Japan, it means “out of Japan” or “Foreign”.
• The second character used is shi (資) which comes from shihon （資本) which means capital as in a company capital. So we have “Foreign Capital”.
• Finally the last character kei (系) means corollary or related to. We generally talk in the press about gaishikei kigyou (外資系企業). Kigyou (企業) means simply a company, so we have foreign capital companies.
• On the contrary Nikkei Kigyou (日系企業) would relate to a Japanese affiliated company. the Ni (日) relates to Nihon （日本) or Japan.

That’s it for Gaishikei.
I recommend you a nice English<->Japanese dictionnary available on the web for free: ARUKU (アルク) http://www.alc.co.jp