Techies shunning Silicon Valley for Japanese dream

Software engineer Carlos Perez Gutierrez was in the enviable position of being able to choose between job offers.

Ride-hailing company Lyft wanted him for its San Francisco office. Booking.com offered to cover his moving expenses to Amsterdam.

But the 30-year-old ended up travelling from his native Mexico to a Japanese company called Line Corp. Perez accepted less money to do it. The reason was a love for Japan’s comic books, anime and video games.

“My parents tell me I was playing Nintendo games since before I could speak,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to visit Japan.”

Corporate Japan has a reputation for long hours, small salaries and no Silicon Valleystyle stock options for the rank-and-file. But the country is also having a renaissance, making it easier to recruit global talent. Tourism is booming and, for the past few years, Japanese cities have been ranked among the world’s most livable. For some tech firms, Japan’s pop culture cache is providing an edge when it comes to hiring.

“We’re seeing more skilled migrants coming to Japan then before, especially in the technology space,” said Marc Burrage, managing director for recruitment firm Hays in Tokyo. “The barriers have also come down because the Government has acknowledged that companies just can’t get enough skilled IT people.”

For businesses that try to lure workers from overseas, the buzz around Japan helps.

Mercari, operator of a hit online flea market in Japan, hired 33 new graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology, a network of engineering schools whose students tend to have their pick of the world’s tech employers.

Mercari, which went public in June, plans to expand its 100-plus engineering force by 1000 in the next three years and needs foreigners to fill some of those roles.

To make sure recruits feel welcome, the company has

People already want to be here, you just have to give them an opportunity. James Westwood

been holding sensitivity training to help people learn to work together. Mercari founder Shintaro Yamada flew to Mumbai to shake hands with his new hires and meet their families.

Ascent Robotics, another Tokyo tech startup hiring foreigners, was founded by a Canadian, Fred Almeida, who’d worked in Japan for years before launching the business in 2016. The company develops artificial intelligence for driverless cars and robots, fields where workers are in high demand.

Yet the firm is receiving an average of 500 applications a month from overseas, says Chief Investment Officer James Westwood.

“People already want to be here, you just have to give them an opportunity,” he said.

A former managing director at Goldman Sachs Group in Hong Kong, Westwood moved to Tokyo to take the job at Ascent in June. He’s one of 49 foreigners at the firm. There are only 11 Japanese.

Marko Simic, a Serbian roboticist who joined in May, said he considered programming jobs in San Francisco and Boston before deciding on Japan. After a year in the country, he says he’s hooked on the convenience of living in Tokyo, an open-24-hours metropolis where the trains run on time and there’s little crime to speak of.

Line’s office in Kyoto, where Perez went to work in June, has turned out to be a big draw for foreign hires. The Tokyobased company operates a messaging app that’s used by half of Japan’s population but the service isn’t popular outside Asia. Nevertheless, Line found itself inundated with 800 applications from all over the world. So far, 13 of the 20 engineers hired for the office have been foreigners.

Tomohiro Ikebe, the Line executive who opened the Kyoto office and conducted interviews, said video conferences via Skype revealed something interesting about many of the applicants.

“You could see that a lot of them had bookshelves full of Japanese comics,” he said.