Interested in starting or building a career in Japan? 

Then this free presentation may be just what you need.

In this presentation learn not only about developing your value and ROI as a candidate but also how you can Future Proof yourself in the face of the converging avalanche of societal and economic changes that will occur and are occurring with the adoption and deployment of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), expert systems, machine vision, robots, 3D printing, autonomous vehicles and so on.

FirstPoint Japan's Publisher and the Founder of Career OverDrive! and SiliconEdge, James Santagata, will be presenting at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan on April 17th, 2014.

Presentation Topic: 
Sick & Tired of Resume-Collecting Recruiters? Fire Your Recruiter & Take Control of Your Job Search & Your Life! 

(FYI: This is not a gratuitous beat down on recruiters, it's a hard-edged, constructive conversation to give job seekers the unadulterated truth along with immediately actionable, life changing information and know-how - all recruiters are more than welcome).

Japanese Start-Ups Channel Samurai Spirit: The Samurai Startup Island, in a low-rent office district built on a landfill on Tokyo Bay, is at the vanguard of what many hope is a new generation of innovators.

By Martin Fackler, New York Times
Published: December 25, 2013

TOKYO — The 20-somethings in jeans sipping espresso and tapping on laptops at this Tokyo business incubator would look more at home in Silicon Valley than in Japan, where for years the surest signs of success were the gray suits of its corporate salarymen. But for those hoping the nation’s latest economic plan will drag Japan from its long malaise, the young men and women here at Samurai Startup Island represent a crucial component: a revival of entrepreneurship.

The signs of that comeback are still new, and tentative enough that the statistics on start-ups and initial public offerings have not caught up. But analysts and investors report that hundreds of new Internet and technology-related companies have sprung up in the last two to three years, creating an ecosystem of incubators like Samurai Startup Island and so-called accelerator new venture investment funds, which invest in early-state start-ups in hopes of cashing in.

Some top universities — the same ones that have long defined success as a job in an established company or elite government ministry — have begun not only to create their own incubators and venture funds, but also to develop curriculums on birthing start-ups. And while some young entrepreneurs say real progress will come only if Prime Minister Shinzo Abe acts as promised to shake up Japan’s hidebound corporate culture, they say the stock market rally and broader optimism created by the economic plan known as Abenomics are already making it easier to find investors and customers.

“This is the beginning of something that could rejuvenate Japan,” said Mitsuru Izumo, the founder of Euglena Corporation, a biotechnology start-up valued at $1 billion, and one of the country’s most prominent new entrepreneurs. “If we don’t unleash our youth, then Japan will become too weak to survive another blow like Fukushima. Entrepreneurship is Japan’s last chance.”

For years, sagging entrepreneurial spirit has been cited as a major reason for Japan’s inability to save itself from a devastating deflationary spiral. The nation that produced Sony, Toyota and Honda has created few successors.

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!

Dear James,

How can I gain employment in Japan, specifically in Tokyo? I have a Bachelor's degree, 30 grad hours earned and a TESOL certificate (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages). I am not a native English speaker and I am over the age of 35. I tried in 2012 to find a job while I was in Tokyo for 9 months and lost a lot of money that way.
What are the chances of teaching German there?

Kind Regards,

- TN

Skills Inventory:
1. Bachelor's Degree
2. Graduate School: 30 hours earned
3. TESOL Certification
4. Languages: 
     (a) German: Native speaker
     (b) English: Native Level Fluency
     (c) Japanese: Advanced Beginner

FirstPoint Japan's Candidates section is now live (日本語話せる候補者に対して)

FirstPoint is not a recruiting or executive search firm, but rather serves as a platform for individual recruiters and executive search consultants as well as executive search agencies that who are ethically-certified by the Ethical Recruiting Alliance to advertise for and interact with bilingual candidates who are looking for opportunities in Japan or the greater APAC market as well as with Japan firms that are expanding their operations overseas.

候補者が抱く疑問は多くあります：

• キャリアの次のステップとして何がベストか？
  
• いつ、どのようにしてそれを得るべきか？
  
• 誰を使うべきか？どのようにしてリクルーターを選んだら良いのか？
  
• リクルーターとどのように生産性の高い付き合いをするべきか？
  
• 今の自分の業界から出るべきか？
  
• どのような機会があって、どのように機会を最大化するのか？
  
• どのようなリスクがあって、どのようにリスクを最小化するのか？
  

これらの疑問は、特に高い価値を持ち、異動してキャリアを築く候補者にとっては大変重要なものです。


候補者の方が人間的、職業的に成長していけることをゴールとしてサポートするのが私にとって重要であり、候補者へのプレッシャーや拘束は一切ありません。
下記が業界経験を基に候補者を支援した内容の一例です。 

What Is Working Environment & Why Is It So Important? (Part 1)
By Kim Pedersen (Guest Blogger)

Kim Pedersen is an expert in Japan business and global working environments and the founder of Roukan.com (Roukan.jp localized for the Japanese market) as well as a member of the High-Impact Coaching Alliance's advisory board.  

Why Is Working Environment (WE) So Important?
Well, the simple answer to this question is that it has a huge impact on a company’s profits. If a profitable organization is important to you then you should pay careful attention to your company's WE. This is just one of the reasons why WE is so important.

Another reason for its importance is that it influences an employee’s well-being to a very high degree. From a corporate standpoint, depending on how you understand and manage WE you can either increase the profitability and competitiveness of your company or you can risk being potentially sued and/or losing money through lack of employee engagement and reduced productivity, absenteeism and so on.

The funny thing about WE is that depending on which path you choose you will either receive all of the positive effects or all of the negative effects. There seems to be no middle ground in regards to WE. In practice, this means that you can choose to have very satisfied employees, a good working environment and higher productivity and profits or you can choose to have very unsatisfied employees, a bad working environment and the chance of litigation and resultant lower profits. 

So what is your choice going to be? 

A big thanks goes out to Roukan.com as Roukan.com's Work Environment Surveys Solution Is Now An Official Sponsor of FirstPoint Japan.

SINGAPORE--Hiroshi Suzuki is one of a handful of Japanese executives who have given up on Japan as a base to conduct global business operations and opted for a more cosmopolitan setting.

Suzuki is president of optical lens and eyeglass maker Hoya Corp., which is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s First Section and headquartered in the capital’s Shinjuku Ward.

Yet, he moved a major part of his business to Singapore, figuring that access to on-the-ground information and other opportunities would enable him to better steer the company.

For the past year and a half, Suzuki has spent more than half of any month in Singapore.

“What a president should do is develop a strategy on how to allocate funds and personnel to businesses with higher growth potential,” he said. “I have better access to information required for such responsibility outside Japan.”

Suzuki, 54, has a long-term contract on a residential floor of an exclusive resort hotel on Sentosa Island and commutes to his office in the business district in central Singapore.

Suzuki returns to Japan mainly for Hoya’s 10 board meetings a year. He consults with representatives of company divisions once a month, either at a meeting outside Japan or through a teleconference.

“From our factories and workers to our customers and rivals, everyone is based outside Japan,” Suzuki said. “I considered relocating our headquarters abroad, but I decided that I would go out first.”

Five of Hoya’s seven board members are from outside the company. The remaining two, Suzuki and Kenji Ema, chief financial officer, are both based overseas.

Ema, 65, set up the company’s financial headquarters in the Netherlands in 2003 and works out of the country.

In late April, Suzuki and Ema met at Hoya’s headquarters in Tokyo and discussed dividends and other issues for an hour. They soon left Japan for their respective bases.

“If we have something to discuss, we can communicate via e-mail and other means,” Suzuki said. “We do not have to get together.”

Sunstar Co., whose main business is health care products, operates its global headquarters in Switzerland.

The company chose Switzerland to change the way its employees view the global business environment.

“How will the world look like if we see it from Switzerland, not from Japan?” a Sunstar official asked.

Sunstar Group Chairman Yoshihiro Kaneda recently moved his base for business to Singapore to expand the company’s Asian operations. He rarely returns to Japan.

The company has no plans to place Japan, whose market is shrinking, at the center of the group’s operations.

A growing number of Japanese companies are relocating some of their headquarters functions or their business divisions abroad.

There are 60 such companies in Singapore alone, including Panasonic Corp., trading house Mitsubishi Corp., shipping company Nippon Yusen KK and chemicals producers Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corp. and Mitsui Chemicals Inc.

Mitsui Chemicals moved a division in charge of sophisticated resins two years ago. It has a production base in Jurong Island, which hosts a number of petrochemical complexes.

Atsushi Komoriya, president of Mitsui Elastomers Singapore Pte., a local subsidiary, said: “Everyone is here, from U.S. chemicals giants with which we compete for market shares to automotive manufacturers to which we supply our products. The basic rule is to do business close to where there is business. It will take too long if we stay in Japan.”

At Hoya, Suzuki and Ema have discussed where each business operation, such as production, sales and research and development, can be conducted most efficiently.

The company moved its eyeglass division to Thailand in 2009 and later relocated its hard disk division to Vietnam and its intraocular lens division to Singapore.

“When it came to whether we can choose Japan as the best place to do business, our conclusion was that we have to choose elsewhere for most operations, such as finance and strategy planning,” Ema said.

A key goal for Hoya’s Dutch-based financial headquarters is to minimize tax payments, drawing on different taxation systems around the world.

In the year ended March, Hoya’s group-wide effective corporate tax rate had fallen to 20.3 percent, compared with 35 percent in Japan.

Hoya concentrates earnings at regional headquarters in countries with low corporate tax rates or at manufacturing companies in Asia and elsewhere where tax burdens are relatively low.

Ema said U.S. and European shareholders consider taxes as business costs and do not invest in a company unless it reduces tax payments at least to levels of Western companies.

“Companies have no choice but to adapt themselves to the environment,” he said. “We are in an era when companies can choose a country where they make products, employ workers and pay taxes.”

SINGAPORE FACES PROBLEMS

As part of its strategy to bolster economic growth and increase tax revenue, Singapore has sought to attract foreign companies, top-level engineers and wealthy people from around the world by offering them an environment in which they can operate freely.

Its corporate tax rate of 17 percent is among the lowest in Asia. An even lower rate applies to regional headquarters and financial centers set up by foreign companies.

Entrepreneurs and wealthy individuals who transfer a certain level of assets to Singapore are granted permanent resident status and exempted from inheritance tax.

However, the influx of foreign companies has caused office rents in central Singapore to double compared with a few years ago. Real estate prices have soared beyond the reach of residents.

Prices of automobiles and other products have risen more than wages. Real income has fallen, hitting low-income earners particularly hard and widening the wealth gap.