I have several businesses in the United States. My family and I are moving to Japan early next year. Due to financial interests I have in the US, I think we'll ultimately be part-time residents, living in the US for 3-4 months of the year, and in Japan 8-9 months.
One idea I have been exploring is moving some of my operations to Japan: creative/marketing, marketing ops, biz ops, design, software development. Basically, anything that doesn't strictly need to be in the same time zone as the sales and delivery portions of the businesses. I have long-term reasons for doing this which aren't worth getting into. But in the end, I estimate this would be ~100 to 120 jobs across various functions, ramping up over the next 5 years.
My main concern is that I don't expect to be near a major metro area, and tend to lean toward in-office teams (vs fully remote). In the US, it's still reasonably common for a company to ask an employee to relocate for a corporate job. Many relocate themselves to high-opportunity areas find work (even traditionally undesirable ones, e.g. North Dakota or Texas for oil and gas).
Two questions:
- How common is it for people in Japan to move for a job, especially it's NOT a major city? (Think Okayama or much smaller.)
- If I'm willing to pay a premium for talent, are folks willing to move to even more rural areas? E.g. if I paid 2x the average salary for a particular position, would I find talent willing to move to a town of 20k people?
I know I'm asking for a broad generalization, but I'm more hoping to understand what kind of cultural trends I might be fighting with this approach. E.g., in the Philippines it's very common to move for jobs. In the US it's moderately common. My sense is that the cultural bias in Japan is to either stay roughly where you grew up, or to move to a much larger city.
P.S. Ideally I would have loved to ask this question in r/japanlife but as a prospective resident it looks like I'm not allowed to post there. However, I'm hoping since this is finance-adjacent folks here won't mind.
by damonkhasel