You get treated like shit, get paid shit, do shitty work, and work under morons whose only qualification is the ability to speak Japanese and bullshit in English... and this for Machine Learning. I can't imagine the things one has to put up with for more vanilla jobs.
Moving to Tokyo must be one of the biggest regrets of my life. I'd look for Singapore or India even, compared to 'grorious Nippon'.
Sounds like your employer is pretty shitty (and to be fair, Japan has more than its fair share of shitty employers), but that's an attribute of your company, not Japan itself. And if you're coming over on a startup visa, it's your company and you set the rules.
All that said, it's hard to people with no connection to Japan opting to start up in Japan -- as patio11 notes, doing so without fluent Japanese is playing life in hard mode.
Can you expand on this? I've looked into several data science positions in Japan and they pay on-par with the U.S. From what I've experienced as a person who spent decades there, the key is to not work for a Japanese company...
You get treated like shit, get paid shit, do shitty work, and work under morons whose only qualification is the ability to speak Japanese and bullshit in English... and this for Machine Learning. I can't imagine the things one has to put up with for more vanilla jobs.
Moving to Tokyo must be one of the biggest regrets of my life. I'd look for Singapore or India even, compared to 'grorious Nippon'.