Taiwan wooing Japanese talent

Larger companies in Taiwan have even offered annual pay packages topping US$1 million for candidates in prized fields, some Japanese engineers said.

So many Japanese have moved to Taiwan that some cities are building, or planning to build, Japanese-language schools for the engineers' children.

Almost every Japanese with technology-related experience gets job offers, Hata said. The largest number of offers are from companies in booming China, she said, but those with the most coveted skills tend to get hired by companies in Taiwan, which are rushing to close the technological gap with Japan.

Hiroshi Itabashi was an engineer with more than 20 years experience at a midsize Japanese television maker when he got an unexpected telephone call in 1999 from Delta Electronics Inc (台達電子), a fast-growing Taiwanese electronic components company.

Delta wanted to start producing television screens and asked Itabashi to help set up their operation.

Three interviews later, including one with a Delta executive who flew to Tokyo to have lunch with him on a Saturday, Itabashi decided to make the jump.

"They gave me this exciting opportunity to build a whole new business from scratch," said Itabashi, 56, who asked that his former Japanese employer not be identified. "This is something you can't do in Japan. These days, Japanese companies always seem to be closing down operations, not starting new ones."

Though the benefits are great, Japanese going abroad say they sometimes struggle to adapt to vastly different corporate cultures. For Tatsuo Okamoto, a 51-year-old semiconductor engineer, the biggest change was the decision-making at Winbond Electronics Corp (華邦電子) in Taiwan, which hired him away from the Tokyo-based chipmaker Renesas Technology Corp, two years ago.

Okamoto recalled one instance when a 15-minute chat in the hallway with Winbond's president was enough to win immediate approval to purchase millions of dollars worth of factory equipment. The same decision in Japan would have taken days of meetings, he said.

Okamoto said the experience opened his eyes to the problems hobbling Japan's competitiveness.

"Joining a Taiwanese company was a high-risk, high-return decision," Okamoto said. "But staying in Japan had become a high-risk, low-return proposition."