Otsukare

Situation

METI projects Japan will be short 400,000 IT workers. The talent exists globally — the barrier is that Japanese firms and foreign engineers cannot find or assess one another across the language and process gap.

Task

• Connect global IT talent to Japanese firms with matching that survives the language gap.
• Win the prefecture stakeholders who would have to back it.

Result

A platform argued against METI's own shortfall figure, and acknowledged by the Vice Chairman of Miyazaki Prefecture — the project's key stakeholder.

My Contribution

• Grounded the thesis in METI's own gap analysis rather than a market guess. 400,000 is the government's number, which made it the room's number too — and made the problem theirs rather than ours to prove.
• Took the case to the prefecture directly rather than to the market first. In Japan, the backing that mattered came from the government side.
• Positioned AI matching as the bridge across the assessment gap, not as the product. The barrier was never the supply of engineers — it was firms being unable to judge them.