Meanwhile, in the Japan some of us actually live in:

1) Very few 26 year olds will be successfully able to convince their 26 year old co-workers to leave Sharp, because that is a once-in-a-lifetime mistake. I am literally related to a $ANONYMOUS_FOR_SAKE_OF_RELATIVE employee who is presently miserable and cannot leave because that means an end of economic stability for his family forever and his family makes no secret of how unhappy they would be in that situation.

2) If you are a 26 year old startup founder and you ask for a bank loan ^H^H^H^H business checking account, be prepared to get told "Oh hell no.", but very politely. The first variant of "Oh hell no" is "Hmm, well theoretically speaking we do have business checking accounts available as a product. Can we see your articles of incorporation, business plans, office rental contract, orders from customers, etc etc?" Upon which you say "Well we're making LCDs so we don't have orders yet because we need a bank account to e.g. purchase machinery" at which point "We regret to inform you that we cannot accept your business."

Not a theoretical concern: I'm presently 2 weeks into the fun with a large Japanese bank trying to get an account issued, which shakes fist at a personal bugbear is not exactly the easiest thing to accomplish for a Western tech entrepreneur in Tokyo at the moment. (I've been asked about Bitcoin three times already.) If I manage to get the account, it will because I rounded up 123 pages of documentation (not an exaggeration, that's a count) from previous work to convince the bank that I was not a ML nor fraud nor credit risk.

3) Venture capital: you will not successfully receive sufficient-to-create-a-physical-product venture capital as a 26 year old in Japan. It's difficult to raise what would be "trivial by Valley standards" just to build software products: prepare for 6 months of All The Fundraising Fun You Can Imagine to get an A round sized like a modest seed round in St. Louis. You need substantial industry connections here to convince a corporate VC to give you the corporation's money. The high-percentage way to "compete" with Sharp is to spend 30 years in it, get recognized internally as a very competent performer who is not management track, "quit" to "run a startup" which makes a product that Sharp definitely needs but would have difficulty making without you, receive money from Sharp's affiliated VC vehicles, and "exit" by taking the buyout order from your single customer, which will naturally be Sharp.

("What would incentivize Sharp to do that?" Because all salarymen at Sharp of a given age are equal but some are more equal than others. M&A is allowed to make decisions regarding compensation that HR is not. This incentivizes folks who are internally indispensable but not managers who show up in the Nikkei/WSJ by name to do a bit of revolving-door. Think like Google but amped to 11.)