Japan's High-Schoolers Start Job Hunting as Firms Offer 300,000-Yen Starting Pay

Job hunting for Japanese high-schoolers has effectively begun, and notably some firms now offer starting pay of 300,000 yen. Once modest, such starting salaries at this level prove the 'war for talent' has reached the youngest frontline.

The driver is the familiar structural shortage: an aging society makes young workers scarce, so firms lock them in early with higher pay rather than fight over university grads. That makes 'starting pay' a concrete piece of the wage-and-price-up logic above. For Taiwan readers it is a fine slice of Japan's labor shift: wage gains are not slogans but shortage-forced market behavior—when a high-school grad is worth 300,000 yen, the price of labor is being structurally repriced, a key basis for Japan's move from deflation to mild inflation.