The design detail worth reading twice is why these schemes sit outside the existing wage structure instead of inside it. Nikkei's account, as reported by en.sedaily.com, says Japanese firms considered the obvious route of stacking allowances on top of base pay to reach a market salary, and backed away from it: over time those allowances risk being treated legally as equivalent to base pay, which drags up overtime, bonuses and severance with them [9]. So the allowance route inflates every downstream liability tied to base pay, for every year the person stays. A separate pay regime for specialists caps the contagion.
That is also the cleanest reading of SOMPO's structure. The holding company hires the AI, cybersecurity, legal and compliance specialists itself, as permanent employees, and dispatches them to affiliates as needed [2]. The stated reason is that affiliates ran a mix of seniority and job-based rules after the 2020 switch, and could not offer exceptional pay on their own [4]. Centralising the contract moves the pay anomaly to the one entity whose rulebook can absorb it.
MUFG went the other way and kept membership-based employment intact, applying separate pay rules to a carve-out under its Ex system from 2024 [5]. The size of that carve-out is the number to hold onto: about 800 people out of 22,000 domestic employees, or roughly 3.6% [6][11], of whom about 40 are mid-career hires [6]. So around 95% of the covered group came from inside the bank [12]. This is mostly reclassification of existing staff onto better terms, not a hiring spree, and reclassification is the expensive kind: a mid-30s employee can be treated like a branch manager or head-office general manager [5], and that becomes the internal comparison everyone else measures against.
Fujitsu prices the scarcity explicitly. Its S, A, B and C grades sort AI, data science and cybersecurity people plus in-house lawyers by scarcity and business contribution [7]. S-grade is 25m to 35m yen by individual negotiation, and A to C carry monthly allowances of 50,000 to 300,000 yen on top of base [8]. At the top of that band, one S-grade hire costs what SOMPO pays more than two of its 15m yen specialists [13].
Then there is the acquisition cost sitting on top. Referral fees through specialist headhunters now average about 35% of the recruited worker's annual salary [10]. On a 15m yen package that is roughly 5.25m yen paid once, before the person produces anything [14]; at Fujitsu's 35m yen ceiling it is about 12.25m yen [15]. The source's framing of the trade is blunt: bearing high hiring costs beats losing competitiveness by failing to secure key people [16]. That is a defensible position and a permanent one, because a market price for individual talent is forming while both Japanese and foreign employers bid [17].
The restraint in the reporting matters as much as the numbers. It is hard to say Japanese firms as a whole are abandoning seniority pay right away [18], and Fujitsu's abolition of batch graduate hiring from 2025 in favour of year-round recruitment [c7b] is still the exception among large employers rather than the norm. What has actually changed is that the exception now has a documented price list, and everyone recruiting in the same fields is quoting against it.
