Need Advice – Moving to Japan as Software Engineer. How important is experience in the tech stack mentioned on job posting? Does general SDE experience also count?

Hello Everyone,

I am a fresh grad with a bachelors degree in CS in India. I graduated in 2025 and have 2 year experience (1 year internship + 1 year full time in the same team) in Software development for Japanese automotive clients.

I really enjoy the work and want to continue in this domain, but i hardly see any openings as my work is very niche.

Most of the jobs are for backend (java, spring boot, databases etc)

Or

Low level embedded systems (which i dont do at work unfortunately)

I am learning japanese (started now) and expect to reach N2 in 2 years. By then i will also have 3 years of full time experience

My questions are. For someone with 3 Years of experience,

1. Do companies expect experience in the work that they do? Or is it just overall software development experience in adjacent roles?
2. Does working on non-trivial personal projects, documenting them properly on github help to cover the lack of on the job experience in a particular tech stack.

Thank you for your time.