Each year, thousands of Japanese people repatriate to Tokyo at the end of their company placements overseas, but for Yuichiro Hori, the experience of coming "home" became the trigger to leaving it permanently.

The Nagoya-born designer had completed a three-year stint in Shanghai managing interiors on a residential project for investment business conglomerate Marubeni Corp. It was a task he had not chosen; he knew nothing about China. His bosses, however, said that, at 25, he should experience working both overseas and on a big project. Going to Shanghai would kill two birds with one stone. Buoyed by his colleagues' encouragement that the country had great potential, he agreed to go.

Arriving in 1999, Hori was shocked by what he found. His first meal was in a McDonald's where more than half the customers were wearing pyjamas and there was no queueing system for ordering. "People were always cutting in and foreigners were served first," he recalls, adding that a mom sitting beside him gave her child a cup to pee in rather than take him to the restroom.