Soichiro "Swimmy" Minami, a former Morgan Stanley banker, is organizing what he says is Japan's first "pink slip party" for finance professionals, in a Tokyo bar where Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. employees once mingled.
About 100 unemployed people, in the market for jobs paying at least $100,000, have been invited to the April 14 gathering at Roppongi's Heartland bar, said Minami, chief executive officer of BizReach Inc., a career consulting company.
The party at Heartland — a banker hangout located in the same building as Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s Tokyo headquarters and what used to be Lehman's Japan head office — follows similar events in New York and other U.S. cities. The credit-market meltdown that sank Lehman and claimed 291,000 financial-industry positions worldwide has forced job seekers to rethink how they go about finding prospective employers, said Minami.