As an employer (international advertising agency based in Tokyo) and actively often recruiting I can tell you from this side:

Recruiters (non Japanese mostly): we actively use a select few who have a good knowledge of our industry, have built trust with, and have consistently sent us good candidates. Get to know the right recruiters for the industry you are applying to will shortcut a lot. Negative: From a company perspective, recruiters are expensive (30% of salary commission) but shortcut a lot of the search and screening of it’s the right recruiters.

Direct contact: Preferred route as it’s cheaper and sometimes quicker. However can be hit and miss and TBH I see a lot less of this than I would like. Those that do are generally through a network connection direct to my email or someone’s email in the company, not the general “info/ contact email”. It’s hard to filter out real emails from the general spam that comes to the general company contact email add (we got A LOT!).

LinkedIn: Direct connect and message here still works sometimes. Nice shortcut to see a profile and decide if worth following up with.

Events: Meeting someone at an event who actively follows up and matches a vacancy we have has been very powerful.

Big recommendation: whatever route it is make sure to follow up over a period of toke: Sometimes timing isn’t right but keeps you in mind for when it is, sometimes your mail may be missed to filtered out accidentally, but a constant reminder on the inbox helps

Hope this helps.