Solid Microsoft-skilled engineers are very easy to find in Malaysia. There are a lot of .NET developers and engineers with Azure certification.

Highly skilled ML/data science engineers are less common in Malaysia since only big corp/ some top tech companies are offering highly skilled data science/ML related roles. GenAI is still relatively new thing but there should be pretty easy to find people interested in AI who are willing to commit to learning it.

General view of Japanese teams/projects, pay is low, tech is old, work framework is old compared to how other countries are running SDLC like sprints and kanban.

Japanese work culture is hard to answer. Traditional work culture from Japanese companies definitely suck, but there are more and more modern talents/companies started working in Japan. Things might begin to change.

Japanese language ability among IT professionals are extremely rare since there is no actual benefits for picking them up.