Japan Job Blog

I’m a teacher. I was a teacher before I came to Japan, and I’ll probably always be a teacher. I love it, and it’s what I’m best at. As a result, a lot of my experience of Japan and advice for people who want to move here is related to teaching.

That’s not to say that other kinds of employment aren’t available. They are. Japan is a modern nation that has just as much need for janitors, actors, store clerks, insurance salesmen, and travel agents as anywhere else. There are hospitals that require doctors and courts that need lawyers. Those jobs are legally available to anyone who possesses the necessary qualifications and visa status.

The reason few non-Japanese hold these jobs is that they don’t meet the qualifications to perform them – in Japan.

Unspoken Job Qualifications in Japan

To adequately perform most jobs in Japan, you’ll need to be able to communicate easily in Japanese. That requires speaking and reading the language well enough to carry out the duties and tasks of your position. If you can’t do that, you can’t expect to get hired.

Imagine getting sick in your home town. You go to the hospital to seek professional advice from a doctor. The doctor’s office has large diplomas on the wall and various awards on the shelves. There are framed newspaper clippings featuring the famous and gifted doctor. You sit down across the desk from him, and he begins speaking Swahili to you (I’m assuming you don’t understand Swahili). He is the best doctor in town, but he can’t communicate with you at all and vice versa. Do you stay?

Such a doctor would not be able to help many patients. To take a slightly less dramatic example, imagine that you work at a shoe store in Tokyo. A customer tries on some shoes and likes them. She wants to buy them, but would prefer to get them in another color. Your shop is out of that color, so you’ll have to order them. You need to explain this to the customer, get her contact information, and order the shoes from the distributor. You need to do all of this in Japanese. If your Japanese isn’t good enough to handle such simple situation, you are not even qualified to work retail here.

Why Most Foreigners are Teachers

Which brings ups back to teaching. You don’t need to know a lot of Japanese in order to teach english in Japan (though I do think it helps out considerably). This is the primary reason that teaching English is such a common job for non-Japanese here – because it’s about the only thing most of them are qualified to do.

I’ve met some very highly educated people in Japan with loads of experience. What do they do here? Most of them teach English because it’s the easiest way to make a living. Of course, it’s not universal. I have friends that have worked for various branches of local government, in yoga studios, at restaurants, in shops, for temp agencies, in sales, and in other industries and positions. These people speak Japanese.

Professional Positions

If you are a professional in your own country, there is a good chance that you can get a similar job here in Japan. The best way to do so is to find connections, either through your company or network, that can help you find work. The next best method is to research companies in your field that are advertising jobs. And start studying Japanese.

Especially if your field is something that requires a professional license (medicine, law, etc.), you’ll have to expect that you’ll need to take a licensing exam in Japan.

That exam will be in Japanese. I saw a clip on the news recently that Japan has a shortage of nurses, so they are bringing over nurses from Singapore and the Philippines. Those nurses have to study Japanese and pass a language test before they can begin working.

There are lots of jobs in Japan, and most of them are available to foreigners. However, the cost of admission is being able to do the job, and this includes communicating with clients and coworkers. If you can’t speak and read Japanese, I suggest looking into teaching.

People all over the world are interested in life in Japan, and there are a lot of great reasons to give it a try. It’s a beautiful country with an old and mysterious culture and virtually no violent crime. The convenience stores are truly convenient, and there are heated toilet seats. Life in Japan is great.

But along with the excitement most people feel when they think about picking up and moving to another country comes no small amount of anxiety. After all, it requires learning an entirely new social and cultural system with, among other things, a whole different language.

Although we all know that no barrier is insurmountable, communication is a fundamental human need. The idea of finding ourselves in a situation where we can’t communicate our needs and desires is a scary one. I’m not going to get into the logistics of living in Japan without learning to speak the language except to say this: though I know plenty of non-Japanese speakers here that seem to do just fine, learning to speak even a little bit of the local language will make your life in any country much richer and more rewarding in just about any metric you can imagine. In other words, I recommend trying to learn Japanese whether you think it’s absolutely necessary or not.

Japanese Language and Jobs

To address the question of linguistic skills in the workplace and in the job market, we need to understand that there are two major categories of jobs for foreigners in Japan. The first one is that of language (usually English) instructor, and the other includes everything else.

Those who choose to work in the language teaching industry are hired specifically for their abilities in their native languages. Thought there are different thoughts on how much instruction should be done in the original language vs. the target language (the one you’ll be teaching), it’s well-known that the vast majority of foreign language teachers in Japan are by no means fluent in Japanese. In fact, most English teachers I’ve met here speak only rudimentary Japanese, if at all.

Some language schools actually prefer that their teachers don’t speak much Japanese, as they want the lessons to be taught primarily in the target language. This (they feel) forces the student to acquire communicative ability in order to understand the lesson. Indeed, with my conversation students, I really try to avoid speaking much Japanese.

However, some teaching environments require the use of Japanese. For example, when teaching English to schoolchildren, you will most certainly need to be able to communicate at least some basic ideas in Japanese. As a schoolteacher, I’ve found that my Japanese ability has been a big help in establishing rapport with my students and coworkers. It also helps e explain difficult ideas and grammatical concepts that simply cannot be expressed by way of example or illustration. Since English is an academic subject in school, it just seems sloppy to me to expect that one can get the point across adequately without using Japanese.

That said, ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) positions probably require the absolute least level of Japanese skills. Even the JET Programme advertises that Japanese skill is not at all required for acceptance. As an ALT, you will always be partnered with a Japanese teacher who teaches the grammar and runs the lesson. The ALT is there to coach pronunciation and nuance more than anything. For this reason, most Japanese people expect that ALTs cannot speak Japanese.

Japanese for Non-Teaching jobs

If you don’t plan to teach a foreign language, you’re going to have to give some very serious thought to enrolling in a language class and at least learning the basics of Japanese communication.

Though you may be able to get hired based on your specific skills in IT or some other technical field, you’ll find that most jobs outside of the education industry will require you to be able to communicate for yourself. In other words, where the language teaching industry expects to babysit employees to a certain degree, professionals in other fields will be expected to act on their own volition, which includes communicating with coworkers and clients.

This isn’t to suggest that fluency is required for all non-teaching jobs. Rather, I’m suggesting that those uninterested in teaching be prepared to go the extra mile when promoting themselves to prospective employers, and some knowledge of Japanese shows commitment and intent beyond what is required to type up and send a few resumes.

How Badly Do You Want It?

As with almost everything else that is worth any effort in life, it all comes down to the question of how badly you want to live in Japan.

If this is just a passing fantasy for you, and you aren’t interested in putting forth some effort to learn Japanese, I’ll recommend staying home. I hate to be a killjoy, but living in a foreign country is challenging, and learning a bit of the language is one of the easiest things you can do to virtually guarantee an improved quality of life. Though I’ve known a dozens of non-speakers who managed to get by in Japan for a few months to a year, very few of them seemed to have all that great an experience while here.

At the very minimum, learning Japanese will give you a far greater ability to interact socially with people here. And why move all the way to Japan to only hang out with other foreigners?