How to get a tech job in Japan! 🇯🇵

🇨🇳 Chinese passport holders living outside China can now visit Taiwan 🇹🇼

Firstly, in Taiwan news, as of September 1, 2023, Taiwan is now allowing individual tourists from Mainland China who are not living in China, as well as business people on short-term visits. My friend living in Japan with a Chinese passport was recently able to get a single entry visa valid for 3 months, with the cost being the equivalent of 600 NTD to apply.

👨🏻‍💻 Finding a tech job in Japan 🇯🇵, revisited

I wrote in my other blog DEM Flyers about 3 years ago when I just moved to Japan about getting a tech job in Japan. I was able to land a software engineering position with Stripe Japan; unfortunately my previous employer Dropbox did not let me transfer to Japan as there were no engineering roles in the Tokyo office. After being in Japan for almost 4 years now, and getting to know the scene much better, I wanted to revisit that article with updated advice.

In broad strokes, the overall steps are:

• Find matching open positions.

• Interview and get a job offer.

• If not on an unrestricted status of residence:

  • Your employer applies for a Certificate of Eligibility (COE), which can take a few months.

  • If on a tourist visa, at this point you must leave Japan.

  • Take the COE to the local Japanese consulate / immigration office and obtain a visa.

• Move to Japan if you aren’t living there already!

There are a couple of other great guides as well, such as from TokyoDev and JapanDev that detail how to find a tech job.

Permission to Live and Work in Japan

Getting permission to work in your field is very important. You can only work if your status or specific visa allows you to work in your field. If you already have a relevant work visa or unrestricted status status such as being married to a Japanese citizen, long-term resident visa, permanent resident, or are a Japanese national (as well as a few other visa types), things are a bit more straightforward and you can just directly look for jobs without worrying about your visa status.

Otherwise, for most people, getting a visa so you can actually move to and work in Japan is tied to having a job offer in hand, aside from some special cases, like a working holiday visa. There are a number of countries (unfortunately the United States is excluded) with working holiday agreements with Japan, and you can stay a year and do any type of work, as well as convert the working holiday visa to a work visa.

Another path that can be good if you aren’t confident in your Japanese skills, is to attend a full-time Japanese language school for at least 6 months (there is a minimum of 6 months to get a student visa, otherwise you can only come under a tourist visa), then apply for jobs while in school to convert the student visa into a work visa.

You can also come to Japan first on a tourist visa and look for jobs while visiting. Unfortunately, you can no longer convert a tourist visa into a work visa, so even if you manage to get a job offer while in Japan, you need to leave Japan, get the work visa, then come back to Japan.

The physical process is that with a job offer, your employer must apply for a Certificate of Eligibility (COE), which can take a few months, and once you have the COE, you convert that to a visa at your local Japanese consulate / immigration office. The r/movingtojapan subreddit is a great resource on visas and moving logistics, and they have a Wiki page on visas.

Looking for a job

If you’re not already living in Japan, one of the big decisions you have to make whether you’ll find a job while outside the country, or come to Japan first on a tourist visa or another visa. The big benefit of already being in Japan is that is it easier to network to find opportunities, and employers will more seriously consider your intent to join the company - I’ve seen situations where people don’t take the final step to actually move to Japan even after getting an offer. It also makes it easier to schedule interviews given that you can do in person interviews.

However, if you are on a short-term visa, then there is pressure to find a job within the span of that visa, and understandably it is disruptive to your existing life to come to Japan for an extended period of time.

If the company you are working for already has an office in Japan and relevant roles available, it is advisable to go through that path first assuming you like working for your company. It will be much easier that way to arrange a transfer instead of looking for a brand new job, and you will likely keep your equity grants even if you take a salary cut, and you generally will keep the option to transfer out of Japan with the same company if you end up not liking living in Japan.

There are a couple of questions that you should evaluate for yourself.

• What’s your experience level?

• How’s your Japanese level?

• What are you looking for culture, company, role, location and compensation wise?

Experience level: You’ll have higher leverage with more experience, especially at reputable companies, but the pool of jobs that meet your conditions will shrink as Japan is not near the US in terms of tech companies and available jobs. There are less companies willing to hire starter engineers directly from abroad, and compensation tends to be lower than other tech hubs around the world.

One option for getting your foot in the door as a new programmer is to go through a coding bootcamp, such as Code Chrysalis. They have good curriculum as well as partnerships in Japan to help you find a job.

Japanese ability: Speaking passable Japanese will open up more opportunities for you, especially if you have JLPT N2 or N1 level Japanese. Companies don’t necessarily require a certificate if you can obviously communicate fluently. I spoke a decent amount of Japanese before I moved, though not a business level. However, I purposely looked for companies that worked in English, because I didn’t want to tie my work performance to my speaking ability, as well as I wanted to avoid the infamous Japanese work culture. English as the official work language has a loose but not strict correlation with a more international work culture, which I was used to coming from Silicon Valley.

As an engineer or engineering manager, you are more likely to find jobs where you are not required to speak Japanese. In other roles, such as Product Manager, it is more likely that there are Japanese language requirements.

Salary: Compared to the US, tech salaries tend to be lower, but still very good for Japan. Personally, I took around a 25% cut in total compensation including equity compared to the Bay Area to move to Japan, and I’ve heard from peers they took anywhere from 20-50% pay cuts, but still the compensation is good enough to comfortably live even in Tokyo. You can view self-reported data for salary at OpenSalary to get points of reference. My personal opinion is that Japan is one of the best places to make a low salary as there are so many ways to live cheaply yet have a high quality life.

Finding Open Positions

You should make a list of target companies and open positions that you want to apply for. Personally, I have a high standard for my working conditions, knew that coming in with an experienced Silicon Valley background would allow me to find better jobs, and already spoke a decent amount of Japanese. I started my search from western Multi National Companies (MNCs) such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Stripe, Square, etc. that I knew had a presence in Japan, as well as Japanese companies who were known to have better compensation and working culture, such as Indeed and Mercari. However, these are not the only companies available, as there are a number of smaller Japanese companies as well as startups with open positions.

There are a few sites and communities that list or expose opportunities:

• TokyoDev and JapanDev focus on developer jobs and are foreigner friendly.

• Justa.io focuses on Japanese startups but also has some foreign companies.

• HackerNews Tokyo is a Slack community for tech folks in Japan and offers the opportunity to connect with people.

A number of western websites also list Japanese jobs:

• LinkedIn with your location set Japan, you can view open positions as well as be visible to recruiters

• AngelList has a focus on startup jobs, with most being global companies.

• StackOverflow

• The Japanese version of Indeed

• Glassdoor

A couple of tips: It’s better to be networking on the ground to find out what the best startups to work for and the headcount situations at major companies. Not every company hiring is listing positions on public websites. Some good meetups: HackerNews Tokyo has events every month or so, and other tech communities crosspost their events there. Venture Café Tokyo hosts Thursday Gathering every Thursday along with other events. Many programming languages have conferences in Japan as well, and attending or speaking at one of these can connect you quickly to companies. The major ones I can think of are Ruby Kaigi, PHPcon Japan, PyCon JP, Scala Matsuri, and Node Gakuen.

Always go through a referral, even if you don’t know anyone at a companies. Reach out people in your network who know people in your target companies.

In my case, I found 3rd party recruiters to be mostly useless. I tried going through Robert Walters as well as some recruiters who contacted me on LinkedIn, but they were either unhelpful or gave me poor matches. However, don’t totally write off recruiters - there are actually good ones out there who know what companies are good and also hiring. At a lower experience level, a recruiter can help package and match you to the right companies. At a middle experience level, most of the time you can just apply to companies directly or through a referral, but again, a good recruiter can connect you to startups that don’t appear on public job boards. At more senior experience levels, I know a few executive recruiters that can be quite helpful.

For me, finding the right job and actually moving was a long drawn out process. I was looking completely from abroad, with the occasional trip to Japan. Many companies I talked to were not looking for engineers in their Tokyo offices, and instead pointed me towards Singapore, which I was not interested in. I had many companies simply not response or ghost me after initial contact. I interviewed with a few Japanese companies with which I did really well technically, but failed mysterious on some cultural issue. I got stuck in headcount limbo multiple times where I had to wait for headcount at a particular company to open up. It took me from March 2019 to October 2019 until I finally got an offer that I really liked, with Stripe. Overall, I think Stripe was the best option for me at that time, in terms of compensation , culture, and mission. It took even more time after signing my offer in November 2019 to get the visa processed and to finally move over in March 2020.

The changes from then until now are that many US tech companies are in a headcount freeze and are not actively hiring. However, Japan has now opened up after the pandemic, and Japanese companies are still hiring, as well as a number of smaller startups. The startup scene in Japan is gradually growing as well.

I hope this guide helps people fulfill their dreams of moving to Japan with a fitting job! I firmly believe that if you can get a good visa situation, a decent job, and speak some Japanese, you can have a really great experience living in Japan. If you need further consultation, you can always reach out at [email protected], and I am personally connected to a number of tech companies, startups, recruiters, and interview prep services in Japan. Remember, you can also support this publication by becoming a paid subscriber or a Patreon!