At J-List we genuinely want to help people all over the world connect with Japan in a variety of ways, whether it’s through the country’s delightful snack culture, through tools to help you learn the Japanese language, or ways of getting closer to Japan through its pop culture. I often get questions from readers who are interested in the idea of coming to Japan to work, and I do my best to give what advice I can.
While most English-native foreigners in Japan get jobs as teachers of English as a Second Language, I’m not too happy about recommending this path: the competition for jobs is fierce, yet salaries for ESL teachers have not risen over the past 20 years, and may have actually fallen slightly. I consider ESL teaching to be acceptable for a limited number of years as a way to come to Asia, but don’t plan your career around it, and avoid over-certification, e.g. getting a master’s degree in TESL or something useless like that.
Happily I think I’ve hit on a good path for some who want to come to Japan to work: web and graphic designer, or web programmer. While most of us may have the impression that Japan is a technological powerhouse, the truth is that Japan is nearly always behind on important trends, something you may have noticed when visiting websites of Japanese companies, which usually look like they were designed in 2006 and sometimes still use Adobe Flash (bleah).
Basically, the fact that Japanese programmers and designers who work with the web are generally well behind the cutting edge creates an opportunity for foreigners who possess these skills to possibly work in Japan without having to bother with the less-than-optimal world of English teaching. If you’ve got good skills and a portfolio and knowledge of tools like HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, AJAX, Objective C etc. and can create websites for the platforms in use today (including mobile, especially mobile), you may find your skills are in demand over here in Japan. Perhaps you can build your skills out to the level which would allow you to really do well here, picking exactly the job you want.
In order to work in Japan you’ll need some basic things, including:
- A 4 year degree from a university. Sorry, but you need this to get a visa, unless you have a J-wife, in which case, high five! (Note that J-wives are generally more expensive than a 4-year university education.)
- When I started teaching ESL, I happened to get a “certification” for teaching which was just a piece of paper I got from my university after taking four classes. It got me my first job so it was worth it. If you can get some kind of certification or any kind of “plus alpha” (as the Japanese say) that shows you are familiar with the technologies involved, it might help.
- Japanese skills, at least JLPT level 4 or 3. There’s a lot of stress when Japanese must use English at work, and the smoother you can interface with Japanese people in a work environment, the more employable you will be.
- Have real experience and a portfolio to show. Make sure your skills are demonstrably above the average in Japan, which are likely to be behind the current bleeding edge. (Yet be humble about your skills, as you would around Japanese people anyway.)
- Always invest in yourself by learning the next cool technology and putting it to use to improve your skills to dazzle Japanese companies who need up-to-date web skills bad enough to hire a barbarian, I mean a foreigner. If you’re a European whose first language isn’t English, I’ve heard it’s a good idea to follow the English web design blogs as you can learn the most from them.
Please note that this post is about an interesting “opportunity” that I happened to observe in the course of running J-List, but you should of course do all the proper due diligence and look into the employment situation dispassionately. Japan is a wonderful place, and I love it to death, but even if you get the web design field in Tokyo, you may experience some frustration by being a foreigner in a Japanese organization. Japanese companies aren’t the most understanding places with it comes to foreigners (it’s not their job to be, of course, as it’s their country), and their organizational structure may cause you to want to go live as a hermit in the mountains and write a manifesto against technology. A web designer who worked at J-List had experience working with large Japanese companies in the past, including one that involved a famous mouse, and the hours of meetings about how to approach even simple tasks was incredibly frustrating for him. If you find yourself working at a bad company, try to upgrade to a better one.
You should also look critically at the salary situation. Japan has basically come off a 20 year recession, or general period of economic non-growth at any rate. As a result, salaries for a web designer are likely to be much higher in, say, San Francisco or London than in Tokyo, though the cost of living will be lower here. Make sure you don’t make decisions that affect your economic future for the wrong reasons, like making Japan into something it’s not in your mind, or choosing with your emotions rather than your head.
Anyway, I hope this was useful to you! There’s a high demand for technical skills in Japan, and if you’ve got these skills and the desire to learn the language and become part of the culture, perhaps you can find yourself in Japan sometime in the future!
