Throwaway account and this will be a longer post so if you are interested please read on!
Some background – I’m an American guy, early 30s, have worked in Japan just over 10 years. 5 on JET, 5 at a “famous Japanese company” in Tokyo. I generally like being in Japan and enjoy my life my here. I speak Japanese, have Japanese friends, can eat natto, and am far removed from a lot of the complaints that I hear here and elsewhere from other western expats in Japan.
Mostly my concern is regarding my work and pay situation.
I won’t get into the job description too much but I’m working on a product sold outside Japan. No translation and no English teaching, mostly marketing and product development.
I entered as a shinsotsu seishain/new graduate and understood well before then that it could be disastrous. I was taking a big pay and work/life balance cut to do so. I wanted to get my foot in the door in the industry and thought I’d move on in 2-3 years. COVID hit, and I wasn’t looking to rush into instability and have stayed there for better or worse. During COVID and even now our product sales were smashing records, and my role, responsibility, and work hours grew, but my pay didn’t by much. I was doing 10-12 hours of work almost every day for the past 4 years, not to mention frantic calls from clients outside of Japan at very late/early hours off the clock. The take home pay including bonus after taxes etc. was 4.5-5.5M JPY. This isn’t particularly bad for Japanese “new employees” but is low given the physical/mental toil and contribution to the company. There were almost never any nomikai with co-workers because most of them are working in the office until 10 or later every day.
Only in the last year or so did we finally add members to our team (including several assistants to me which helped a lot) so now I’m going in for much more reasonable hours and have almost completely mitigated the “work after work” I ended up doing quite a bit due to global time differences. I earned the trust and respect of the kyokucho and all those people and they genuinely listen to my advice and proposals when making important business decisions.
This is all a significant improvement for me except that the lower overtime hours are reducing my pay substantially, and I have no desire to be in a management role at this company. The managers work basically 24 hours a day and must truly sacrifice their social/family lives for the work. They do get a better base rate/bonus pay but they do not get overtime pay. I’m friendly with some of them and they share the numbers with me openly. The common complaint is once they get promoted, they get slapped with a significant pay decrease along with a ton of new responsibilities and people to manage. They’re all good and intelligent people, the amount of stress they exude is just alarming and a huge demotivator for me and likely most of the other employees. I was practically told I will get promoted next year if I get a good performance review this FY which is basically guaranteed based on Q1 sales alone. I’ll still likely need 3-4 years before promoted to the “manager” pay grade.
I’m able to live comfortably but not able to save/invest as much as I want to, and of course it’s gotten worse with the USD rate and inflation in Japan. I guess I’m at a kind of crossroads where I can either continue down the path with this company and have a stable but deeper decent into madness or take a risk and change things. I’ve looked around online for other jobs but haven’t found anything that seems really good. I’m concerned about having to start it all over and being in a potentially ever worse work environment. I’m not really thinking about going back to the US right now even though I could definitely earn more. There’s really nowhere I want to be in the US as my parents have passed on, I’m comfortable with my SO in Japan, and all the social/political madness there is pretty draining.
tl;dr What do you think I do based on below:
**Good**
-Guaranteed lifetime employment in contract
-Interesting job content, a lot of people would consider it a “dream job” based on this alone
-Generally good work environment (recently) – Good coworkers, lenient work hours as long as we get what we need finished
**Bad**
-Low pay
-Bonus heavily dependent on things I have no control over – company/group performance, department performance
-Would say grueling hours, but this has improved lately, however wouldn’t be surprised if it picked up to insanity in the following months
I get the easy response is “if you don’t like it leave” but I actually do like it, and I haven’t found anything better. I know I’m the only one who can make a decision but just looking for some opinions or advice. Thank you for reading.
by No-Media-592