People living outside of big cities, what kind of job do you have?

33 comments

1. Live in Hayama, do freelance consulting work for mainly American customers.

   If you end up getting married to your gf and get a spouse visa, look for remote jobs with international companies hiring worldwide. If you can manage to get a job paying in USD you can have a very happy and comfortable life in Japan.

2. Inaka can be very different to live than in Tokyo. Not just the convenience but also locals attitudes and way of life. You may have done already but if not, it’s good to test out living in Fukui, Akita or where you are thinking of for a week or so (if you can wrangle that much time on holiday from your company).

3. [deleted]

4. I work for a cultural research think tank / consultancy type place. The work is fully remote. I think the big motivator for you to learn Japanese should be that if you speak both English and Japanese well, SO many more doors will open for you. The companies that are culturally internationalized so work in Japanese and English are more likely to have a more western working style, offering flexible & remote work. Hope this helps

5. I still live within 90 minutes of Tokyo and just go to the office a couple times a week and treat myself to the green car on those days so I don’t hate it.

6. you can move to other large cities that dont feel crowded. Morioka, Mito, Sendai, Tsukuba, Nagoya etc. Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto are all tourist places and is crowded beyond capacity but there are many large cities that are capital cities of their prefecture that give you the feel you want without being thrust into the inaka dealing with mukkade.

7. You might like Nagoya as a good mix of both. Hardly any tourists and has good Shinkansen connections to other parts of Japan.

8. Best to follow others’ advice and visit Fukui or Akita before you pack up. Fukui is not much cooler than Tokyo, and the humidity is just as oppressive, minus the population. Winters are a lot of fun as well.

   No offense, but unless you have a niche you can start on your own in English, an N4 level won’t take you far beyond possibly opening your own Eikaiwa.

   Unless you’re in IT or working for a company that allows remote work, opportunities are quite limited.

9. I have a full remote job now and am also planning to move to a remote island like Rebun, Yoron, or main islands in Ogasawara. If anyone here is currently a hermit on one of these islands, please let me know and share your experience as well.

10. Almost 2h from Tokyo in Kanagawa. I go to office in Tokyo once a week. Other days I’m working remotely in a tech support job. Moving away from the big city hellhole was the best decision for my peace of mind.

11. If you’re looking to move as far out as Fukui or Akita, it would be wise to follow the advice of going to spend time there first. You have to be prepared to make trade offs. The cost of living will be lower but it may not be enough to offset the salary decrease. Also, consider that owning a car in Tokyo is often optional, but that is not the case in smaller cities and rural areas.

    If this is something you are serious about, I would use the goal of moving out of Tokyo as a reason to spend more time studying Japanese. Your career prospects will be much more limited without it, and it may be worth delaying the move a little bit so that you aren’t rushing into a potentially challenging situation with relatively limited tools.

    In the meantime, go all out looking for fully remote work. Opportunities definitely exist but they will depend on your skillset. Again, use this as motivation to study Japanese. It may be necessary for the interview even if the actual job is almost entirely done in English.

12. The quality of life is great in small/medium sized cities. You can live in the middle of the main city for cheap (it’s equivalent living in Shibuya) and everything is close and accessible. Less population so you won’t get long waiting times in the clinics, public transportation is less crowded as well. Due to the city being small you can use your bicycle to go anywhere. People are friendly as well, I didn’t face much racism – although they do stare sometimes but you’ll get used to it and start feeling like a celebrity.

    For the pay, yeah that’s tough. In my case I work in IT for a company based in a big city which happens to have a branch in a smaller city. So the pay isn’t **that** bad, but I’ve seen people in IT in this city working for minimum wage and having trouble saving. But some people who manage to get a full remote job are living here making Tokyo grade salaries so they’re saving a lot of money as rent is cheap. These people are mainly in IT and translation.

13. 32 F, I work in STEM on the experimental side, in English and in person (we caaaaan work remote some days but the default is to be there in person). 

    I live in a 100k-inhabitants that is 90 min by train from a big agglomeration. My city has the lab I work at, and a handful of factories / labs from different company R&D departments.

     I have a 40-minute bicycle commute every day, along a small river canal where I can see all sorts of birds and plants and fields. It’s quite enjoyable. It would be 20 minutes by bus, but we only get one bus per 45 minutes and the bus is often late, so it’s rather annoying. Cycling is nice. A bit intense in the current weather, mind you, but I’m Mediterranean, I can handle it.

14. I live in Tottori and work in exports related to F&B industry in quite a big sized company. Good working conditions (for being Japan), and Tottori is a great place to live if you like nature and peace.

15. Moving is fine but as others said why not move to a smaller less crowded city like Fukuoka? The main issue from your post is you do not specify what type of work/skills you have. This is the main issue regarding work outside Tokyo.

16. I’m in Hamamatsu working as a programmer. I rarely use Japanese at work because my manager is American, and the engineering team are mostly also foreigners.

17. Learn japanese my man. At least get to everyday conversational. No one gives a shit about your grammar as long as you can converse without problems (contrary to what the JLPT crowd will have you believe 😂).

18. I live in a small town called Bizen (30k people I believe) in Okayama. I work in the shipping department for a sweets company called Fukuido and Couture Fukuido Tokyo. However it’s a special case because it’s a family business, and my department consists of me, my wife, my sister in law, and my father in law, and we all speak fluent English. However wife and sister are bilingual (japanese first). The management department and kitchen all speak japanese, and it’s absolutely necessary for working in those positions. I can read hiragana and katakana, and a handful of kanjis relevant to my job, and know about 1000 words that get me through work without issues, so it’s not a problem in my case.

    Otherwise, there are other English speakers in town, despite it being so small. And there’s a few white English speakers that work at city hall, which was quite surprising. However they definitely have to have college level japanese for a position like that I figure. There’s more to Japan than Tokyo, but I can imagine it’s difficult to find other work outside of the counties capital without special skill sets.

19. I have a friend who quit his conventional job to go become a fruit farmer.

20. I live outside the cities. I work remotely for a company in Tokyo. So I make Tokyo money but live in the sticks. Really is the best for savings. I translate and interpret. I make considerably more than the average person. Yes, I need Japanese. I have N1.

    Consider finding remote positions.

21. I’ve been living here in fukui since 2017 and I love it.

    The good things are: I’m 31 with 2 kids, 2 dogs. It’s perfect for a quiet family life. There aren’t enough foreigners that people treat you differently or try to speak English to you anywhere ( except in one specific city ), barely any young people besides at Donkis parking lot, no loud cars, no bikes. There are a total of 3 police officers looking bored at you from their respective kobans. The streets are wide and spacious, everytime I travel to a bigger city it feels claustrophobic.

    The bad: Last 3 years haven’t been that bad, but… The snow here is insane. Unless you live by a street that pees or have the money to avoid some of these steps, it’s 3 months of cleaning the snow by shovel, pure core strength training. Usually 1 whole month you have to shovel your house/mansion entrance, pray that your company hired a company to clean the snow or else shovel your parking space, clean your car/maybe shovel again to leave, shovel your house entrance again so you can park, repeat.
    Also, its pretty boring by itself. Usually to have fun, it’s always road trips to Ishikawa, Obama, Awara, etc. I wouldn’t recommend to young people. The only thrill of living here in fukui is driving, as we are ranked dead last in Japan in driving skills. I think I’ll die everyday. The absolute worst of the worst. I remember the menkyocenter guy spending 30 minutes just talking how we HAVE to follow the rules, fukui is ranked last, etc, he basically begged us to stop for pedestrians.

    If you have any specifics you want to ask, feel free to. I can’t give much information about jobs because I work at an auto factory, doubt that’s for everyone, I take home around 35万〜40万after taxes and for a family of four here I usually spend 22万 a month with living expenses.

22. I work 100% remote in game dev.
    About an hour and a half from tokyo in northern Saitama, I can see Gunma out of my window tho.

    Feels like a great mix of close enough to Tokyo if we need, and then also close to mountains and nature too. Nice community here.

    Shinkansen and JR plus tollway options, so access seems great. But if needing to commute to Tokyo from here multiple times a week it may feel a tad far.

    It seems like with your skill set you could also work remote, it’s just finding a company that is open to that option.

    Good luck!

23. Come to the inaka, it’s quieter here, the people friendly, the food is great and the cost of living is low.

    At the momement most of our income come from a rental property in the USA. So I don’t have a offical Job. Spouse teaches english, and I a “dependant”. Job came with housing so we have a pretty good deal. We’ve also looked at buying a house which is quite low compared to Los Angeles prices.

    We do live in the capital city so it is a tad bit more urban which we like but you can drive 10 minuites in be in endless rice fields. So it really depends on how rural you want it to be.

    It is so increibly quiet here. I actually started crying the first day I moved in because I was unaware how I was just used to the constant noise of cars, trains, busses, airplanes, hellicopters. And Just how anxious constant noise makes me. You can walk for 10-20 minuites without hearing the sound of a car at night.

    You may find that you can live on less and not be freaked out about it.

24. Sure, a smaller city might be nicer, but I find most to have
    – bad jobs (not just low pay, also no WFH, long hours),
    – few jobs (most SWE jobs are in Tokyo),
    – high car dependency (sub 1M cities stop being walkable, and for a fulfilling life you need a car)
    – small international community (I can’t exactly go to a Rust meetup in Morioka, expect only to find temporary stay English teachers)

    So yup, I’m happy with Tokyo – found a nice place with lots of parks and rivers. The only alternative would be changing countries.

25. Kobe is a great place to live. Not as dense and crowded as Osaka but only twenty minutes away. Not rammed with tourists on little narrow streets like Kyoto, but only an hour away if you want to visit. You can cross the central area on foot easily. Mt Rokko runs behind it so you always have access to great walking, hiking, and biking, plus you can always see some greenery. The adjacent cities (though they’re more like suburbs) of Ashoka and Nishinomiya have some really nice residential areas.

26. Getting decent stable pay in “inaka” is difficult for everyone outside a small privileged minority of large land owning successful farmers, ex-exec retirees on ancestral property etc. I have some Japanese friends who are highly qualified, experienced overseas and bilingual – but work for hourly rates barely over the baseline of this area. Good local jobs are hard to find.

    Also typical “country life” in Japan is more like a sparse urban environment generally. Where I am there are no big cities nearby – but all the usual chain stores, conbini are still all around – so it’s like a spaced out cookie cutter impression of anywhere else in Japan.

    And there is still a morning “rat race” of people speeding like crazy in their kei cars and trucks to start work (all at the exact same time apparently). Many work monotonous factory jobs on the town’s outskirts where ninja, bears and real nature once roamed.

    Rural Hokkaido, which was always my dream (I’m in Honshu), has real INAKÀ. But living there would require deep pockets to get started and some kind of steady remote income either way to pay “the man”. Unfortunately even if you’re self sufficient and “off grid”, the tax system effectively winds you back in to the shit. Japan is unlike other countries who tax mostly according to income/wealth and don’t twist the dagger on those with low incomes … especially to pay for nonexistent services in low income isolated areas.

    My mind boggles to understand where the “city” tax is spent and see this as one of the major impediments to living in rural areas (along with all the insane “community” ball busting tasks). Looking at the local grandiose 24/7 air-conditioned city hall “castle” that towers over every other building in this small town, I guess most tax is being kept by the bureaucracy to feather their own nest and that of their in-circle OG business buddies.

    So the town (other than city hall) is dilapidated and on a crutch, nature is in retreat, the income opportunities are scarce, the work like serfdom….but the taxes are still high and there isn’t much “slow life” to be had.

27. speaking for the real inaka,

    There are always jobs like farming, carpentry, fishermen, construction, forestry etc. . you’ll be able to get a job even if you don’t have experience.
    Its what i’ve been doing for a few years, you’ll earn about 18man but thats more than enough to live well ( my rent is 2 man for a newly built house).
    Or work remote or maybe for the yakuba?
    Money should be your least concern, you can’t really spend it here.
    My japanese is really not good but living here forces me to learn.
    As a graphic designer you should probably stay close to some bigger cities unless you want to change your whole lifestyle.

28. If you’re a visual designer there will be a lot of opportunities to work remotely as a freelancer. Though if you haven’t plan to get married and get that sweet spouse visa yet, you’ll need to have at least one company to sponsor you and have at least 2m of annual income. And if you want to work with japanese client you’ll need to grind your japanese for sure! Good luck!

    Ref: https://ib-tec.co.jp/career-advice/how-to-stay-in-japan-as-a-freelancer/

29. Living in the inaka as a foreigner, you generally have three options.

    1. Teach English
    2. Find a remote job
    3. Learn Japanese to a professional level

    We all know the state of the English economy, it ain’t good. Remote jobs are out there for the right skillset, but many are actually hybrid, not remote. Learning Japanese is going to open you up to the most variety of options, and it’s a worthy goal anyway, so I’d buckle down on that. It will also help open you up to more remote jobs, if that’s what you want.

    Personally, I was a JET, so I’ve already done number 1. I tried 2, but I don’t really have any IT skills and being all the way in Aomori means that any sort of hybrid job with an office in Tokyo is out.

    Ended up doing 3. I studied my ass off during COVID. Still am. Got really lucky with my local connections got an interpretation gig which I was barely qualified for, and then they hired me full time in an internationalization job. My professional Japanese is still weak so I generally don’t answer the phone, but I do a ton of translation and write emails and documents in Japanese.

30. I don’t quite understand how simply living in Japan is not enough of a motivation to improve your Japanese…

31. Fukui is hotter than Tokyo in summer, you need to do more research.

    Source: I’ve lived in both places.

    PS: if you want cooler summers, avoid the Sea of Japan and stay in the pacific side.

32. I live in Shikoku. I trade stocks and my wife works part time in elementary school. If you can’t speak Japanese well, I think the only available jobs for foreigners around here are english teaching, factories, service industry, and maybe farming. If you can speak Japanese and have relative experience, I think it is possible to find a job in the “big” cities here, though the pay will probably be a lot lower than Tokyo.

33. To get rid of the temperature in summer, you will have to go to someplace higher up in the mountains, which will generally be a location with more of a domestic tourist oriented economy. Summer homes, and resorts where the Japanese go to escape the heat.

    Just going to a smaller town than Tokyo will not help you escape the heat. I have been based in Nagano, and a “small town” in Aichi both are still damn hot in the summer during the day. Nights are cooler. I do not have AC in my house in Nagano, but with windows open and plenty of fans, it is fine – unless you are working outside or moving around inside. Then it is just as hot. In Aichi I don’t notice the heat because I am in AC rooms or car 90% of the day.

    Since your skillset would hopefully have you working at a desk doing your design work, the major difference in heat you would notice is just cutting out the commute. So long as you are stationary in an AC room the heat does not make a difference.

    I am unclear what you mean by escaping the “urban life”. A medium sized town is no different than a similar sized area in Tokyo. If look out your window, it will look the same – cars and buildings – the same chain shops. The only difference is how far you have to go to get into a mountain, and also how far you have to go to get to more variety of cafe, and if you have reason to take the train, how far you have to go to the bus stop or train station.

    My place in Aichi is the same as my place that I used to live in Nakano-ku, Tokyo, except that it is further walk to the train station and I can not walk to the supermarket, but the view at any given location on the street is the same. The train station is just as crowded. There is lower population density, but they are all riding on fewer trains and busses.

    Look at google map street view. Drop the little man into any location in the middle of Fukui, then drop them in the middle of someplace in Tokyo outside Yamanote. The view does not change much. Just buildings.

    If you live in real Inaka, it will be a different lifestyle.

    As far as work, if you have a visa, and are willing to hustle a bit, there are always opportunities to work for yourself. With design you would want to seek out local businesses, foreign owned is a good place to start, and just get yourself known to people. Get it known that you are looking for work. It will take some time to build up a portfolio of clients.

    If you are looking to be employed either for design or in something that is not related to design, the options in a medium size city are similar limitations as anywhere – just that there are fewer the further you get away from urbanization. This is where the “cost of living” might come in though. Salary might be lower in the smaller towns because for many Japanese people who are living at family home, or own a house that is much cheaper than in Tokyo, the cost of living *is* cheaper, so wages are also slightly lower.

    For you, unless you are in true inaka and have your own house or are living in someplace for free, cost of living is not much lower, really. You will have a larger apartment for the similar price, or a same size apartment for less, and if you have a car (depending on how far rural you go you will need a car) the parking spot is cheaper but then you have to add the car costs. It would be actually cheaper for me to live in Tokyo, outside the Yamanote, or in Nagoya, than it is for me to live in a “less expensive” small town outside of Nagoya because I need a car here.

    All other things cost the same. Food costs the same. All chain restaurants cost the same. Electricity costs the same. Cell phone plans cost the same. Any savings would be simply from not going out for expensive date nights.