Hello r/movingtojapan. I am currently thinking of pursuing my doctorate degree in Japan through MEXT Scholarship in about 1-2 years from now. I come from Social Science background (Economics, Management, and Marketing), so I plan to apply to professors at UTokyo/KyotoU/OsakaU/Waseda/Keio, which has great reputation in Social Science study. Currently self-studying my Japanese Language to around N2-ish level by the time I apply for the MEXT.
How good the prospect of life, study, and job market there (planning to go to academia/research field)?
5 comments
Have you ever actually taken the JLPT? Self-evaluation is **never** accurate.
N2 isn’t enough for doctoral studies regardless.
Edit: If your program is conducted in English (which is actually relatively common for post-undergrad) you’ll be fine.
A postdoc is very competitive, especially in social science field, and getting a permanent position is extremely hard, like only 6% get the permanent positions. Most of the postdoc positions are term limited and their average age is 37 years old, which says that the majority of them don’t get permanent jobs until late 30s. There are many documentaries about postdocs being hard to make ends meet, as the postdoc problem is the biggest topic regarding the japanese academia last 20 years.
I’m not trying to discourage you, but you should do more research about the postdoc situations. You can find a lot of documents published by various research organizations about this topic, and, if you are N2, you should be able to read them to know the current state of the issue.
Most PhD programs in Japan don’t need Japanese. This is because there usually aren’t classes and everything is research based. As long as you can communicate with your professor you will be fine. The ones that might require Japanese are either because of the subject or because the professor can’t speak English well.
As for jobs in academia, the market is terrible, especially for social sciences. Getting a job is all about connections and the number of publications you have. Besides that, it’s rough as a young professor to settle down because you will be applying all over the country and it’s common practice to change schools after five years “to help you grow”. But, it’s like that all over the world in academia. Consider that every lab produces one or more PhD students every year, but an assistant professor job for that lab only opens up every five or more years.
Getting into a PhD program might not be hard, as you said as long as your professor will take you, then that’s 80% of the way. Although getting a position in academia is the tough part.
There are a lot of people trying to get tenured professor positions and usually you will have to start at the bottom of the rung like being an assistant professor or lecturer. So being able to hold lectures and help students in Japanese will be necessary.
I think your experiences can be heavily impacted by the local work culture of that centre. I know some labs where PhD students who dont show up on Sundays can get a bad reputation, which is tremendously unfair, but other labs have healthier environments. You want to know the local conditions.