Hello!
I originally posted this in r/japan, but I was told to create a post here instead.
I am a PhD student who has been entertaining the idea of doing a postdoc in Japan (in 3-4 years from now). I acknowledge that a lot may change by then, but I’d like to be as informed as possible. I found a few posts regarding JSPS on this subreddit (as well as on r/japan), but the most recent relevant one is from 2 years ago, so I thought it would be better to create my own.
At this stage, my main questions are the following:
1. Are there any other postdoctoral fellowships/programmes, apart from JSPS ([https://www.jsps.go.jp/english/e-fellow/](https://www.jsps.go.jp/english/e-fellow/))? It seems that their ‘Standard Program’, which has an acceptance rate of roughly 10%, is what I should be looking at (my research category would be ‘humanities’).
2. How do you go about finding a postdoctoral position? Am I being delusional in thinking that there should be a way to browse/search specifically for postdoc fellowships? The closest thing I could find is the JREC-IN Portal, but it seems more job-oriented, and I am not sure whether the postdoc positions listed there would even be eligible for a JSPS fellowship. Furthermore, if such a website doesn’t exist, then how is one supposed to contact a potential supervisor and discuss their research proposal? In one of the other posts, people were talking about the ‘cold email approach’, but this seems a bit odd and rather inefficient to me—am I supposed to start sending out emails to random professors in my field of research, without even knowing if they (and the universities they work at) are looking for postdoctoral applicants?
For context, I am British, and I’ve never lived/studied in Japan (I’ve only visited a couple of times). My Japanese is intermediate, but I will obviously work on improving it in the next few years, if I do decide to go to Japan.
I welcome any advice and opinions. Thank you!
4 comments
If you want to get paid, JREC-IN or the JSPS PD fellowship is your best shot.
To apply for a JSPS PD fellowship, you need a host professor. Not just as a requirement but to give you advice on your research plan. As you noted, the JSPS fellowships are very competitive.
The postdocs on JREC-IN are typically paid positions. You don’t need a JSPS fellowship to be a postdoc. Professors have grants and budgets and they can choose to use some of their budgets to pay for a postdoc. In this case, they would post it on JREC-IN. On a side note, JREC-IN is amazing. Almost every academic position all across Japan is posted there. It’s a one stop source for academic jobs in Japan. I wish other countries had a website like JREC-IN.
The easiest way to get a postdoc position is by knowing a professor. Ask your supervisor if they have friends in Japan. They probably do. Or try and talk to professors at conferences. A lot of the postdocs that came from my lab were people who my professor met at a conference.
Otherwise, you are stuck to cold emails. I get cold emails all the time from students requesting for me to supervise them. It’s not strange. It also shouldn’t be that “inefficient” because there can’t be more than a handful of full professors in Japan in your exact research area. Maybe you are at the beginning of your PhD, but by the end, you will find that PhDs are normally very narrow. So, the number of professors that can support your research is actually quite small.
Anyway, just explain your intentions and provide a research proposal and your CV. Try and only contact full professors. Assistant professors can usually not take any students/postdocs and associate professors can only sometimes do. It’s normally up to the full professor of each lab.
Also, a side warning, in humanities, a lot of postdoc positions are unpaid and part time. In hard sciences, they are normally paid though.
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If you are British, you can apply for the JSPS through your home country, which has a higher funding rate. For example, if you apply from the US the funding rate is more like 25 percent instead of 10 percent for the “open call” JSPS applications
cold email approach can work. Or go to conferences and try to meet Japanese profs there.