Hi, my office currently have a plan to hire a regional manager guy to bridge between my country and japan. I think my skillset crossed all marks except proficiencies in japanese language. If you guys have an experience about this, what type of japanese language level should I achieve ?
My field would be a software agency, the target to get the offshore client from japan, my main company HQ was in shinjuku, but now I reside on the children company in SEA, to live in japan would be my lifelong dream.
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**How much japanese language needed to survive in a japan workplace ?**
Hi, my office currently have a plan to hire a regional manager guy to bridge between my country and japan. I think my skillset crossed all marks except proficiencies in japanese language. If you guys have an experience about this, what type of japanese language level should I achieve ?
My field would be a software agency, the target to get the offshore client from japan, my main company HQ was in shinjuku, but now I reside on the children company in SEA, to live in japan would be my lifelong dream.
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I think this is a better question for your internal recruitment team. It’s really impossible for us random internet strangers to say. In general you’d need equivalent to JLPT N2 (you don’t need the certificate per se, but its a convenient measurement we can use for this discussion). But if you’re going to be managing Japanese folks who don’t speak a lick of English or interacting with customers they may want someone with native level Japanese.
Going the other direction, if they’d be having you manage foreign talent they may not require you to speak any Japanese at all. Certainly my manager doesn’t speak a word of Japanese, and neither do the various product owners I interact with. But I am quite far removed from our customers.
Imagine the situation were reversed. How much English would you want that person to be able to speak? If you’re not there then you’re not ready.
A job as a regional manager is going to require a lot of paperwork, so it’s important to keep in mind that, in addition to kanji being a thing, there are several significant differences between written and spoken Japanese. N2 means that you know over 1,000 kanji and can read magazines without too much trouble. Business Japanese means understanding the idiosyncrasies of business email. It’s doable, but you need to be realistic about the timeline here.