What underrated jobs can a foreigner with really good Japanese get in japan that no one really talks about?

I always hear about teaching jobs and an IT specialist I think it was but I don’t hear of anything else. I want to work in japan in the near future but are there other jobs you don’t really hear people talk about more that you can get in japan as a foreigner if your japanese is at a jlpt n2-n1 level?

3 comments
  1. If your Japanese is N1 level then you can basically do any job that you have the skills for. The key in that case, if you’re competing for a Japanese-language-only job, against other native Japanese speakers, is to look for ones where your English skills/bilingualism would give you an advantage.

    So that means looking at US/international companies with offices in Japan, companies that do a lot of overseas business/work with clients outside Japan, that sort of thing.

    I had friends who worked at some of the big consulting firms, for example, and they hired a lot of international people.

    So the best thing is to focus on what jobs you have the skills to do (maybe even working some years at home to build up experience) and then figure out a way to do that job in Japan.

  2. If you have skills you can do just about anything. I interviewed a couple accountants recently, both non-Japanese, not that they’d need to speak any other language except on rare occasions. Tokyo is fairly multicultural these days. Of course, with just average soft skills and some business/office abilities, you can do “overseas sales,” which is an extremely broad category that covers everything from bus. dev. for Japanese startups and routine office work for multinationals and a whole lot of other roles. Some of them pay well and are rewarding, and some are terrible. It depends on the culture of the firm and a few other factors too.

  3. You may have better luck (it was more than ten years ago in the wake of the financial crisis after all) but my experience was that speaking Japanese doesn’t really qualify you for many great jobs on its own because there are already 125 million Japanese people who speak Japanese very well. The natural focus is on things that also require your English skills, but they seem like obvious ones: teacher, translator, interpreter, etc. If you have other unique skills, obviously that will open doors in Japan just like it does at home. I gave up and now I am a computer programmer in the US with Japanese skills of rather limited practical value.

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