Essentially I’m looking to become a therapist, I’ve been in school for this for a year or 2 and one of my dreams has always been to move to Japan. The problem is I can barely speak Japanese so the only people I could help would be people who speak English fluently and so I think it could be really hard to work as a therapist over there. What are your thoughts, is this a possibility?
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6 comments
If you wanted to be a licensed therapist you’d need to pass the licensing exam. If you wanted to be an unlicensed therapist then the only rule is that you don’t use specific words in your signage and advertising. Of course, an unlicensed therapist would not be able to take national health insurance.
https://www.imhpj.org/faq/
There would also be the question of what visa you’d use. As you would not be licensed in Japan, you’d not be able to get a medical services visa.
If this is a path you’d like to go down, I’d strongly advise you to work on your Japanese. JLPT N1 would be the bare minimum along with heaps of industry specific terms. It’s not impossible, but you’re looking at a decade of study easy to get yourself ready for it.
Why a therapist in Japan? How would you expect to be able to relate to people and all the complexities of their lives that are entrenched in a culture you are likely very unfamiliar with, the social mores and subtle ticks that go along with that, and expect to be able to offer them advice? In a language you profess to not speak nonetheless?? There are some mighty pipe dreams on this sub, but this is really not pragmatic in the slightest. Sorry OP
Please read the [“Doctor” FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/movingtojapan/wiki/doctor) about [medically related jobs](https://www.reddit.com/r/movingtojapan/comments/6vh3xn/re_possible_to_be_a_foreign_md_in_japan/) in Japan and the previous posts specifically about [working as a therapist.](https://www.reddit.com/r/movingtojapan/search?q=therapist&restrict_sr=on&include_over_18=on&sort=relevance&t=all)
If someone barely spoke your primary language, how would they fare in the same career?
Over at r/Japanlife there are people looking for English speaking psychiatrists and therapists all the time. To me, it seems like there is quite a demand for an ex-pat therapist. I wish I had access to one because my Japanese is purely awful. Also with the rise of online/remote therapy, you could probably find work outside of Japan if you had to.
side note; There is one ex-pat psychiatrist around the Osaka/Kyoto area that gets denounced as a fraudster on r/Japanlife all the time he seems to be the only English-speaking mental health professional around.
You could probably be some kind of counsellor or therapist for gaijin but I doubt it’d be easy to get enough paid work doing that to sponsor a visa.
If you studied Japanese really hard maybe you could be a functional therapist in that language, but then there are probably a decent amount of Japanese people doing that already.
Even then, unless you are going to go through Japanese medical school you’d not be able to prescribe meds, and as much as people here do want and need therapy, they also want and/or need the meds too.