My story

When I arrived in Japan, I was what some call a “mid-career” professional, with an honours science degree and 11 years of experience in various aspects of software development. With this background, it would not be hard to find a job in the US, UK or Australia. But here, I faced the two common obstacles for foreigners in Japan: I hardly spoke Japanese; and I had no working visa.

I knew it would take a while before I could improve my Japanese to the point where it would help in my job hunt, so I decided to look for a job that required only English. After lots of research and emailing before I left, and a bit of legwork during the first week, I managed to get a verbal offer from a company after less than a month. Unfortunately, I was away travelling by this time, and by the time I returned a month or so later they rescinded the offer due to various company politics and so on. It took about two more months before I found another good company.

When I first arrived, I thought it might take 3 months to get a job; if I still had nothing after 6 months I would have to reconsider. In the end, it took about 3 months, as expected.

I’ve distilled my experiences down to a few topics. Lots of this stuff took me quite a while to sort out, much of it from various websites, so it should save you some time at least. In particular, it wasn’t easy to get complete and reliable information about working visa requirements and procedures, especially considering how crucial it is to get it right.