Right now I'm working in Japan as an ALT, but have been feeling it may soon be time to move on within the next year or two. I like living in Japan, and would like to stay, but I'm not exactly sure what viable career path there would be here for me, given my credentials (two liberal arts degrees and no real hard skills aside from Japanese). So, I guess I'm curious as to what advice people who have been down this road before have: what is the best place to go from here? Are there any decent career paths for staying in Japan? Is returning to my country (US, in this case), or even going somewhere else, actually better in the long run? Are there any easily obtainable skills/credentials I could attain to increase my prospects? I know translation/interpretation is often brought up, but I don't know much of its prospects for career advancement.

Brief Bio:
Education: 2 BAs (History & Japanese)
Certificates: JLPT N1, Kanken 2kyu
Work Experience: Tax Preparer, ALT

patriconia Wrote:Right now I'm working in Japan as an ALT, but have been feeling it may soon be time to move on within the next year or two. I like living in Japan, and would like to stay, but I'm not exactly sure what viable career path there would be here for me, given my credentials (two liberal arts degrees and no real hard skills aside from Japanese). So, I guess I'm curious as to what advice people who have been down this road before have: what is the best place to go from here? Are there any decent career paths for staying in Japan? Is returning to my country (US, in this case), or even going somewhere else, actually better in the long run? Are there any easily obtainable skills/credentials I could attain to increase my prospects? I know translation/interpretation is often brought up, but I don't know much of its prospects for career advancement.

Brief Bio:
Education: 2 BAs (History & Japanese)
Certificates: JLPT N1, Kanken 2kyu
Work Experience: Tax Preparer, ALT

The Tax Preparer experience looks good. It's hard to find experienced tax people.

I don't know about Japan but in the US I think a business/accounting/finance/law path would be best in the long run. Is it possible for you to get an accounting designation? What about a law degree?

(As far as being a translator or interpreter, when I was a senior in high school I briefly considered that, but then rejected the idea because I realized that since I only spoke English as a native (and learned the other languages in school) there would always be people a lot better at those other languages than me. I.e., I took Russian in school, but people who grew up speaking both English and Russian at home (and can speak both like a native) are a dime a dozen. Ditto with French, Spanish, German, Italian etc. etc. I think that in order to have any cred as an interpreter you need to speak at least two languages with native fluency).

Actually, I have heard of quite a few people who've worked as a translator/interpreted with Japanese as a second language learned later in life. And they only had some college Japanese plus maybe a year or two living in Japan.


The Yen Press translation editor I talked to had only maybe a year or two of time living in Japan and only ever got JLPT N2, moved back to the states, worked as a translator for Yen Press and is now an editor.
I've actually heard of quite a few people who got in with similar credentials. Because translating things into English means the English is more important than the Japanese. Although you are still competing against people fluent in both, but even then, having a high degree of knowledge about the material you're translating is even more important yet; whether it be anime, technical stuff, legal stuff or business stuff.


I dunno if you watch much jvloggers on Youtube, but Sharla (Sharla in Japan) worked as an interpreter for a business in Japan for awhile. Now she prolly just lives off youtube royalties lol. She attended college in Japan for a year and was living there maybe 2-3 years total.

Victor (Gimmeabreakman on youtube) worked as an Eikawa(sp?) teacher for awhile, then opened his own school in Japan. He's been living there for 20 years or so.


So there's quite a few options. And I'm hearing more and more people say that you can just get a job, any job, in Japan, pretty much the same as the US. Having relevant schooling or experience in whatever field you apply for is going to be required though, same as in the US.

In the US, any business that deals with Japanese companies is going to need an interpreter/translator, possibly several. What kind of "fluency" they require you to have is obviously going to vary.


1. I would definitely broaden your horizons. You're thinking very inside-the-box.
2. Don't discount any possibility before you try. Think about what you might like to do and find out how to go about getting into it.

Some important questions:
1. How old are you?
2. Did you graduate from a "prestigious" university?

If you're 25 or younger and graduated from a "prestigious" university, then you have good shot at a position as a "new graduate" at many companies, especially those openly seeking foreigners (Rakuten, Uniqlo, etc.).

On a separate note, are you interesting in accounting (I ask because you mentioned you were a tax preparer)? I don't know the details and background behind this, but I've heard that a lot more Japanese people are taking the CPA exam now. I suspect it's because many Japanese companies are pushing to globalize. Anyway, if you're interesting in accounting, then it's worth looking into.

I'm 27, and did not go to a prestigious school - just two state colleges.

The tax preparer position was something I got into because I needed a job and that was an opportunity that came up...not because I really have much interest in it, so admittedly that's not really an avenue I've put much research into. I guess I haven't really considered things from a very broad view, which is why I'm seeking fresh perspectives to look into.

I've also thought about going back to college, but at this point I'm not really up on it, especially from the financial side.

Finding a new job will depend almost entirely on how hard you want to look for a position and how good your connections are.

If you have enough years as tax prepayer, then you can probably leverage that for some kind of finance job, but you'll have to send out some resumes and see what happens. I doubt you'd be able to do the same job in Japan that you did in the states since Japanese tax law is going to be completely different. But you might grab something if the job is international facing like vileru mentioned, but there will probably be examinations needed to do it.

Translation isn't really a great job to move into. The pay isn't much better than being an ALT, and may in fact be less than an ALT in some cases as well as being more hours.

The only recommendation I can give is that you tap your connections and see if anyone has anything. After that, try checking out http://www.daijob.com and see if you can find any finance jobs that way. I recommend starting your search now. If you are JET, then check out the JET Alumni association, there might be some leads for a job there.

Really you are in the position I was in about 6-7 months ago. I decided to quit being an ALT and I wanted to do programming but after weighing it, and sending off some resumes, I realized I should probably just return to the states and get some experience and plan to try again in 2 years.

Couple of things here

Looks like your Japanese skills are good to go so you're not so far behind in the game as it may feel.

Simplified steps

1. Get yourself to Tokyo or Osaka - you may have to keep teaching to do this
2. Figure out what you want to do with your career - I recommend getting the book "What Color is your Parachute". Read it from front to back and complete all the exercises about finding your "path".
3. Hit the ground running - send resumes everywhere, knock on doors, hit the big companies and the small ones, and network at every opportunity you get

An alternative path, one that I took myself, is to go back to grad school to get a masters in something like business (MBA) and try to land an internship in Japan.

What I see coming up in these postings is....business business business.

Everyone I know, friends/family/cousins pretty much all of us work at large companies in business (finance, HR, purchasing (supply chain)) etc. If I were hiring right now, the only thing in your background that would interest me is your tax experience. The BA in history isn't worth anything in the business world unfortunately.

A friend of mine did his BA in Political Science then immediately got his MBA because he admitted right up front "I can't get a job with a degree in Political Science".

patriconia Wrote:Right now I'm working in Japan as an ALT, but have been feeling it may soon be time to move on within the next year or two. I like living in Japan, and would like to stay, but I'm not exactly sure what viable career path there would be here for me, given my credentials (two liberal arts degrees and no real hard skills aside from Japanese). So, I guess I'm curious as to what advice people who have been down this road before have: what is the best place to go from here? Are there any decent career paths for staying in Japan? Is returning to my country (US, in this case), or even going somewhere else, actually better in the long run? Are there any easily obtainable skills/credentials I could attain to increase my prospects? I know translation/interpretation is often brought up, but I don't know much of its prospects for career advancement.

Brief Bio:
Education: 2 BAs (History & Japanese)
Certificates: JLPT N1, Kanken 2kyu
Work Experience: Tax Preparer, ALT

Just wanted to say a couple of things. 1. Congrats on your outstanding ability in Japanese. 2. While I'm not able to help you with your question, I subscribed to your thread because I myself was in a similar situation and had the same question.

I was an ALT for a while and while my Japanese was never as good as yours, I struggled with the "what to do next" question quite a bit. Japanese culture was definitely interesting to me, so I didn't want to lose that. But the language and culture also seemed unrelated to any other career options I was interested in.

I eventually went back home to grad school in a technical field, and made that my career in my own country. A further complicating issue for me was that the work culture in Japan (work-life balance) was not attractive to me, so I didn't really want to work for a Japanese company.

Good luck!

On second thought, I think that I do have a suggestion for you. It seems to me that people who are fluent in Japanese and love history should consider, well, becoming professors of Japanese history. A while back I read a few award-winning books by Japanese historians and found them fascinating.
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

If this career path sounds interesting to you I recommend a) contacting the authors for career advice b) compiling a list of reputable departments in that field and contacting people there to learn more.

In any case, please keep us informed on what you choose as a next step in your career.

I can't really give you any specific advice, but have a look at the following website:
http://shinpaideshou.wordpress.com/
It aims to show possible paths for people with a BA in Japanese. Maybe looking over the different opportunities helps you to gain a picture of what you can do. Good luck!

ariariari Wrote:It seems to me that people who are fluent in Japanese and love history should consider, well, becoming professors of Japanese history. ... If this career path sounds interesting to you I recommend a) contacting the authors for career advice b) compiling a list of reputable departments in that field and contacting people there to learn more.

Becoming a professor is right up there with becoming a professional footballer or rap star in terms of how unlikely success is. I think the advice you'd get would be similar to this:

1) make sure you have amazing references (do extra-curricular activities to ensure you have stellar references), in order to
2) get into the most prestigious university possible (Yale, Cambridge, ...). Then,
3) write a wonderful dissertation on a topic that has broad appeal. This will help you
4) get a university job (incredibly rare).
5) Work like hell for a few years, publishing and teaching, so that you get tenure. If you fail, go to step 4 and try again. And if you failed at step 4, you're back where you started, looking for a career (and a mountain of debt if you don't have family support).

Just because they don't look like pro athletes or do drugs like pro musicians doesn't mean your professors didn't single-mindedly sought and achieved the impossible. And they're all too ready to encourage you to aim for tenure because they need grad students to do the work and pay their salaries .

And as far as getting your history book published... . Exercise: go to any famous school's history department website's faculty roster, and note the books they've published, and how many of them target the popular audience, like the two great books you cited, @ariariari. Most professors write books/articles to be read by other profs (or grad students). The system doesn't really encourage or reward engaging with the lay public, which is why so many history books these days are written by non-academics (trawl Amazon's history best sellers).

My advice is worthless (or potentially worse: harmful), but maybe trying a bunch of different things to broaden your experiences would be valuable. Is op interested in programming (or web design, or graphics, or computery things)? I didn't realize how nice Khan Academy and Code Academy had gotten. It probably takes a couple of hours to get through the first few lessons and see if web programming is something you'd be interested in. Anyway, it's much easier, faster, and cheaper to get into Google.jp than tenure

Given your advanced Japanese abilities, I want to mention that you might be interested in applying for work at Japanese language learning publishers.

Also, although translation is not so great in terms of pay, as vix86 mentioned, interpreters can make enormous sums of money. However, you'll have to get professional qualifications, and, if you want to have good odds of making a lot of money, then it's a good idea to go to a prestigious institution where interpreters often get picked up by multinational corporations, the U.N., ASEAN, etc. I can't recommendation any specific places, except for the Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS), which, in the US, has the best track record in this regard. In general, I suggest being wary if an institution isn't forthcoming about where their graduates have found employment. If you have any reservations, I recommend emailing students in the program to get firsthand information.

I like ariariari's suggestion regarding the history route, too. You could either apply through MEXT to attend a Japanese university or apply to universities in your home country. Even if you return home to get a PhD, I'd assume most of your field work would be in Japan. Plus, thanks to the Internet, you don't really need to be on your campus after you finish your course requirements (at least in the US). As for financing the degree, if you get your degree at a reputable American institution, then your tuition will be waived and you'll receive a stipend for at least 5 years (usually $10,000-25,000/year depending on the location and institution; funding tends to be better the more urban and the more prestigious the institution is).

As for MEXT, there are several MEXT scholars who frequent these forums, so they should be in a better position to give details. If I recall correctly, MEXT covers all your tuition, but you have to take care of your living expenses on your own. But I may be wrong, so it's best to wait till someone who's knowledgable chimes in.

[Zgarbas]

MEXT covers your tuition, and gives you a monthly sum which is enough to cover living expenses without much worry (~150.000yen, it depends on your area and degree, but not by much). However, the application process lasts more than a year and I think you have to go to the US to apply for it since you have to be present for the exam and interview. Not sure how it would help you career-wise, though; as a student you can only work part-time and almost everyone I know works just your basic conbini/cafes/eikaiwa baitos (even well into their PhDs), and most people I know who stayed on after getting their degrees just got regular 社会人 jobs.

.

aldebrn Wrote:And as far as getting your history book published... . Exercise: go to any famous school's history department website's faculty roster, and note the books they've published, and how many of them target the popular audience, like the two great books you cited, @ariariari. Most professors write books/articles to be read by other profs (or grad students). The system doesn't really encourage or reward engaging with the lay public, which is why so many history books these days are written by non-academics (trawl Amazon's history best sellers).

The reason for this is that the books are usually a more polished version of dissertation topics and/or scholarly papers. Therefore, very narrow and directed towards academics. But that brings up the topic of wether it's even realistic to think you can make a living from writing in today's market. I just heard a multi NYtimes bestselling writer claim that it will soon be impossible to make a decent living as a writer and that he never considers writing a book that he can't also option as a film.

So yeah, just more grist for the "professor-as-celebrity-without-the-large-paycheck-and-endorsement-deals" mill.

[Zgarbas]

Arupan Wrote:@Zgarbas: Do they really give you ~150,000 yen at Nagoya University!? Area does seem to matter, but I thought pretty much everywhere is around ~145,000 (+X if you get in grad school). And good luck on your entrance exam, by the way (just read your blog). That thing is HELL! ^^; (the Japanese language test isn't really that hard but writing a well-structured essay on something random they give you from your entire area of study in a super-limited time frame on the other hand is... simply... just no comment)

As a Research Student you get 146.000, and it gets increased to 152.000 as an MA Student (I think you get even more as a Ph.D). Yeah, I guess it's more 145k than 150k, I just tend to round up ^^'

Thanks! The Feb. admission is rather different, in that it doesn't have the essay, just the proposal&interview + Japanese language test... but they make the test extra-hard. We've had years when no one passed it, even though all applicants are Chinese people who majored in Japanese and got the N1 ages ago >.< The actual topic for the essay wouldn't really be a problem, but my essay writing skills are awful so I didn't take the Sept. admission to not embarrass myself =P.

Thanks for the advice so far, everyone. Looks like a lot of the advice is to cast a broad net in a job search, and not to undervalue the tax experience.

I have thought about the grad school/professor route, but reading about the glut of graduates entering the market and slim prospects for really making it up the latter have kind of deterred me from going that route.

Try a NZ or Australian university if you want to go the professor route, you actually get paid decently for being a GTA while working for your MA/PhD.

[s0apgun]

Computer programming. You could teach yourself Java or Ruby to a pretty advanced level on your free time for the next year and try to land a developer job in Tokyo. The salaries are great and you could work within a start up atmosphere rather than some corporate hell. Check out http://www.tokyodev.com/

I actually did dabble a bit in programming in high school...basically just learned a few basics. With regards to computers, other than that I took a network admin class in HS (though never got certified). Although, I have to wonder even if I did manage to teach myself to code, how much would I be hindered in a job hunt by a lack of any academic background in it?

s0apgun Wrote:Computer programming. You could teach yourself Java or Ruby to a pretty advanced level on your free time for the next year and try to land a developer job in Tokyo. The salaries are great and you could work within a start up atmosphere rather than some corporate hell. Check out http://www.tokyodev.com/

Don't suggest this unless you also mention that getting the proper visa COULD be problematic.

The Engineer Work Visa which programming falls under required you have a degree within the relevant field OR have 10 years of professional experience.

I've read that some of the process comes down to how the company writes your visa letter to immigration and also how the visa worker for that feels. But there is a checklist that the person will go down and check off whether you meet the requirements. Simply being good at programming might be enough to get you hired at a company, but I'd personally worry about having my visa rejected and then being told I have 90 days to figure out what the hell I'm doing and then get out of the country.

I emailed a guy that runs a blog about engineers working in Japan about my concerns on this since he's done the visa process both as a worker and an employer.

I'll post the emails.

vix86 Wrote:Greetings!

I recently ran across your blog while doing some searches on dev jobs in Japan. I really like a lot of the content in your posts and many of them focus on questions I've always had but had trouble getting answers to.

A big one is the whole "Can I get a dev visa with a humanities degree?" I saw you actually tried to answer that in your post "Getting a Japanese Visa for a Programming Job with an English Major." The post answered some questions but it still leaves some questions that I wonder if you might be able to answer having worked as a dev and also started your own company.

I left Japan 5 months ago and return to the U.S. to hunt for dev. employment figuring it'd be quite difficult to get work in Japan. I've been coding for years (since junior high) creating open source stuff but ultimately ended up with a B.S. in Experimental Psychology. My plan has been to secure 2 years of professional dev experience and then return to Japan and hunt for work but after seeing your post I have doubts.

1) The engineer visa has a requirement where the person's degree has to be in the same field OR have 10 years of professional experience. Is there leeway in how sponsoring companies can 'justify' these requirements? Ex: Showing elective course work in the target field, etc.

Your post said a "specialist" type could still pursue work mainly using English language skills, but that sounds a lot like saying "you can't code but you can help with explaining English documentation to devs, or localization. Both of which aren't very appealing prospects when what you really want to do is build solutions to problems with code.

2) Would a simpler solution be to just get a Masters in the field via online courses or the like?

Reply Wrote:Hey J,

Japanese immigration law (and law here in general) isn't black and white. It tends to be viewed more as a set of guidelines, and a fair amount of leeway is left to whoever is interpreting it. This makes it hard to give answers on whats allowed and what isn't.

The Japanese government may accept your degree as it's a BSc that is tangentially related with software development. I don't think it is possible to say if you'll get accepted with it or not until you actually apply though.

For now, the main thing I'd focus on is making yourself an attractive developer to companies. This will help you regardless of whether you end up in Japan or not, and the more attractive you are, the more
willing companies are to hire you.

Here's a good article to read:
https://training.kalzumeus.com/newslette...th-nothing
The guy who wrote it also worked as a developer in Japan, but in a much more traditional Japanese company, so don't let his asides about how hard it was working as a Japanese salaryman is - I think his experience was atypical of expat developers.

EDIT: s0apgun, you actually linked to the guy I emailed. Lol.

Arupan Wrote:Yes, you have to be in the US in order to take the exam, interview, etc... for MEXT.

Not necessarily, you can apply to a university and get them to recommend you for it.

Just as an aside, there are plenty of jobs similar to ALT available that you can do until you find something better. Teaching English in Japan pretty much has unlimited job opportunities, so it's not like you have to worry about finding a job before your visa expires.

I dunno how much teaching appeals to you though, but you could work as an ALT, at an Eikawa, or do private tutoring either in person or online. Which I would definitely be doing on the side for some extra coin if I were you, provided you have the time for it.
You could also get into freelance translation/interpretation/tutoring and be your own boss, although it might help to have some experience working for a company beforehand, and there may be some kind of certifications you need for those...I'm not really sure.

I'm assuming you've heard of gaijinpot.com


Assuming you don't absolutely have to get a job in the same field as your degree, I'd think the most prudent thing to do is to figure out what you'd like to do and go from there

While teaching in Japan may have unlimited variations, there are an awful lot of companies out there that will absolutely screw you over, and very, very few that will treat you decently. Beware, and do your research.