This is not the first time we have heard the opinion that Asia is an underrated destination for relocation. Our hero moved to Japan knowing only Konnichi wa. And he found a job at a local IT giant, and then switched to developing his own startup.
Of course, this did not happen at the snap of a finger. But it turned out that the country is not as closed as it seems at first glance: the locals are friendly towards visitors, and there is a need for emigrant specialists. Although it is better to learn the language and take into account Japanese specifics. We asked about her: how IT companies are structured, is it easy for a developer to find a job, is it necessary to know Japanese, and how does one generally live under a cherry blossom branch?
How I ended up at the end of the world
Hello, my name is Danya Chepenko. I was born and raised in Moscow - and in 2021 I moved to live in Asia.
I have long been interested in finding out how life works here. For a Westerner, any Asian country is an incomprehensible and alien world, almost another planet. And the more stories I heard about moving to the East, the more I wanted to check out how life really is here - and this can only be done by immersing yourself 100%.
Everyone has their own reasons for relocating: some are looking for a higher salary, others are looking for new complex tasks. The most important thing for me was to understand how local technologies work: I even started a channel in which I write analytical notes about the Asian IT market.
I was finishing college, so I had two options: look for a job or study further. I chose a master's degree: I went to Hong Kong, and from there I moved to Japan.
I studied, interned at a fund as an analyst - my visa did not allow me to work full time. The Chinese IT market is very strong, the conditions are harsh, there are many top engineers. For example, one of my friends said that before Black Friday, employees of companies like AliBaba can be in the office all week. And if you plan to develop your product in the future, it’s almost impossible to squeeze into the market.
While I was thinking about what to do after my master’s degree, I was unexpectedly approached by a recruiter from the Japanese company Yahoo! Japan - and offered to work with them. I thought: why not? And he moved.
<commercial break> According to g-mate statistics, at least 30–50% of employers are ready to consider remote work, and relocation is the second most popular among locations. And the coronavirus that is boring everyone is not an obstacle: during the pandemic, both in Russia and abroad, hiring has accelerated 3 times.
Register with @g_jobbot, relocated vacancies that suit you will be sent to Telegram.</рекламная пауза>
Haircuts with massage
In hairdressing salons, common rooms dominate, without division into women's and men's. The range of services is standard: coloring, cutting, styling. During the provision of a haircut service, after washing, a very high-quality and long massage of the scalp is mandatory, for at least 10–15 minutes. A variety of hair and scalp treatments are also very popular: masks, collagen smoothing.
The Japanese have a different hair structure from ours; they are smooth and hard, which, together with the rich black color, seriously complicates the dyeing process. Many young Japanese women love to wear lighter “European” tones, but are forced to settle not for blonde, but for brown and red tones.
A rather rare, but typical for Japan phenomenon is small hairdressing salons with two or three chairs, in which elderly masters cut hair exclusively for older and conservative men like themselves.
Local specifics: how Yahoo! Japan and local IT companies
Yahoo! Japan, it would seem, should be associated with a famous search engine - yes, it is. But the Japanese branch has historically developed along a completely different path: from the American Yahoo only the name and technology licenses. And by Japanese standards, the company is incredibly young: it is only 30 years old.
It sounds funny, but it's true: compared to other companies. For example, the Sumitomo Group conglomerate is older than the United States, founded in 1630 and still alive. There is a tea company that is almost 1000 years old, and even Nintendo was founded in 1889.
It sounds unusual, but this is how the peculiarities of local traditions manifest themselves, and they are reflected in the conduct of business. Conglomerates rule the roost in Japan and severely fragment the market. This raises the barriers to entry into the banking sector or the food sector - for example, into the soybean or rice trade. All the space is occupied by large companies, startups can only integrate into this pipeline to a minimum. The exception is if a new segment arises, such as the Internet.
Yahoo! Japan is a subsidiary of local large conglomerate SoftBank. SoftBank deals with almost everything related to telecommunications in Japan, and its venture investment fund is the largest: $100 billion. SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son is a visionary who made a name for himself by investing a couple of million in AliBaba. In 1994, he suggested to the founder of Yahoo that he develop the search market in Japan using American technology. It turned out to be a joint venture: the income was divided among themselves, but everything about food was on the Japanese side.
The search for the original Yahoo ceased to exist, and the Japanese branch in its country became the number one consumer company. They are strong in e-commerce, payment business and advertising - this is the core of the business, and in addition - a question-and-answer service like Quora and various consumer applications: calendar, email client, video hosting. Along with Rakuten, Yahoo! Japan became the main IT company in Japan - and not a single conglomerate could absorb them.
Another feature of Japan is money and payment systems. For many reasons, credit and debit cards have not taken root here, including because of the highly developed small businesses. Acquiring with a commission of about 1.15–2.5% did not stimulate the transition to card systems at all. In addition, part of the taxes cannot be covered by tips from clients (as happens, for example, in the USA); in Japan, leaving a tip is not accepted and is not even encouraged. Therefore, cashless payment is rather rare: outside of Tokyo, not every supermarket allows you to pay by card.
I found the following statistics on the Internet: it explains the dislike of Japanese small businesses for cards
Therefore, in 2021, the country began to develop a payment instrument - an alternative to acquiring: this approach is more convenient for small businesses. Yahoo! Japan, together with Softbank and PayTM, launched the PayPay application. This is a super app: the main function is payment, transferring money via QR codes. A marketplace based on Yahoo Shopping was developed inside PayPay: there I worked on recommendation systems. The position was at the intersection of Data Science, product analytics, ML - I wrote models, was engaged in Ad-hoc analytics, and data visualization.
Although Yahoo! In many ways, Japan is head and shoulders above all other companies; it is one of the first IT giants in Japan. Therefore, all processes are in Japanese, employees are Japanese-speaking, and foreign employees are about 5% out of 10,000 locals.
English in Asia: necessary, but not sufficient
In Hong Kong, I worked with Hong Kongers and Chinese - in principle, they speak English well. But internal communication took place in Chinese. At first it isolated me from my colleagues, but then I got used to it: I learned Chinese, I know the basics. The complexity of the language is shocking at first: there are 6 tones in Cantonese. That is, the same word can be pronounced differently, and because of this take on different meanings. I learned a little Chinese so that I had enough vocabulary for daily work, but I still understood about 10 percent of the conversations at the water cooler. But maybe that’s good: these dialogues could simply be irrelevant.
I really only knew how to say hello in Japanese, but I decided to take a risk and move to find out how the IT sector works here. The company had cool onboarding; they paid me for individual lessons with a tutor during working hours, and then for group lessons. This helped me get involved in work processes.
English is very bad in Japan. A Japanese person you meet on the street most likely knows the language to a minimum and will be able to help show you the way, for example, but no one wants to speak English. All expats echo each other that you need to learn the local language and there is no way around it. But in Japan, in my opinion, this is necessary more than anywhere else.
Classes with native speakers did not adapt me to the working environment 100%. Many meetings were held in Japanese, and I understood a third of what was said. But everything related to business processes was on the presentation slides, and you can translate them yourself without any problems. And at technical meetings we tried to communicate in English - there were no problems.
At some point, I was the only foreigner on the team among five locals. I thought that it was inconvenient for them to switch to English just for my sake, and suggested that they communicate in Japanese in work chats. It turned out that this is not so difficult: most often a limited list of terms is used, my task was to remember certain language structures and minimal grammar. So I made a list of the most common turns of phrase and learned them.
But still, I felt uncomfortable working in a team consisting only of Japanese. Yes, it's interesting to see what you're capable of. But joining the professional community is difficult, and to grow vertically, an impeccable knowledge of Japanese at the business level is required.
Plus, I didn’t like working in a giant corporation: clumsy processes, a large layer of technology, the feeling of being a cog in a soulless machine - it’s very difficult to influence the development of a product. It is not clear whether you develop as a specialist in such conditions.
Therefore, in parallel with my work, I always looked at what projects might be in demand on the local market - I wanted to use the accumulated knowledge about Asia and post-startup. An acquaintance wrote to me, whose project had recently launched and unexpectedly took off, asking for help. I got involved and soon quit to develop his startup together. We make a platform for immersive video communications: a third of users are from Japan, we work with Sony, Panasonic and Sega.
Scope of aesthetic medicine clinics
The Japanese never come here in advance: the mesotherapy we use as a preventive measure is incomprehensible to them. People come to aesthetic medicine clinics with serious age-related problems.
The Japanese are characterized by a finely wrinkled morphotype of skin aging. It is very effectively corrected using laser technology, threads and injections. In terms of popularity among clients, the undisputed leader is laser techniques, especially in the field of combating pigmentation. Threads are much less in demand. And injections occupy a few percent of the market.
These circumstances, together with the traditional aversion to skin damage, have greatly reduced interest in plastic surgery. It is treated with great caution and only a few resort to it, and only in the presence of serious age-related changes that cannot be corrected by other methods. But among young people there is a demand (not massively, but often) for changing the shape of the nose and eye shape to a more European one. The large, “non-narrow” eyes of popular anime characters also stimulate this demand.
Business processes and careers in Japan
Japan is amazing in terms of business processes and management. In my opinion, their features originate from the industrial progress that began in the 70s.
Then companies like Toshiba, Panasonic, Toyota appeared in Japan. For example, Toyota's management system has become legendary. Everything was very structured, people basically worked in one place until they got old.
Companies created such a motivation system that it made no sense to move anywhere further: the longer you work in a company, the easier it is to get a promotion.
And besides this, if you entered a good university, your career was practically determined for the rest of your life. But before entering university there is a wild battle for cool private kindergartens. They give advantages first when entering school, then from school to high school and then to university. This is very expensive, not everyone can pay for the training, but some seem justified: some companies hire people by checking them purely formally, for adequacy - no strict tests.
Therefore, in Japanese IT companies you can find many employees without computer science education. This is how the hiring system of classic Japanese corporations works: you hire a person from a university and train him yourself.
This approach still exists in large corporations today, but it used to be particularly influential. On the one hand, this is what keeps employees going: some of my colleagues worked for 5-6 years in one place and had no intention of moving anywhere.
On the other hand, the created motivation systems also gave rise to problems: the entry threshold was very high, and it was almost impossible to get into a Japanese company without a junior position from the outside. Now I don’t really understand why everything is arranged this way. But due to the fact that the companies were just emerging, it was possible to formulate a plan that they follow and build a strict hierarchy.
Another oddity of Japanese companies is rotation. You can work as an engineer for 6 years, then they will transfer you to the HR department to a senior position, and then they can put you in the information security department. As I understand it, this is done in order to develop leaders who see business from all sides.
Now the country is becoming more and more attractive to expat developers. There are several reasons for this:
- More companies are using English as their first language in communications. Perhaps, so far only at the developer level, at the business level Japanese prevails. But at the level of creating a product, English will be enough. These are large companies, for example, Rakuten, Mercari (like Avito in Russian realities), deep-tech startups. American companies are also represented here: Google, Amazon, Indeed, they actively hunt people from abroad and transport them to Japan.
- The Japanese government has long advocated increasing productivity to stimulate economic growth. Even with efforts to recruit more women, retirees and foreign workers, Japan's demographic shift threatens to stall GDP growth in the next decade. The country has a low birth rate and an increase in life expectancy - therefore, the number of working-age population has decreased to 59.7% of the total. By 2050, the number of inhabitants will decrease from 128 million to 109 million people. Therefore, there are not enough personnel from the domestic market - but the economy needs to develop, and companies are turning to the external market: there is a demand for specialists from outside.
Rakuten set the trend for expansion. Their CEO, Hiroshi Mikitani, is a very adventurous person by Japanese standards. One day he decided to develop the company as an international one and translated all communications into English. Nobody understood this in the business community at the time, but this undertaking slightly opened the borders of closed Japan.
Thanks to him, a lot of foreigners appeared in the product development environment. It seems to me that there are about 30 guys from Yandex in Rakuten, many from India, Europe, and the States. Their recruiters now use graduate recruitment: they intercept students from St. Petersburg universities, among others. By the way, Hiroshi Mikitani published a book, and it was even translated into Russian.
More and more vacancies contain no Japanese requirement, although in my opinion, it is still better to learn Japanese if you want to grow your career.
An experienced specialist can qualify for a good salary such as $150,000 per year - depending on what you do. I know a lot of specialists who didn’t come as juniors or even mid-levels—they’re actively looking for people like that here.
The interviews are structured approximately the same as ours - 3 technical, 1 with a recruiter. I got a job through a hiring event: you go through an initial interview, and then they offer to come over the weekend to discuss technical issues. 2 interviews on hard skills on Saturday, one behavioral interview on Sunday, and in the evening I already had an offer, the visa took two months to prepare.
If we talk about the feeling of inclusion in the local community, we need to separately discuss what this means. I don’t have much time to go somewhere, and the needs for communication are not the same as at school or college. But there is still a community: for me it consists of both foreign and Japanese friends.
Of course, the easiest way to find a common language is with expats. When we meet one of the visitors on the street, we immediately nod to each other: there is a feeling that we understand each other. It’s always easier to start a dialogue with them: “where did you come from, what do you do?”
Most likely, he works in IT, but there are also many scientists here. Japan has large academic budgets, for example, one of the most heavily funded areas is the study of VR, AR, biotechnology, and neuroscience. They give a lot of money for research; this is basically not the case in other countries. Budgets are good and attractive, strong scientific universities, for example, Riken.
Why Japan
- Japan is a very stable country. It so happened historically that it was closed to the entire European world for a very long time and developed separately. The world's geopolitical experts can predict the development of countries in Europe or the United States, but when it comes to Japan, it seems to me that it is very difficult for them to make predictions. And this is great - a unique world, besides, Japan’s economy is in third place in terms of GDP, and the country is not very stormy in terms of morals and social life.
- It feels like people respect personal space. In the metro it is not customary to even answer phone calls - this is bad form. Not to mention pushing other people or leaning on them.
- Purity. I don’t understand why Japan is so clean, but other countries around the world are not. My theory is related to the fact that in Japanese houses it is not customary to wear shoes, because of this you need to keep the floor clean, and this attitude is transferred to the surrounding reality. At the same time, there are no trash cans on the street or they are very rare. In Japanese there is a separate verb that means you take your trash with you. Not an expression, but a verb: like “walk”, “go”, “eat”, only “take the trash with you”. At first, it’s probably annoying: where to throw away the coffee cup? You put it in your briefcase and go home with it. The waste is sorted, with different colored bags for different types of waste. There is no centralized garbage chute where you throw everything you find, and the bags are taken from special places on the street. This approach probably won’t appeal to everyone, which is why some people can’t get used to it and leave Japan.
- Cool food. For several years I have not found a tasteless food that I did not like.
- The nature is picturesque - well, this is not a secret at all, sakura, mountains, temples. Wherever you go, even to the outback, it’s all pretty. In terms of living standards and development, the central cities and the provinces are not much different. Of course, there are also many options for spending time outside the city: hiking, mountain hiking, cycling.
BuddyPhones School+ - the best children's headphones
Gadget manufacturers continue to adapt to new living conditions with coronavirus. The Icelandic company Onanoff presented children's headphones at the conference, which received a CES 2021 award.
BuddyPhones School+ are great for distance learning: they have three volume levels and are safe for children's hearing - the power is limited to a safe level of 85 dB. The headphones have a sensitive microphone that picks up your voice and reduces background noise.
The headphones are made of safe materials; the headband is claimed to have a long service life. They fold easily and are convenient to store. There is a built-in BuddyJack adapter that allows you to simultaneously connect 4 cables and conduct a group lesson. The set includes replaceable ear pads, which are made of moisture-wicking and hypoallergenic materials.
The headphones can work offline for up to a day; both wired and wireless connections are possible. Available in 6 colors, you can purchase additional stickers to make your headphones unique.
This is our selection of the most interesting new products from CES 2021. Which new product from our selection interested you the most and why? Which new products would you like to buy and why - write in the comments.
Why NOT Japan
1. Many things work here differently than in other countries, and you just have to accept it. Especially when it comes to service and quality of services: most likely, no one will listen to your feedback, even if the complaints are quite reasonable. If the Japanese approach fails to be adopted, a person will either live in a feeling of isolation, or become disillusioned with the country and leave.
2. Japanese is difficult, but you need to know it. This is perhaps the biggest challenge that can put off a potential expat: there are no cheat codes to learning a language. You'll have to spend time and learn. And without a tongue, most likely you won’t be able to stay for long
3.
It will not be easy for a foreigner to build a vertical career in management. It is possible that this minus is temporary: as I noted above, the country is changing and is looking at some processes more openly. For technical specialists, everything is similar to other countries, but there will be many management difficulties.
<commercial break> According to g-mate statistics, at least 30–50% of employers are ready to consider remote work, and relocation is the second most popular among locations. And the coronavirus that is boring everyone is not an obstacle: during the pandemic, both in Russia and abroad, hiring has accelerated 3 times.
Register with @g_jobbot, relocated vacancies that suit you will be sent to Telegram.</рекламная пауза>
JLab JBuds Frames - wireless speakers with eyeglass mount
These are miniature Bluetooth speakers that can be attached to any glasses, both sunglasses and vision-correcting ones. The devices are installed on the arms and can operate independently of each other.
The speakers don't completely cover your ears, so you can listen to music and be aware of what's happening around you at the same time.
The devices have built-in batteries that provide up to 8 hours of continuous use.
