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A comment on Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in. Parent comment

Re:Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in by bedobi on Saturday January 01, 2022 @02:38AM (#29756384)
As others have pointed out, you probably don't want to be working for businesses that are run in the Japanese way, but there are plenty of both expat and native run businesses that aren't. The pay will be low but Tokyo is incredibly cheap so it's not really a problem locally. (but it is a problem in the sense that whatever you save won't be worth much elsewhere if you move back to the states or whatever later years later)

It goes without saying your experience will be incomparably better the sooner you learn Japanese, and it's nowhere near as hard as popularly portrayed.

Give it a shot, you only live once.

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Re:Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in by nonbirithm on Saturday January 01, 2022 @03:18PM (#29762255)
I've tried in the past, but didn't hear back from most of the places I applied to. The ones that did respond suggested that I look for a domestic role for the same company because my Japanese wasn't strong enough. I hadn't taken the JLPT at the time but I had been learning the language for 7 years at that point, and I would guess I'm currently at an N3 or N2 level. It does makes sense since they would say that since the JLPT doesn't test for language production, only interpretation.

It's likely that I'm just looking in the wrong places, though. About all I understand how to do is to just trawl through public job boards looking for open positions. I still think it would be nice to work in Japan, even if it's only a thing that lasts as long as I can bear it. However, the pandemic has set back so much as visiting Japan as a tourist by several years, so I don't know how that bodes for working there.

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