Moving to Japan to work in tech: what I’d tell myself in 2016

I moved to Osaka in 2016. Coming here was about mahjong, and my first jobs showed it: part-time work, then a job as a parlor “member”, the staff who run the floor and fill empty seats at the tables. In April 2017 I got my first office job, in customer support at ZenMarket, a cross-border e-commerce service. That turned into marketing, then frontend engineering, and since 2021 customer success and go-to-market at Vercel, fully remote from Osaka for a company headquartered in San Francisco.

None of that followed a plan. If I could send a note to myself the week I arrived, this is what it would say.

The Japanese that matters at work

The JLPT is multiple choice and never asks you to speak or write. It’s a useful line on a résumé and a poor predictor of how you’ll do in an office, because work asks you to produce Japanese: write the email, answer the chat message, explain why the thing is late.

What I’d practice, in order:

Reading. Most of an office day is reading: chat threads, specs (仕様書), meeting notes (議事録), internal wikis, contracts. You can get through a conversation with context and good will. A ten-page spec has to actually be read, and kanji speed is what separates people who can work in Japanese from people who can chat in it.

Business writing. Japanese emails and chat messages follow a pattern, and the pattern is learnable in a couple of weeks. A handful of phrases carries most of it:

Phrase	Roughly	When
お世話になっております	“Thank you for your continued support”	Opens almost every business email
恐れ入りますが	“Sorry to trouble you, but”	Before a request
ご確認のほどよろしくお願いいたします	“Please take a look”	Closing a request
承知いたしました	“Understood”	With customers and seniors, instead of 了解です
取り急ぎ	“Quickly, for now”	A short reply before the full one

Keigo. Keigo, the honorific register, has three layers: teineigo (丁寧語, plain desu/masu politeness), sonkeigo (尊敬語, raising the other person) and kenjōgo (謙譲語, lowering yourself). You need teineigo everywhere and the other two with customers and in writing. You can learn the grammar from a book; reading who is above whom in a given room takes longer. Nobody expects a foreigner to be perfect, but people do notice whether you try.

Working the floor of a mahjong parlor means polite Japanese with customers, spoken fast, for an entire shift. As schools go, there are worse.

One more habit: give the conclusion first (結論から申し上げますと, “to start with the conclusion”) and report early, even when there’s nothing good to report. Hō-ren-sō (報連相: report, inform, consult) sounds like a corporate poster. It’s also the fastest way to earn trust in a Japanese team.

Rirekisho and shokumu keirekisho

Most Japanese companies ask for two documents, and people coming from abroad tend to put all their effort into the wrong one.

The rirekisho (履歴書) is a standardized form: education and work history in date order, licenses and qualifications (your JLPT level goes here), a short motivation section (志望動機) and, on most templates, a photo. Fill it in cleanly, typed is fine at nearly every tech company, and don’t spend a weekend on it.

The shokumu keirekisho (職務経歴書, the career history) is the one that gets you an interview. It’s free-form, usually two or three A4 pages, and organized by role. A skeleton that works:

職務経歴書
2026年9月30日現在　氏名　〇〇 〇〇

■職務要約
（3〜5行。何年、どんな仕事をしてきて、何が出来るか）

■職務経歴
2023年4月〜現在　株式会社〇〇（従業員数〇〇名）
事業内容：〇〇
担当業務：〇〇
使用技術：TypeScript, React, Next.js, 〇〇
実績：〇〇

■活かせる経験・知識・スキル

■語学
日本語：ビジネスレベル（JLPT N〇）
英語：〇〇

■自己PR

The summary at the top (職務要約) does most of the work: three to five lines saying how many years, doing what, and what you can do for them. The reader is often someone in HR before it’s an engineer, so write it for both.

A few rules I’d follow:

• Write it in Japanese, even when the posting says English is fine. It’s the first writing sample they’ll see from you.
• Have a native speaker check it: ideally someone who has read a lot of them, not a translation app.
• One concrete sentence about what you did beats a paragraph about what your team achieved. Give scope, tools, and whatever numbers you’re allowed to share.
• Keep your reason for changing jobs (転職理由) pointed forward. “I want to build X” reads better than “my last company wouldn’t let me.”

I ran hiring interviews at my first company, and the third point is the one I’d underline. Recruiting agencies (転職エージェント) will help you polish both documents for free, since the hiring company pays them. Use them, but write the first draft yourself.

Meetups: connpass is the front door

Japanese tech events live on connpass: study sessions (勉強会, benkyōkai), lightning-talk nights, hackathons, company meetups. Most are free, or charge a small fee for the drinks.

Two pieces of advice. First, stay for the konshinkai (懇親会, the drinks afterwards). The talks often end up on YouTube; the conversations don’t. Second, after two or three events, give a five-minute lightning talk (LT). Speakers get approached afterwards, while attendees have to do the approaching, and an LT in imperfect Japanese about something you actually built is remembered longer than a polished one about nothing in particular.

Several of my own talks in Japan were connpass events: Serverless Meetup Tokyo in 2023, the Vercel meetups in 2024, a Findy session on v0 in 2025, and the Tokyo AI Hackathon I co-organized with Anthropic, Raycast and Supabase. Tokyo has far more events than anywhere else, but a lot of them now stream online, so living in Osaka is less of an excuse than it used to be. (The full list of my talks is on the speaking page.)

Being multilingual is the advantage

If you come to Japan from abroad, it’s tempting to treat your other languages as background and Japanese as the only one that counts. Don’t.

At ZenMarket I localized content in English, Japanese and Spanish and ran marketing for twelve markets with a multicultural team. At Vercel I was the first Japanese-speaking customer success hire, and a big part of that job is explaining Japanese customers to global teams, and global teams to Japanese customers.

You’ll rarely beat native Japanese engineers at Japanese, or native English speakers at English. You don’t need to. Sitting between a Japanese customer and an overseas team and making each side make sense to the other is a job in itself. Japanese companies going abroad need that person as much as foreign companies coming to Japan do.

At Qiita Conference in 2024, Vercel engineer Shusaku Uesugi and I gave a keynote about our unconventional careers, and one of our points was that what you want to build matters more than perfect English. The same goes for your Japanese. In a 2019 interview with a Japanese mahjong site I said the way to learn a language is to keep stepping forward, even if you fail. I’d still say it.

Patience compounds

Here is how the steps actually went: part-time jobs and the parlor in 2016, customer support in 2017, marketing team lead in 2018, marketing director in 2019, frontend engineer in 2021, then Vercel at the end of that year.

Looking back, each one reused the last:

• Support taught me the customers and the product, and gave me a first look at how a Japanese company decides things (ringi, the written proposal that collects approvals layer by layer; nemawashi, the groundwork done before the meeting).
• Marketing got me writing code: internal tools in JavaScript, Node.js and Google Apps Script.
• The code got me a frontend job, building production UIs in React, Next.js and TypeScript.
• Frontend experience, customer-facing experience and Japanese, together, are more or less the job description for Japanese-speaking customer success at a developer platform.

I turned pro with the Japan Professional Mahjong Association in 2017, the same year I started in support. Mahjong teaches you that one hand proves nothing and that good decisions win over enough of them. Careers look a lot like that from the inside.

So, to 2016 me: take the job that makes you use Japanese all day, even if the title is wrong, and keep adding one skill next to the one you have.

And sign up for one connpass event this month.