In 2023, I scaled TokyoDev from a one-man operation to a team. The idea was to get some tasks off my plate, but while I’ve succeeded at passing off responsibilities to others, I somehow didn’t gain any more free time. This is because working with new people also created new ideas and opportunities, which I haven’t been able to pass up. In 2024, we saw the first fruits of this collaboration, achieving things I never would have been able to pull off by myself. For instance, we started producing Japanese-language content teaching employers how to build international teams, had a sponsor booth at Japan’s largest Ruby conference, brought the developer community and our clients together through events, and built an editing process that increased the overall quality of our content, and found new contributors who have written some extremely popular articles. As the year winds to a close, I’ve been reflecting on both these accomplishments and the challenges we’ve faced, and how they’re paving the way for what is to come. 65 developers got a job via TokyoDev In 2024, we tracked 65 developers who were successfully hired after applying for a position on TokyoDev. This number was down from last year’s 71 developers. Interestingly, while the total number of hires decreased, the number of companies that hired successfully went up, from 29 to 31. One reason for fewer hires was that several of our most successful clients shifted their focus away from non-Japanese speaking engineers in favour of fluent Japanese speakers. TokyoDev has always been most successful at helping companies with hiring talented engineers with little-to-no Japanese skills, and so with their change in focus, we haven’t been able to help them to the same degree as last year. However, another factor was simply timing. We count successful hires based upon when we receive a fee for them. The time between when a company posts a job to when we receive the fee is typically 3–6 months, as it takes a while for a company to interview candidates, make offers, secure visas, and so on. This means that, even though we currently have a lot of successful hires in the pipeline, they won’t be reflected in this year’s stats. For instance, while we had six successful hires per month in January and February 2024, we have nine projected successful hires in both January and February 2025 I’m optimistic about how we’re going to do next year. 60 articles written by 19 authors One of our greatest accomplishments in 2024 was establishing a repeatable editing process that has allowed us to create extremely high-quality articles. The top five articles by number of visitors were: How I Got a Digital Nomad Visa for Japan by Christian Mack The English Paradox: Four Decades of Life and Language in Japan by Tom Gally The rise and fall of D&D in Japan by Masaki Yanagida How I obtained a J-FIND visa in Japan by Oguzhan Karagözoglu Japan Needs International Developers by Rebecca Callahan The cool thing is that four of the five articles draw upon external contributors’ unique personal experiences, which allowed them to share information with our community that no one else could. Besides our English articles, we also launched a new sub-site that’s helping Japanese companies build global engineering teams. It’s still in its infancy, but we already have 18 articles for it, and we have some other great ideas for the coming year. 18 developer stories published We write developer stories to highlight the experiences of employees at our client companies to give candidates a better understanding of what it’s actually like to work there. This year, we released 18 developer stories. The top five stories by number of visitors were: Realising Dreams of AI and Japan at Recursive “We’re the first global team in Fukuoka”: English Evolution at Money Forward Bringing AI to the Construction Industry with EARTHBRAIN Becoming a Tech Lead at KOMOJU Succeeding as a Senior Engineer at Kraken 814 developers answered our survey Since 2019, TokyoDev has conducted an annual survey of international software developers living in Japan. The 2024 edition was the biggest yet, with 814 developers sharing details on their salaries, working conditions, and the technologies they use. I’ve had people tell me how useful our survey is—some even used it to negotiate better salaries when applying for jobs—so I’m glad it has continued to grow and add to the community. 2,800+ people joined our Discord server In 2024, over 2,800 people joined TokyoDev’s Discord server. This community has proved incredibly valuable. Not only has it helped people get their lives up and running in Japan, but it also has been a great source of inspiration for article topics, and a way to find potential contributors to the site. 7 events hosted In 2024, we continued to expand the in-person meetups we held. Highlights included a pair of events in Okinawa during Ruby Kaigi, an excellent beer garden in collaboration with WAY equity partners (at least I hear it was good, I got COVID the day before), and the launch of our TokyoDev Talks. 5 organizations sponsored TokyoDev owes its origins to the developer community in Japan, so it’s important to me that we use our success to give back to it. We have continued to do this through supporting the following organizations: RubyKaigi: The main Ruby conference in Japan. Attending the 2010 edition was what inspired me to start blogging on this site. Rails Girls Japan: Holds free workshops to help women pick up Ruby on Rails. Tokyo Test Fest: The first edition of an international software quality conference in Japan. Women In Technology Japan: A community that bridges the gender gap in tech and promotes diversity and inclusion in Japan. Women Who Code: This one was heartbreaking for me, as they went bankrupt almost immediately after our sponsorship. That community was succeeded by Women in Software Engineering Japan, where I’m serving as an advisor. 9 people contributed to our team Besides the contributors who wrote articles for the site or made illustrations for them, we have a number of people doing work for us on an ongoing basis. Daniel López Prat improved the infrastructure that runs the TokyoDev site, including adding additional monitoring and keeping our libraries up to date. Keiko Kimoto helped with translation and other administrative tasks, including helping us obtain a trademark for TokyoDev. Mathieu Mayer helped with product design, UX, and frontend development, such as refreshing our articles index. Michelle Tan conducted developer story interviews and helped with full stack development by building things like an admin interface for our clients to use. Rebecca Callahan interviewed contributors, wrote articles for us, and led our editorial team and process. Sacha Greif continued to refine the software that runs our survey, and helped with creating this year’s survey. Sayana Takagi acted as our client representative and led the creation of our sub-site aimed at Japanese companies. Scott Rothrock moderated our Discord community, wrote articles for us, and contributed to our editorial team and process. Looking ahead to 2025 We have a number of exciting things in the works. We’re in the planning phase of several in-person events and have plans to sponsor more communities, and are also working on a new way of connecting international developers with Japanese companies that I hope to be able to talk about soon. Thanks to everyone who has supported us this year. I’m looking forward to continuing to grow together through the next!

Given how many of us grew up playing classic Japanese games, it’s no surprise that people are keen to work on games in Japan. But what’s the reality on the ground? What skills do you need to succeed in the Japanese game industry, and what challenges can you expect to encounter? To find out, I interviewed a number of current and former members of the game industry here in Japan, for their thoughts on: What makes Japanese game development different? The upside of working on games in Japan The downside How they got started in the Japanese game industry Their top tips for success Conclusion Our interviewees hail from five different countries, work in roles ranging from studio head to entry-level programmer, and have developed everything from Nintendo games to 18+ eroge. Marc Trudel is the Studio Head at Wizcorp, a studio specializing in visual effects, porting games, and developing custom tools and engines for the Japanese game industry. He’s Canadian and has lived in Japan since 2009. Mathieu Siboulotte is a French developer hired as a game designer at the international creative company Studio No Border in 2020. Tristan Metz came from the Netherlands in 2024 to work as a game programmer at AVR Japan, an XR solution company. Minh Nguyen is a Vietnamese developer who worked for DMM Games, which specializes in erotic games (eroge), from 2017–2020 before switching industries. Jared Hays is an American who was employed by the Nintendo-affiliated company Good Feel between 2011 and 2017. He now works for a gaming company in the US. What makes Japanese game development different? Tristan Metz pointed out the most obvious difference: “In the Netherlands we tend to stick to only English, whereas in Japan both Japanese and English often tend to be required.” I also feel that in Japan there is much more of a hierarchy and emphasis on your position within the company. . . . I do think that even the Japanese language itself inherently makes interacting with people feel more formal. “This might also have to do with the fact that the Netherlands tends to have a very flat hierarchy for many organizations,” Metz concluded. Minh Nguyen doesn’t see as much difference in company structure. “I think in terms of team composition it won’t differ that much compared to other countries. We would have a product owner (the term is “director”) who makes initiatives for overall game direction; planners, who design game specs, feature, and gameplay-balancing; designers, who create art and models for the characters and environments and UIs in-game; and developers, who implement back-end or front-end. Testers are usually from outsourcing companies who do testing and verify behavior, and planners would also have to test new releases themselves.” According to Nguyen, the development process is about the same as well. “We would also use Scrum/Kanban to iterate development cycles, as seen in other software companies,” he said. What he has noticed is that Japan focuses on a different category of games. Games in Japan are mostly RPG-flavored [social] games that have characters and a lottery system called gacha to make money. If you are more into MOBA/FPS/strategy then unfortunately those are nonexistent here. For Marc Trudel, the real appeal of developing in Japan is the intense passion of those in the industry. “I had one client that’s head of R&D,” Trudel told me, “and we’re having dinner together, and we’re talking about what games do we play when we have time off, and he says, ‘I don’t play games.’ I was like, ‘Okay, so what do you do?’ ‘Well, I read about neurology in infants and children, to try to understand how the brain works in the context of gaming.’” “He’s not leading game projects,” Trudel added, “and yet he clearly has an interest in how those game projects can have a beneficial impact on younger people. . . . It impresses me.” That dedication, and that passion [Japanese developers] have . . . I don’t want to say it’s not found overseas, but here it seems to me like it’s so consistent. Everyone I talk to is going to have a story of their own, a focus of their own. But Jared Hays thinks that trademark passion can easily manifest as stubborn single-mindedness. “There’s a certain amount of, ‘If it’s not working, just try harder.’ “One of the biggest differences, and certainly the biggest in work culture, was that in Japan there was very little interest in improving processes. So it was, ‘Well, we made the last game this way and it’s shipped, and it sold, and we made money, so we’re just gonna make the next game the same way.’” And there was really no room to say, ‘Have you tried doing X?’ Or, ‘Yes, we made the game, but we did this thing that drove people crazy, people quit, everyone got burned out.’ It was not a good way to make the game. [They] just said, ‘Yes, but it worked.’ Hays offered an example: “Yoshi’s Woolly World was really built on top of Kirby’s Epic Yarn, on top of the tech stack that they had built, which was in turn built on top of a WarioWare game they had made. So those first two were for the Wii, and then Woolly World was for the Wii U. And as they moved onto the next game, the scale of the game and the things they tried to do got bigger, because players expected more. . . . So, Woolly World had no project management, no production, zero. There was no issue tracking. There was no schedule planning, nothing.” I went to school for both computer science and game development, and one of the courses that I found incredibly valuable was a course, not in the nuts and bolts of programming, but in software engineering that really taught working in a team and coordinating with people, communication, delivering milestones, all of the things that most modern devs consider the other 80 percent of the job. And they just had none of that. “If we could align our schedules so that people aren’t sitting around waiting for other people half the week, maybe people wouldn’t need to work overtime,” Hays said. “Maybe the director wouldn’t need to keep a sleeping bag under his desk.” A lack of project management was the biggest difference Hays found, but he also pointed out that Japanese developers are working with more limited resources than their counterparts overseas. “Japanese devs are really harmed by the lack of a Japanese Stack Overflow.” Because in English, if you Google a programming problem, there is an answer. And in Japanese, you Google and it’s just some random guy’s blog where he’s like, ‘Hey, I tried using Unity for the weekend and here’s what I found out.’ So there’s much less centralized information and information exchange between developers. The upside of working on games in Japan For some developers, the best part about working in the Japanese game industry is the games themselves. “My favourite thing about game development in Japan,” said Metz, “are the cool projects and opportunities it brings, which was also the biggest reason for me to move here. Japan is well-known for its famous games from Nintendo, Sega, Square Enix, and countless more. There are a plethora of opportunities in this country and that really excites me.” Hays concurred. I literally made a game with Yoshi. I would never, ever get that here [in the US]. Hays and Metz agreed that collaborating with their coworkers proved an incredible perk. “Like I said,” Hays told me, “some of the people who started the company were super veterans and were incredibly knowledgeable. And it was really awesome to get to work with most of the people, [though] not all of the people. So experientially, it was great.” Trudel has also enjoyed working with Japanese game developers. They know all the games through and through. They have really pointed opinions on what they think is good. . . . It’s a craft for them. It’s something they dedicate their life to. Sometimes, that dedication proves almost uncomfortable, at least for Nguyen. “The games I had worked on were all 18+. . . . During the title alpha/beta release they made the whole company playtest it. I had to play through explicit content along with the surrounding people.” Still, he was impressed by how wholeheartedly they tackled each project. “For an adult game title, the people around me were extremely serious and very committed to making the game become a hit. That was a unique feeling and experience for me.” It’s a bit different for Mathieu Siboulotte, working at a small studio with an international team. “So far, the working environment in my studio is kind of unique. We almost never do any overtime, we have some flexible hours and some remote work days. We are a very small structure of only four people, so we kind of come when we want and leave when we want, as long as we do our hours! For my project, my team is split between France and Japan, so my hours are mostly in the late morning until the evening, so we can share many hours together!” But like the other designers, he draws inspiration from his colleagues. “I regularly join a meetup of French game devs in Japan or the Tokyo Indie Game Show in Akihabara. It is great to test new prototypes and connect with people there!” The downside As for the downside of game development in Japan, Trudel mourns the vanishing culture of mentorship. “I feel like this is kind of getting lost in Japan,” he explained, “that senpai [older mentor] that’s going to take you under their wing.” Maybe it’s specific to the game industry, but I’m starting to see there are not a lot of people that even want to take those responsibilities—or for those who do, sometimes it’s going to be a bit more of a power trip. In general, he explained, game projects in Japan tend to lack both money and expertise. “They’re all built on custom engines, yet every R&D project is underfunded. And not only is it underfunded, but they just can’t find the resources to really do the job to bring their technological assets to the next level, right? “It’s true in R&D, and to some degree it’s true for game-making proper as well, where they don’t quite have the technical abilities to really fully [realize] their creative vision. So that’s really where we [Wizcorp] come in . . . to try to fill in the gaps.” Hays also noted the lack of good leadership. The mentorship wasn’t great, and people I was supposed to be seeking advice from as more senior engineers often were senior because they’d been there a while, and not necessarily because they were incredibly knowledgeable or good at passing that knowledge along. He explained that “Right after I worked on Woolly World, I worked on a game that was on mobile and on Facebook, and that was part of our foray into self-published first party IP. “It was me and one senior dev. He was doing all of the client stuff, I was doing all of the server stuff. It was in Unity, which I had used in school, and the backend was on Google Cloud Platform, which I had also used in school. And we approached a milestone that was like, it should be playable by now. We got to a point where the server was stood up enough and the client was stood up enough that they should connect and you could actually experience gameplay. “And we turned it on and the client performance was so bad, it was unplayable. And I turned to the senior dev, who, again, has been in the industry probably since I was born. . . . I was like, ‘Did you run the profiler? I looked at the profiler. . . . ‘It’s going crazy doing all of this sprite rendering, but it looks like you wrote this rendering code.’ “He’s like, ‘Well, yeah, that’s how you have to render the sprites.’ No, it’s a game engine. It does that. You didn’t need to do this. And so again, as the only server engineer, I had to take several weeks to rewrite the client because he had no idea what he was doing and didn’t attempt to find any of this information.” In general, Hays found, the emphasis on appearances undermined genuine efficacy. “Shortly after I started, the head of the programming department took me aside. [He said], “People don’t like that you’re leaving on time.’ ‘Am I behind on any of my work?’ ‘No, it just looks bad.’” This was the same head of the programming department who told me that the company wouldn’t hire female programmers because they would distract the male programmers. “Never mind the fact that probably 30 to 40 percent of the company is women,” Hays said. “The art department had no problem hiring them. The design department was fine. It was just the programming department.” Nguyen confirmed that most game developers in Japan fit a narrow profile: young, unmarried, and willing to put in any amount of overtime. “Once you have a family, things change,” he said. “Most game companies’ demographics are single and young people, often with little to no responsibilities outside work, and once your priorities shift from games to family you start feeling like you are an outsider.” The long hours in particular are difficult to manage, according to Nguyen. “There are crunch times before each release, and this can be stressful depending on how the project is managed.” My friend and I used to have to work long hours of overtime during the pre-release period. It can suck when people around you have no responsibilities outside work and happily put in the hours while you can’t. It was these pressures that led Nguyen to switch to a different industry. He also agreed with Trudel that the tech at many game companies is outdated. “There is an inertia to upgrade,” he said. “The most important thing in a game is not tech, it is gameplay and art.” As for Metz, he mostly would like to be paid more. My least favourite thing about game development in Japan is probably the low wages. Wages in Japan are a lot lower than in the Netherlands, but I have the impression that programmers have better financial opportunities in other programming industries outside of gaming. “I have the impression this difference is also not as big in the Netherlands,” he added, “but I could be completely wrong on that.” Hays encountered the same pay problem. “The pay is terrible. Just for reference, I looked up one of my old withholding slips from 2013, and I was taking home less than 4 million. That is bad. And I tripled my salary by moving back to the US.” How they got started in the Japanese game industry Some of our interviewees landed in the Japanese game industry mostly by accident. Trudel, for instance, originally came to Japan for the martial arts. Between 2007 and 2009 he visited Japan whenever he could, for anywhere between a weekend to several months at a time. “During [one of my longer trips], I would basically be training three times a day, five or six days a week,” he said. “I would just be dojo-hopping basically, to kind of get my bearings in terms of figuring out if I saw something in it. But what I ended up sticking to was basically the classical martial arts of Japan.” He finally moved officially to Japan on October 20th in 2009, on a working holiday visa. “I didn’t actually have the job lined up when I came in,” he explained. I had a little bit of money set aside. I figured okay, well, let’s just try to find a job. Now that I’m here [in Japan], I can visit people in person. You didn’t really have Zoom at the time. . . . When I started at Wizcorp, I was hired at the same time as one other person, but I was essentially employee number three.” “At the time I was hired as an engineer,” Trudel said, “and ended up doing all the IT stuff.” His official title was System Architect and Network Administrator. “And from there, once we started to move gradually into games from 2010, I started to take [on a] technical leadership position.” Having also served as CTO and COO of Wizcorp, Trudel became the Studio Head in February of 2023. As of now, he’s worked at Wizcorp for over 15 years. Nguyen also was always interested in coming to Japan. Our uni curriculum offered Japanese lessons and allowed the credits to accumulate as well, so I had studied Japanese and gotten my N1 even before my very first trip to Japan. A big thanks to my uni, which made this miracle happen! By contrast, Siboulotte chose the game industry, but not Japan specifically. He started learning game development with RPG Maker when he was 16, but didn’t study game development in university. “I thought joining this industry was impossible,” he said. Instead, he majored in international trade, while continuing game projects on the side. He then received a bachelor’s degree in cultural product marketing, which gave him the opportunity to join an animation studio as a producer’s assistant. “However, game development was still on my mind,” Siboulotte said, “so I decided to leave and start university again from scratch, to study game design, in 2017.” He got his lucky break with Studio No Border, an international creative studio that’s affiliated with the French entertainment group Ankama. “I joined this project in 2020,” Siboulotte said, “right before Japan closed in a lockdown. It was also my first ‘real’ position in the game industry.” I honestly absolutely arrived here by chance. I was just looking for my first gig after my graduation and internship, and this job happened to be the first one to give me a reply! “I applied on the website AFJV, a French website listing games positions in France or with French language involved, and after around four months of tests and interviews, I finally got a green light to come to Japan!” Hays and Metz were both specifically interested in working on Japanese games. While still a college student, Hays spent time in Osaka and loved it. After graduating in 2011, he returned to Japan and was quickly introduced to Good Feel, where he got to pursue his dream of working on Nintendo games. Metz told me there was a specific moment that clinched his desire to come to Japan. The final push to want to commit to the game dev industry in Japan was a 2017 GDC talk by Nintendo about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. However, Metz was also well-prepared for the move. “I have always been fascinated with Japanese culture from a young age,” he said, “and have been self-studying the language off and on for around 9 years.” Their top tips for success The most consistent advice interviewees offered: learn Japanese. “It might be obvious for those wanting to work in Japan,” said Metz, “but I think that game development in Japan is much more reclusive than IT companies in Japan and will require a very high level of language fluency.” Nguyen agreed. You need to speak a very high level of Japanese. N3 or even N2 might not be enough to collaborate effectively. From there, however, the advice began to differ, depending on whether interviewees thought that game development in Japan was a good long-term career goal, or whether it should be for the short-term only. “Be sure to get out of the industry while you are still young and you want to advance your career more in tech,” Nguyen stressed. “The game industry doesn’t usually put as much emphasis on tech as others and it is certainly not a tech-driven industry, so staying there a long time can be detrimental to your career.” If you value experience working with tech, plan your departure even before entering the game industry. My friend and I struggled a lot when we were trying to jump ship. Hays concurred with Nguyen’s advice. “Treat it like a gap year,” he said. “Spend three, four, five years doing this because it’s what you really want to do. And then probably take that and go home.” “I’m not going to say, ‘No, never do it, stay away, don’t touch it with a 30 foot pole’,” Hays also said. “But make sure you understand what you’re getting yourself into and that in all likelihood, you’re probably sacrificing some career progression and certainly income for the sake of this opportunity.” Above all, Hays believes it’s important to do your research before going in. I will say as someone who loves video games, loves Japan, loves Japanese video games, if you’re doing it because you have an idealized vision of what working on your favorite games must be like, then you should spend time looking at real-world information. “Look for testimonials of people who worked at [those] companies, look for information about the pay and the working conditions. Just because it’s your dream doesn’t mean you shouldn’t research the company like you would a company in your home country.” Trudel also emphasized the need for research beforehand. “Do visit first. Being a tourist is not the same thing as living here, but it’ll give you some idea.” From there, Trudel’s advice differs, because he’s more optimistic about game development prospects in Japan. It does require, he believes, a great deal of commitment and the willingness to adapt. Japanese society works very differently. The game industry works very differently. Every client is going to work very differently, culturally speaking, and you need to find a way to acclimate to that, and blend in to some degree. “You need to be able to find a way to communicate,” Trudel went on, “where it’s going to make things move in the right direction.” It can be tricky, he told me, but “it’s not impossible.” Japanese ability of course helps immensely: “I mean, the one big mistake that I made was not learning the language enough before coming here,” Trudel admitted. “This set me back some years.” But language skills aren’t the whole picture. “I know that for me, as much as I struggled with language early on because I couldn’t understand what people were saying. . . . Because I couldn’t understand, I had to pick up on nonverbal cues more and on all etiquette stuff a lot more quickly, just to not get into trouble. Basically, it made me pay more attention to things.” Language is not enough. Language is just the gateway to the culture, really. From there, you have to walk through it. “I think a good way to do that,” Trudel advised, “is to engage in cultural activities. It could be sports, I mean, you can go and join a volleyball team for all I care, but having these kinds of activities where you need some form of interaction, some form of communication, verbal and nonverbal, to be able to engage in the activity, will make a big difference. “Plus it’s going to give you a bit of a network, beyond just having colleagues at work.” Trudel is strongly in favor of all forms of networking, even before you come to Japan. “Reach out,” he suggested. “I mean, you have LinkedIn, you have Facebook, you have all these social networks where there are some groups for the Japanese gaming industry. Talk to people, ask questions, see what they’re about.” He clarified, though, that you’ll get better results if you focus on gathering information over clinching a job. “[Those who message me about jobs], every time I’m going to tell them there’s an application process and a candidate selection process, and I’m out of the loop there. “But if you were just asking about whether you might find something to your liking [in Japan], I’m happy to jump on a 30 minute call with you and try to figure it out and just have that discussion. I’m assuming that not everyone is going to be necessarily as willing to engage like that, but it’s just a numbers game, right? “You know, the more people you reach out to, the more people are going to answer back, and then you’re going to be better informed.” Conclusion While the experiences shared here have been subjective, two of the major points—the low wages and the need for Japanese ability—were confirmed in TokyoDev’s 2024 survey. The gaming and education industries had the lowest compensation, with respondents making a median of ¥8 million a year. 37% of respondents in the gaming industry always used Japanese with their colleagues, the highest percentage of any industry. So if you’re interested in being a game developer in Japan, it’s best to start studying Japanese as soon as possible (and perhaps to be independently wealthy). But if a conventional Japanese game company isn’t for you, there are also a number of international game studios that can offer a more flexible and English-speaking environment. If you’re both ambitious and determined, like Siboulotte, you might aim to strike out on your own. The [Japanese] indie scene looks huge, and it gave me the will to make my own indie game besides work. I am really looking forward to BitSummit in Kyoto to try and show my prototype at a big fair again! Wizcorp and other game companies in Japan are hiring now, so check out our game development jobs page. Want to hear more experiences? Continue the discussion in our Discord community.

Are you working remotely for a Japanese company? What happens if your company suddenly issues a return-to-office mandate? Will you have to move back to Tokyo? What if remote work is in your contract—do you have the right to refuse to return to the office? What standing do you have to negotiate with your company? What are your chances of persuading management to change their minds? These are the questions TokyoDev set out to answer, because return-to-office mandates are on the rise in Japan. Return-to-office mandates: the numbers The TokyoDev 2024 survey showed that, among respondents, only 9% worked five days a week in the office. However, companies are increasingly switching from fully-remote to a hybrid working pattern. In 2023, 43% of survey-takers could work fully remotely if they wished, but in 2024, only 38% could say the same. This trend is not confined to Japan. According to Morgan McKinley, in Hong Kong 91% of companies insisted their employees return to the office, while only around 40% of companies in the UK and Canada are asking the same. Japanese companies come in around the middle, with 62% requesting that their employees come back into the office at least some days. Return-to-office orders are having a direct impact on employee attrition. While only 10% of TokyoDev survey respondents who could choose whether or not to work remotely were interested in changing jobs, 18% of those in a hybrid environment were job-hunting, and 39% of those required to work full-time at the office were actively searching for new roles. 49% of survey-takers valued the ability to work remotely over everything else. Meanwhile, those who had to attend an office were more negative about their workplace in every aspect except job security than those who could work fully remotely. In short, tech companies in Japan should be advised that insisting on in-office work, or even hybrid work, could strongly affect their recruitment and retention of employees. By contrast, those who allow fully-remote work can expect to see a rise in applications. What the Tokyo Labor Bureau has to say For those developers whose companies issue a return-to-office mandate, what are their rights under Japanese law? And what is the experience like for those developers who try to enlist the help of Japan’s foreign worker resource centers? To find out, I called them myself. Each time I represented myself as a developer dealing with an increasingly typical situation: though I had always worked remotely, and had moved to a distant prefecture while doing so, I was suddenly being ordered to report to the Tokyo office once a week. What could I do about it? Labor Standards Advice Hotline I started by calling this hotline, which quickly set me up with an interpreter. With each question she listened to me in English, then spoke to her superiors in Japanese and translated their reply back to me. The upshot of their advice was that I should contact either my local prefectural labor bureau, or (since my hypothetical employer was based in Tokyo) the Tokyo Labor Bureau. There wasn’t much legal advice or support that they could offer other than directing me to the appropriate resources. However, they did tell me that most of my case depended on the exact wording of my contract. If it was specified in my contract that I could work fully remotely, regardless of changes in the company’s work plans, then I had a good chance of insisting on continuing to do so—or, at the very least, negotiating from a position of strength. If, however, my contract said that I could work remotely with the company’s permission, or contingent upon company circumstances, then my only hope was to ask for some kind of compromise. If remote work was specified in my contract, I was told, and the company continued to insist that I come to the Tokyo office when I already lived in another prefecture, then I could be eligible for leave allowance, or a payment of 60% of my salary. They weren’t able to give further details on the subject, however, and again directed me to one of the labor bureaus for more details. The Tokyo Labor Bureau When I rang the Tokyo Labor Bureau and presented them with the same dilemma, it was easy to locate someone who spoke English, but their answers were less optimistic. Essentially, the woman on the phone said, there was no provision for return-to-office mandates—-or indeed, anything about remote work—in Japanese law. This left me with limited options. The Tokyo Labor Bureau has a “resolution system” designed to help employees and companies mediate conflicts. This is available only in Japanese, so I would need to bring a friend or translator; however, it is free of charge. In general, while certainly willing to help, she didn’t seem too optimistic about my chances of pushing back against the company’s order. It would be “kind of hard,” she admitted. Since this was more about my particular contract than general labor law, she also suggested that this was really a matter for the lawyers, and gave me the number for the Foreign Residents Support Center. The Foreign Residents Support Center When I first called the center, their lawyer was busy, but the woman on the phone apologized profusely and asked if they could call me back, which they did within a few hours. The lawyer I spoke to had yet another set of suggestions for my return-to-office scenario, but of the people I’d asked so far, he seemed the most optimistic regarding my chances. Unfortunately, it seems that hard-and-fast answers are difficult to come by. In principle, he said, I should not have to obey the mandate if my contract states that fully-remote work is allowed. In fact, I might be able to do so even if fully-remote work wasn’t specified in my contract. If there was correspondence exchanged when I signed the contract that promised fully-remote work, or possibly even verbal statements (though this would naturally be harder to prove), I could argue that fully-remote work was a “specific condition” of my employment. If there is some rational reason for the once-a-week visit to the office, he went on, then the company would be obligated to pay my commuting costs from the distant prefecture to the Tokyo office. However, like me, he considered it unlikely that the weekly meeting was really all that necessary. Instead, he thought I could press for doing the meeting via video call, and that this would fulfill my obligation to the company without incurring additional hassle or expense for either side. The tricky part was that all of this was speculative, and a lot would depend on specific qualifications. For example, when discussing whether the return-to-office order was actually illegal, he said it depended on several different factors: Was fully-remote work promised in my contract? Could my job be done fully remotely? Does the company have an important reason for this order? Of course, the last question is the hardest to nail down. The company has to compare the necessity of the order to the disadvantage of the employee, I was told, which appears to leave a lot of legal wiggle room for a strict or unscrupulous company. And contrary to what the Labor Standards Advice Hotline had suggested, he did not think I would be eligible for leave allowance. If the company refused to budge, he said I should contact my local bar association or city hall to find representation. If I was unable to locate a lawyer on my own, I was free to call back and they would assist me again. However, like everyone else I spoke to, the lawyer strongly suggested that I attempt to negotiate with my company instead. Given my specific circumstances, he suggested that if the company covered the commuting costs, I could perhaps offer to return to the office once every two weeks. In general, he assured me that I shouldn’t be afraid to bargain in this way, particularly if I worked for a small company that might find me difficult to replace. A less positive experience Sadly, sometimes neither negotiation nor legal action are possible. Several TokyoDev members spoke anonymously on their companies’ return-to-office mandates, and one of them described his own experience in consulting a lawyer. It was a lawyer [where] you get 30 minutes of pre-consultation. I sent him my job description, my contract and stuff, and then he looked it up. He said that even though it’s written in the contract that remote work is possible, there’s no precedent in the Supreme Court. . . . He said that if you want to fight, of course I can help you fight it. But in the end, if you lose or if the company dismisses you in the middle of it, then you have bigger problems. Although the opportunity for remote work had been promised in his job description, the actual employment contracts were more vague in their terms. Technically, the company wasn’t violating the contracts. Employees suspected that the company was using this return-to-office mandate to reduce their workforce without violating Japanese employment laws, but such an assertion would be difficult to prove. In the end, the developer decided against legal action. “I did not try to lawyer my way through because I know, once I file a lawsuit or something like that, then it’s going to be big trouble for me.” He is, however, actively searching for a new role, as were other developers we spoke to who had been ordered back to the office. To be clear about the prospect of retaliation, Japan law is strict about the circumstances under which an employee can be terminated. An employee negotiating in good faith around remote work isn’t an acceptable reason, and would run afoul of Japanese law: An employer is only allowed to dismiss an employee if there are objectively reasonable grounds for dismissal, and dismissal is deemed to be appropriate in light of socially accepted ideas. Furthermore, all possible grounds for dismissal must be clearly stated in the work rules if the dismissal of an employee is to be valid. The union option To Dennis Tesolat, General Secretary at the General Union, the solution to these return-to-office mandates is obvious. He calls it “union math.” If tech workers were to get together, they could command a lot at the negotiation table. I met with both Tesolat and Sonomi Terao, the Executive Officer at the General Union. They believe most developers don’t consider unionizing because they’re office workers rather than in the trades, but they are in a great situation to do so. “There’s power in numbers,” Tesolat said, “but [also] just one person joining can be effective.” The General Union, which is headquartered in Osaka but accepts members from all over Japan, already has at least one worker dealing with an unwanted return-to-office mandate. They wouldn’t mind taking on more such cases. Companies don’t want to fight, they want to make money. But we’re a union, it’s our job, so we don’t mind. In fact, Tesolat said, sometimes zero confrontation is required. Just sending in the notification of an employee’s General Union membership often causes management to back off their demands. “At least somebody else now is watching you,” said Tesolat. “Is it a big help, is it going to change your whole situation? No, but they might leave you alone.” And if they don’t, “You just have more options [with a union]. The chance to negotiate, to be supported by colleagues, the right to dispute. The option of court is always there, but it’s not the first option. Nine out of ten times we solve things without using that court option.” What’s key, he said, is not approaching the negotiating table alone. “Dispute and negotiating—that’s our job. . . . And once you [mess] it up, we can’t help you at that point.” This is especially true if you’re an international developer working for a Japanese company, “because the whole manner of negotiation is different. . . . The chance for a lot of misunderstanding is there.” That’s the thing about negotiating on your own. It’s hard, you don’t always know what to do it . . . and if there’s retaliation from that, ‘So what?’ But if the union does it, and there’s retaliation, there’s trade union law that says you can’t do that. What about retaliation for joining a union? Tesolat laughed and said that in his thirty years of experience, he’s seen fewer than ten straightforward retaliation cases. That leaves open the possibility of indirect retaliation, but Tesolat again pointed out that the union exists to deal with precisely that sort of issue. In short, “I would worry about a lot of other things before I’d worry about joining a union.” Two years ago, the General Union didn’t even have an IT branch. During the pandemic, however, the General Union—which had initially confined its membership to the Kansai area—began accepting applications from all over Japan, and from a greater variety of professions. “People were getting fired, they weren’t getting paid, and we couldn’t say no,” Tesolat said, “so we opened the door.” As a result, membership shot up by 35%. Recently, they’ve seen another surge in tech worker applications: “A lot of people started getting scared after the layoffs in America.” With return-to-office mandates increasing, the General Union may see their numbers continue to rise—and that’s good for “union math.” How to reverse your company’s return-to-office policy One anonymous developer we spoke to successfully reversed the return-to-office policy for his entire team. During Covid, he told us, the team worked fully remotely, but after the pandemic was over the management team insisted that developers return to the office five days a week. Eventually our interviewee was able to persuade them to restore remote work, first on a hybrid basis, and later full-time. “This was at a very small company though,” he explained, “where we had more leverage than what you would normally expect in a midsize or big company. Since the push also came from me as the lead developer, management eventually accepted it.” “I was the first developer in the company,” he added, “and I was often asked about what we needed to do to get a dev department running. “One of the things I mentioned is that it is hard to keep developers for a long time, so you need incentives. You either give them a raise, or benefits, or both. Since it was a small company it had no way to compete with bigger ones when it came to benefits and salary. So, what else can you do? If you are small and agile, you can afford to give remote work benefits, as it will cost you little or nothing to do so.” From the company’s perspective, my point was more about being able to retain people and also have an easier time finding new ones. The cost of hiring and onboarding a new developer is quite high in my experience. If you have a good worker and you are not in a position to be giving raises to everyone, remote work is an easy way to keep your devs happy. The fact that other companies do not offer it also means that it is harder for them to be poached. I asked if he had any advice for other developers who wanted remote work. “If I were to give any tips to other developers that are unhappy with their situation,” he said, “it would be to let their company know about it. “For example, they probably have a one-on-one discussion with their manager every so often. This is a good opportunity to ask if the company is considering remote work, [explain] why they want it, and so on. I would not expect a change immediately, especially if they are in a more traditional Japanese company. But consistently asking about it and showing that it really matters is what made the devs here get remote work. ”[Ask the company to] try running a trial with just one developer or two, and evaluate the pros and cons. If the company outright states that it will never allow it no matter what, or it becomes clear that they will not do it, I would start looking for new opportunities that provide the benefit.” So, it is always about leverage. If the company does not think you are worth what you are asking, your only choice is to go to a place that thinks you are worth it. And, of course, keep studying and learning to improve the chances of someone thinking that you are. Conclusion In the TokyoDev 2024 survey, there’s a clear correlation between in-office work and job-hunting. Full-time office workers are looking for new opportunities at the highest rate, followed by hybrid workers, whereas only 10% of fully-remote workers are looking for new roles. As more companies become aware of how highly their employees prioritize remote work, we should expect to see a decline in return-to-office mandates. Even those who don’t wish to change jobs may be able to use this trend to negotiate with their companies. Of course, not all of those negotiations will be successful, and the advice offered by Japanese labor bureaus and legal support centers can be highly variable. However, most of the people I contacted were supportive and helpful. Perhaps, if you encounter negativity or opposition from government workers, you should avail yourself of the old immigration tactic: if you don’t like the answer you got, ask someone else. Has your company asked you to return to the office? We have a list of fully remote developer jobs for you. If you want to continue the conversation, join our Discord community.

Japan’s lack of recognition for same-sex marriage doesn’t affect me personally, but it does affect people I care about. So when I saw Business for Marriage Equality, a campaign that highlights 500+ companies and organizations that support legalization of same-sex marriage, I immediately had TokyoDev join it. TokyoDev unequivocally supports LGBT+ rights, including same-sex marriage. Japan does not currently recognize same-sex marriages or civil unions. While the same-sex partnership systems offered by municipalities and prefectures cover 85% of the population, these provide limited benefits, and are not equivalent to legal recognition. Several courts have ruled that the lack of legal recognition is unconstitutional, most recently the Tokyo High Court. But the fact remains that same-sex couples in Japan lack the fundamental rights granted to heterosexual ones. Beyond the moral issues this inequality raises, it also causes practical ones. Globally, same-sex marriage is recognized in 36 countries, whose citizens represent 20% of the world’s population. Lack of a clear legal framework for acknowledging same-sex unions makes the relocation of foreign same-sex couples to Japan fraught with difficulty. For instance, if both partners are non-Japanese and one of them relocates to Japan on a working visa, the other may be able to come on a designated activities visa, though those visas can be difficult to acquire. However, a non-Japanese person married to a Japanese citizen is ineligible for such a visa. This uncertainty about whether a couple can relocate together—not to mention the questions it raises about what discrimination they may face—means that talented individuals who would otherwise enthusiastically relocate to Japan are not doing so. I’ve observed their reluctance firsthand. As Japan needs international developers, this lack of legal equality for same-sex relationships is holding the country back by damaging its impression among skilled talent overseas. I’m optimistic about the future, though. Momentum continues to build around the legalization of same-sex marriage here, and I think it is inevitable that it will eventually be achieved. I hope that our support contributes in a small way to help those affected, until the day of legalization arrives.

In the face of AI, there are two strategies: embrace the algorithm, or embrace being human. As a job board operator, this has been weighing on me. I see hints that AI will disrupt the industry and transform the hiring process, perhaps not for the better. Ultimately, I’ve decided that TokyoDev will not use AI to influence the hiring process. We will instead focus on doing what AI cannot: building a supportive community, crafting high-quality resources to help individuals become stronger candidates, and leveraging our deep expertise to help companies showcase what makes them unique, attracting the talent they seek. Challenges posed by AI Since AI has entered common usage, it has created a number of issues in the hiring industry, both for candidates and for companies. AI makes it incredibly easy to send customized job applications Since online job applications became common, candidates have been able to apply for countless positions in a short period of time. Anecodetally, I’ve heard of people submitting 1,000+ job applications. The initial downside to this approach was that candidates couldn’t spend a lot of time customizing those applications, so they tended to be low quality. Now AI tools have emerged that not only allow candidates to automate their job applications, but to submit a fully-customized application based on the job description and their resume. While I believe these tools won’t yield the best results, for many, the temptation to use them is just too high, particularly for candidates who aren’t getting job offers. This means that positions are receiving an increasing number of applications that seem to be tailored to them and are superficially passable. The more people use such tools, the worse the problem becomes. This is particularly true for positions that support remote work globally. For example, by some estimates, there are 28 million software developers worldwide. If even only 0.01% of all developers were to use AI tooling, a position could potentially receive 2,800 such unthoughtful, AI-generated applications. Only after human reviewers have invested some time in reading the AI-generated application will they see the cracks in the facade. Countless human hours will therefore be spent filtering out AI-generated applications, unless recruiters take the next logical step. Large application volume makes AI screening attractive This can lead to a technological arms race: as candidates seek to lower the effort spent on job applications, those screening the applications will seek to do the same. Recruiters have always spent only a short amount of time reviewing a given application: some estimates put it at seven seconds. In our previous hypothetical of 2,800 applications, that adds up to almost 5 ½ hours of review. This is a time sink that recruiters will jump at the chance to cut down. Now, AI-based screening tools are starting to be built into Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). These tools don’t automatically accept or reject candidates. Rather, they opt to assist in evaluation, usually by assigning scores based on how well candidates match the job description. You can see an example of how this works with Workable’s overview of their AI screening assistant. Even though these tools do not explicitly reject candidates, they implicitly do so. If a recruiter sees a candidate has a low match score, they’re likely to just click the button to reject the candidate themselves. If they weren’t going to trust the evaluation and were going to read the application themselves, why would they bother to use the AI evaluation to begin with? This will lead to qualified candidates getting rejected—but most recruiters are okay with this, as they fundamentally see the job of the initial screening as rejecting unqualified candidates, rather than identifying qualified ones. AI is an existential threat to job boards Before TokyoDev was a job board, it was my personal blog with a mailing list. Despite the mailing list only having a couple hundred subscribers on it, and me only posting opportunities every once in a blue moon, several people got jobs through it. This meant we had an incredibly high signal to noise ratio. Since turning the mailing list into Japan’s first job board for international software developers, the number of applications we process has skyrocketed. On our job board, positions that accept overseas candidates will often receive hundreds of applicants from us alone. While our clients have compared the quality of our candidates favourably to competitors, the fact remains that our signal to noise ratio has worsened. I can see that, as AI-created applications become more common, they could grow to be an existential threat to our business. Our value lies in the superior candidates that we provide to our clients; if all of the applications through us are the same as other job boards’, why would clients choose us? Furthermore, these automated tools make it likely that a company’s own ATS will be getting ever-increasing volumes of applications. If their ATS does a good enough job of highlighting qualified candidates, there will be no need to bother with third party sites such as ours. Why TokyoDev does not use AI screening In the face of these challenges, I’ve seen other job boards begin to implement their own AI-based screening, scoring candidates in a similar fashion to ATS. After all, it’s incredibly easy to use services like ChatGPT to do this: any AI will happily give you back such a score, whether or not it’s meaningful or would correlate with what a skilled human evaluator would give. TokyoDev, however, does not plan to implement any AI-based screening, both for philosophical and practical reasons. Screening candidates would be illegal In Japan, recruiting is a regulated industry. We’re regulated as a job board, not a recruitment agency. That means we’re prohibited from screening candidates or modifying the applications they make. Some job boards in Japan have registered themselves as recruitment agencies, allowing them to do such screening. While TokyoDev could do this too, I’ve intentionally not pursued this option, as getting involved with screening would take away from our primary focus: sharing opportunities in Japan with international developers. Transparency is a guiding principle Transparency is incredibly important to me. My belief in the importance of transparency is why we’ve been explicit about how we make money, and how that influences our operations. An AI-based screening system is fundamentally not transparent. Such a system would mean putting candidates at the whim of an AI, the processes of which cannot be deeply or thoroughly inspected. Those job boards utilizing AI screening could attempt to frame this as a good thing; they could say that “AI highlights your strengths,” or that it allows exceptional candidates to shine. But even so, it wouldn’t make sense to ever show how well a candidate was scored by an AI, as revealing that information to applicants would encourage and allow them to game the system, reducing the quality of applications that the client eventually receives. The process would need to be kept mysterious, which is antithetical to the way I’ve always run TokyoDev. AI tools have been shown to be biased Amazon used AI to screen candidates, but scrapped it after they uncovered that it preferred male candidates, and was doing things like penalizing resumes that included the word “women’s” in it. While AI has progressed a lot in the last 10 years, and it may theoretically be possible to create an unbiased tool, I think it is quite challenging to actually do so, let alone definitively prove that it doesn’t have unacceptable bias. Tackling the gender divide in our industry is an important issue to me. TokyoDev supports communities that empower women in technology, and provides companies with advice on how to improve gender diversity. It would be counterproductive for us to inject additional bias into the hiring process. Companies developing ATS have more resources to invest in AI TokyoDev is a niche job board with finite resources. We’re not going to be able to build a better AI-powered screening system than companies with development teams producing ATS products. I wouldn’t want to come up with some haphazard solution myself, either. Helping companies decide who is a good fit is a huge responsibility that can change lives. If I were to implement some AI screening system, and it failed to identify even a single qualified candidate who might have gotten the job otherwise, that would weigh too heavily on my shoulders. How TokyoDev works to improve the process This is not to say that we’re doing nothing in the face of AI. Rather than leveraging AI to reject poor candidates, TokyoDev is working to increase the number of high-quality candidates. For example, when candidates are troubled by an unclear job description or application process, they can reach out to me directly, and I am usually able to cut through the bureaucracy and find a truthful answer. This is something AI cannot do. On a broader scale, we invest in the hiring ecosystem by building our community, educating applicants, and helping companies highlight their best qualities to attract top talent. We also work to better the software industry as a whole in Japan; these improved work conditions will then attract more qualified candidates. Community building I’ve been volunteering at and organizing tech events since 2010. As we’ve seen success with TokyoDev, I’ve worked to reinvest back into the local developer community, through sponsorship and more. We’ve also started our own community, both online through a Discord server, and through hosting in-person events. Our primary motivation is the value these create for our members, but they also have a positive impact on our business. Because a community promotes peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, it’s helped our members become better candidates. A prime example is the “resume review” channel in our Discord, where members can post their resume and get feedback from others. I’ve seen firsthand how members have used the channel to develop an insta-reject resume into one that successfully passes screenings. We also educate our members on immigration-related processes, settling into life in Japan, and successfully dealing with diverse personal and professional stresses. Besides that, many talented developers seek out our events, to hone their skills and make connections. By having these people in our audience, it’s more likely that they’ll choose to use our job board over others, which means we have higher-caliber applicants. Informing candidates Alongside the peer-to-peer education members of our community get, we also invest in creating high-quality resources that can help people become better candidates. Some examples include our articles on writing resumes for jobs in Japan, using recruitment agencies in Japan, and a guide to software engineer visas in Japan. In addition, we write articles about Japanese work culture, the process of moving to Japan, and how to live here comfortably with pets, children, and more. This is because Japan is in need of talented and senior developers, and we want to do everything we can to attract those kinds of people to the Japanese companies we work with. Good candidates are hungry for information so that they can make informed decisions; the smoother and more appealing we can make the process of immigration, the more top-notch international candidates will be interested in applying. Besides our articles, we also conduct an annual survey of international developers living in Japan, which enables people to better understand the market. These resources help all potential candidates, regardless of where they ultimately apply. Helping companies highlight themselves In-demand candidates have the choice of where they want to work, so they won’t bother applying to a company that doesn’t look attractive to them. At TokyoDev, we manually review every job description that is posted on the platform. Using our industry experience, we work with the client to make more informative, appealing listings that are standardized and easy to understand. This is especially important in Japan, where English-speaking postings are often created by using machine translation, and can be missing crucial information for international engineers or contain confusing, ambiguous English. We also write developer stories to help companies demonstrate that their own employees have a positive view of their work environment. These stories highlight the culture of the company in a genuine way, and provide an “insider” perspective for would-be candidates. Conclusion TokyoDev has grown to be a much greater endeavour than my personal blog ever set out to be. Through it, I have been able to help hundreds of developers find their paths to Japan. We have made measurable change in our industry by educating people about their rights, supporting diversity, and assisting companies in understanding how to attract and retain international engineers. AI screening contains inscrutable processes that are biased against certain classes of applicants and prevent communication on a meaningful, human level. Building it into TokyoDev would turn it into a cold, sterile service that runs counter to the warm and welcoming place we currently are. Instead of turning to a machine to overcome modern hiring challenges, we will continue to embrace our humanity, by connecting with people on a personal level to grow and promote high-quality candidates. We will do this because we believe it’s not only the right way to hire, it’s genuinely the most effective, transparent, and helpful method.