It’s a fact that Japan needs more international developers. That doesn’t mean integrating those developers into Japanese companies, as well as Japanese society, is a simple process. But what are the most common challenges encountered by these companies with multinational teams? To find out, TokyoDev interviewed a number of Japanese companies with international employees. In addition to discussing the benefits of hiring overseas, we also wanted to learn more about what challenges they had faced, and how they had overcome them. The companies interviewed included: Autify, which provides an AI-based software test automation platform Beatrust, which has created a search platform that automatically structures profile information Cybozu, Japan’s leading groupware provider DeepX, which automates heavy equipment machinery Givery, which scouts, hires, and trains world-class engineers Shippio, which digitalizes international trading and is Japan’s first digital forwarding company Yaraku, which offers web-based translation management According to those companies, the issues they experienced fell into two categories: addressing the language barrier, and helping new hires come to Japan. The language barrier Language issues are by far the most universal problem faced by Japanese companies with multinational teams. As a result, all of the companies we spoke to have evolved their own unique solutions. AI translation To help improve English-Japanese communication, Yaraku has turned to AI and its own translation tool, YarakuZen. With these they’ve reduced comprehension issues down to verbal communication alone. Since their engineering teams primarily communicate via text anyway, this has solved the majority of their language barrier issue, and engineers feel that they can now work smoothly together. Calling on bilinguals While DeepX employs engineers from over 20 countries, English is the common language between them. Documentation is written in English, and even Japanese departments still write minutes in English so colleagues can check them later. Likewise, explanations of company-wide meetings are delivered in both Japanese and English. Still, a communication gap exists. To overcome it, DeepX assigns Japanese project managers who can also speak English well. English skills weren’t previously a requirement, but once English became the official language of the engineering team, bilingualism was an essential part of the role. These project managers are responsible for taking requests from clients and communicating them accurately to the English-only engineers. In addition, DeepX is producing more bilingual employees by offering online training in both Japanese and English. The online lessons have proven particularly popular with international employees who have just arrived in Japan. Beatrust has pursued a similar policy of encouraging employees to learn and speak both languages. Dr. Andreas Dippon, the Vice President of Engineering at Beatrust, feels that bilingual colleagues are absolutely necessary to business. I think the biggest mistake you can make is just hiring foreigners who speak only English and assuming all the communication inside engineering is just English and that’s fine. You need to understand that business communication with [those] engineers will be immensely difficult . . . You need some almost bilingual people in between the business side and the engineering side to make it work. Similar to DeepX, Beatrust offers its employees a stipend for language learning. “So nowadays, it’s almost like 80 percent of both sides can speak English and Japanese to some extent, and then there are like two or three people on each side who cannot speak the other language,” Dippon said. “So we have like two or three engineers who cannot speak Japanese at all, and we have two or three business members who cannot speak English at all.” But in the engineering team itself “is 100 percent English. And the business team is almost 100 percent Japanese.” “ Of course the leaders try to bridge the gap,” Dippon explained. “So I’m now joining the business meetings that are in Japanese and trying to follow up on that and then share the information with the engineering team, and [it’s] also the same for the business lead, who is joining some engineering meetings and trying to update the business team on what’s happening inside engineering.” “Mixed language” Shippio, on the other hand, encountered negative results when they leaned too hard on their bilingual employees. Initially they asked bilinguals to provide simultaneous interpretation at meetings, but quickly decided that the burden on them was too great and not sustainable in the long term. Instead, Shippio has adopted a policy of “mixed language,” or combining Japanese and English together. The goal of mixed language is simple: to “understand each other.” Many employees who speak one language also know a bit of the other, and Shippio has found that by fostering a culture of flexible communication, employees can overcome the language barrier themselves. For example, a Japanese engineer might forget an English word, in which case he’ll do his best to explain the meaning in Japanese. If the international engineer can understand a bit of Japanese, he’ll be able to figure out what his coworker intended to say, at which point they will switch back to English. This method, while idiosyncratic to every conversation, strikes a balance between the stress of speaking another language and consideration for the other person. The most important thing, according to Shippio, is that the message is conveyed in any language. Meeting more often Another method these companies use is creating structured meeting schedules designed to improve cross-team communication. Givery teams hold what they call “win sessions” and “sync-up meetings” once or twice a month, to ensure thorough information-sharing within and between departments. These two types of meetings have different goals: A “win session” reviews business or project successes, with the aim of analyzing and then repeating that success in future. A “sync-up meeting” helps teams coordinate project deadlines. They report on their progress, discuss any obstacles that have arisen, and plan future tasks. In these meetings employees often speak Japanese, but the meetings are translated into English, and sometimes supplemented with additional English messages and explanations. By building these sort of regular, focused meetings into the company’s schedule, Givery aims to overcome language difficulties with extra personal contact. Beatrust takes a similarly structured, if somewhat more casual, approach. They tend to schedule most meetings on Friday, when engineers are likely to come to the office. However, in addition to the regular meetings, they also hold the “no meeting hour” for everyone, including the business team. “One of the reasons is to just let people talk to each other,” Dippon explained. “Let the engineers talk to business people and to each other.” This kind of interaction, we don’t really care if it’s personal stuff or work stuff that they talk about. Just to be there, talking to each other, and getting this feeling of a team [is what’s important]. . . . This is hugely beneficial, I think. Building Bonds Beatrust also believes in building team relationships through regular off-site events. “Last time we went to Takaosan, the mountain area,” said Dippon. “It was nice, we did udon-making. . . . This was kind of a workshop for QRs, and this was really fun, because even the Japanese people had never done it before by themselves. So it was a really great experience. After we did that, we had a half-day workshop about team culture, company culture, our next goals, and so on.” Dippon in particular appreciates any chance to learn more about his fellow employees. Like, ‘Why did you leave your country? Why did you come to Japan? What are the problems in your country? What’s good in your country?’ You hear a lot of very different stories. DeepX also hopes to deepen the bonds between employees with different cultures and backgrounds via family parties, barbecues, and other fun, relaxing events. This policy intensified after the COVID-19 pandemic, during which Japan’s borders were closed and international engineers weren’t able to immigrate. When the borders opened and those engineers finally did arrive, DeepX organized in-house get-togethers every two weeks, to fortify the newcomers’ relationships with other members of the company. Sponsoring visas Not every company that hires international developers actually brings them to Japan—-quite a few prefer to hire foreign employees who are already in-country. However, for those willing to sponsor new work visas, there is universal consensus on how best to do it: hire a professional. Cybozu has gone to the extent of bringing those professionals in-house. The first international member they hired was an engineer living in the United States. Though he wanted to work in Japan, at that time they didn’t have any experience in acquiring a work visa or relocating an employee, so they asked him to work for their US subsidiary instead. But as they continued hiring internationally, Cybozu realized that quite a few engineers were interested in physically relocating to Japan. To facilitate this, the company set up a new support system for their multinational team, for the purpose of providing their employees with work visas. Other companies prefer to outsource the visa process. DeepX, for example, has hired a certified administrative scrivener corporation to handle visa applications on behalf of the company. Autify also goes to a “dedicated, specialized” lawyer for immigration procedures. Thomas Santonja, VP of Engineering at Autify, feels that sponsoring visas is a necessary cost of business and that the advantages far outweigh the price. We used to have fully remote, long-term employees outside of Japan, but we stopped after we noticed that there is a lot of value in being able to meet in person and join in increased collaboration, especially with Japanese-speaking employees that are less inclined to make an effort when they don’t know the people individually. “It’s kind of become a requirement, in the last two years,” he concluded, “to at least be capable of being physically here.” However, Autify does prevent unnecessary expenses by having a new employee work remotely from their home country for a one month trial period before starting the visa process in earnest. So far, the only serious issues they encountered were with an employee based in Egypt; the visa process became so complicated, Autify eventually had to give up. But Autify also employs engineers from France, the Philippines, and Canada, among other countries, and has successfully brought their workers over many times. Helping employees adjust Sponsoring a visa is only the beginning of bringing an employee to Japan. The next step is providing special support for international employees, although this can look quite different from company to company. DeepX points out that just working at a new company is difficult enough; also beginning a new life in a new country, particularly when one doesn’t speak the language, can be incredibly challenging. That’s why DeepX not only covers the cost of international flights, but also implemented other support systems for new arrivals. To help them get started in Japan, DeepX provides a hired car to transport them from the airport, and a furnished monthly apartment for one month. Then they offer four days of special paid leave to complete necessary procedures: opening a bank account, signing a mobile phone contract, finding housing, etc. The company also introduces real estate companies that specialize in helping foreigners find housing, since that can sometimes be a difficult process on its own. Dippon at Beatrust believes that international employees need ongoing support, not just at the point of entry, and that it’s best to have at least one person in-house who is prepared to assist them. I think that one trap many companies run into is that they know all about Japanese laws and taxes and so on, and everybody grew up with that, so they are all familiar. But suddenly you have foreigners who have basically no idea about the systems, and they need a lot of support, because it can be quite different. Santonja at Autify, by contrast, has had a different experience helping employees get settled. “I am extremely tempted to say that I don’t have any challenges. I would be extremely hard pressed to tell you anything that could be remotely considered difficult or, you know, require some organization or even extra work or thinking.” Most people we hire look for us, right? So they are looking for an opportunity to move to Japan and be supported with a visa, which is again a very rare occurrence. They tend to be extremely motivated to live and make it work here. So I don’t think that integration in Japan is such a challenge. Conclusion To companies unfamiliar with the process, the barriers to hiring internationally may seem high. However, there are typically only two major challenges when integrating developers from other countries. The first, language issues, has a variety of solutions ranging from the technical to the cultural. The second, attaining the correct work visa, is best handled by trained professionals, whether in-house or through contractors. Neither of these difficulties is insurmountable, particularly with expert assistance. In addition, Givery in particular has stressed that it’s not necessary to figure out all the details in advance of hiring: in fact, it can benefit a company to introduce international workers early on, before its own internal policies are overly fixed. This information should also benefit international developers hoping to work in Japan. Since this article reflects the top concerns of Japanese companies, developers can work to proactively relieve those worries. Learning even basic Japanese helps reduce the language barrier, while becoming preemptively familiar with Japanese society reassures employers that you’re capable of taking care of yourself here. If you’d like to learn more about the benefits these companies enjoy from hiring international developers, see part one of this article series here. Want to find a job in Japan? Check out the TokyoDev job board. If you want to know more about multinational teams, moving to Japan, or Japanese work life in general, see our extensive library of articles. If you’d like to continue the conversation, please join the TokyoDev Discord.

TokyoDev has already reported that Japan really needs international developers. But the more Japanese companies we’ve interviewed, the more we’ve realized that a talent shortage is not the only reason for Japanese companies to hire from overseas. There are a host of other advantages to recruiting internationally, and a growing number of managers are beginning to recognize the benefits. To gain more perspective on how multinational teams enhance their Japanese companies, we conducted interviews with the following businesses: Autify, which provides an AI-based software test automation platform Beatrust, which provides solutions to help companies maximize their human capital Cybozu, Japan’s leading groupware provider DeepX, which automates heavy equipment machinery Givery, which scouts, hires, and trains world-class engineers KOMOJU by Degica, a payment processor MODE, which pioneers innovative solutions to connect the digital and physical worlds Yaraku, which offers web-based translation management Below we’ve compiled the top reasons they gave for hiring international developers, and the specific ways in which those developers have improved their businesses. These range from the obvious—a greater talent pool to draw from—to surprising and even counterintuitive upsides, such as improved domestic recruiting and sheer enjoyment. The global talent pool Because Japan is suffering a developer shortage, and particularly lacks specialized and senior engineers, Japanese companies are expanding their recruiting efforts worldwide to find the staff and skill sets they need. That was DeepX’s initial motive for hiring international engineers: they needed employees with advanced technical skills. At first, when the company was founded in 2016, DeepX only intended to hire Japanese engineers. However, robotics is a fairly rare specialty in Japan, and those engineers who have studied it were reluctant to work at a newly-formed startup. Consequently, in 2018, DeepX hired their first international engineer; now they employ engineers from 20 different countries. Givery ran into the same issue. Though founded in 2009, the company spent five years trying to find enough staff to develop its B2C programming learning service, but struggled to attract talent because the company wasn’t yet well-known in Japan. In 2014 they received an application from a recruitment service, for an international front-end engineer who didn’t speak much Japanese. Since management was already discussing how best to globalize, they decided to seize this opportunity, despite the fact that many managers did not speak English. Seven years later, half of Givery’s development team of 120 are non-Japanese and hail from 20 different countries. The immediate benefits of widening the applicant pool speak for themselves. However Makoto Mizukami, head of Customer Engineering at KOMOJU by Degica, thinks recruiting internationally isn’t just a solution for today: it’s future-proofing. Because Japan is facing a declining and aging population, Mizukami believes that companies will face increased long-term risks if they insist on only hiring Japanese employees. In order for companies to survive, they must expand the range of people they employ. According to Mizukami, this applies to more than international engineers: companies must create an environment that can accept a highly diverse range of workers, including immigrants, women, people with disabilities, and the elderly. As will be seen later in this article, hiring international workers often has the side effect of creating a more favorable work environment for all. Recruiting at home But hiring international workers has a surprising secondary benefit: it improves domestic recruitment as well. KOMOJU found this out firsthand when they hired Shogo Ito as Staff SRE, since his primary motivation for joining KOMOJU was to improve his English. In Ito’s previous job, while he’d had the opportunity to collaborate with overseas teams, he hadn’t felt immersed in an English environment. But since at KOMOJU English is the primary form of communication, Ito felt confident he’d have a chance there to improve his skills. Givery has also benefited from this trend. It was their initial struggle to find engineers locally that led them to recruit internationally. As their multinational development team grew, though, they discovered that their diversity attracted more Japanese talent as well. As a result, Givery is one of the few tech companies in Japan to meet its recruitment goals on a regular basis. International knowledge Companies that hire internationally usually discover that their new employees bring more to the table than expected. It’s not just a question of tech skills—they carry with them fresh information that broadens companies’ knowledge bases overall. In the case of Beatrust, information from international employees contributes directly to their product. “We have a talent collaboration platform,” explained Dr. Andreas Dippon, the Vice President of Engineering at Beatrust. “The focus is [helping] employees better work with each other. Currently we’re focused on selling this product to big clients in Japan, which all already have some diversification. “Of course in Japan it’s mainly Japanese people, but you also have international engineers joining the big companies as well. So how can we support them collaborating in their company where there’s a language barrier, where there are cultural differences?”  Having engineers of different backgrounds, especially with our product, helps us better understand how users think. KOMOJU also credits their global team with improving their product. As every country has unique payment methods and financial rules, the “insider knowledge” of employees from that country has proven invaluable. KOMOJU specifically cited China, which uses a number of payment methods such as Alipay and WeChat Pay that are unfamiliar in Japan; according to them, Chinese employees have been extremely helpful in explaining those systems to the rest of the team. Mizukami gave another example of international knowledge proving helpful. A user who had a free Chinese email address was flagged by the fraud detection system. At that time, Mizukami said, a Chinese engineer told them that “People who use this address cannot be trusted, so it’s okay to ignore it.” With that engineer’s assistance, the team was able to respond to the situation appropriately. Other tech companies we spoke to cited the benefits of international knowledge more generally, but Cybozu in particular knows the value of global perspectives. An earlier attempt to take their product, Cybozu Office, to the US via a subsidiary failed—in part, executives decided, due to differences in business customs between the US and Japan. That was why, in 2022, Cybozu approached international expansion differently. This time they created the New Business Division, an English-first multinational development team specifically designed to help Cybozu adapt existing products to the global market. In addition, the team has been tasked with building new products from the ground up, with an international audience in mind. Staying abreast of new tech Another plus to hiring international engineers, and particularly those who speak English, is earlier access to new tools and technology. Ito at KOMOJU pointed out that information on new services and tools is usually spread through English online media, and that most Japanese engineers don’t keep up with English articles on the subject. This means that, until someone writes an “I tried it” style post in Japanese, information on the latest developments isn’t readily available to Japanese developers. Having international engineers on the team, who are accustomed to scanning the English-language web for new tools and methods, accelerates the process. In addition, since KOMOJU’s official company language is English, there’s no concern about finding software with a Japanese UI, which greatly expands their options. Ito explained that KOMOJU uses services that are not very familiar in Japan, such as JumpCloud, Tenable, Vanta, and Honeybadger. Takuma Tatsumi, a recruiter for Yaraku, confirmed that the latest technology is overwhelmingly in English, leading to asymmetry of information. Even at previous companies, Japanese CTOs would ask the international engineers, “What are the current technology trends?” But since Yaraku has hired a number of international members, they’re now able to keep up with the latest development trends and incorporate new technology when it is, in fact, new. Changes in work environment Most Japanese companies with multinational teams end up making substantial culture changes to accommodate international employees. This could be considered a downside; instead, those we spoke to agree that the evolution of their company’s work environment was one of the top benefits of international recruitment. “The advantage I can see is with a mix of mindsets and [thoughts on the] future of work from so many different places,” said Thomas Santonja, VP of Engineering at Autify. I found a lot of very, very rich discussions about what to do, what not to do, and why, and a lot of debate, which is at least in my experience rarer in a pure Japanese environment. “Canadian and American staff are the ones that are the most vocal about why and how to do stuff, and [they] try to engage to get other people’s opinions,” he added. “That actually created a culture which is not necessarily super common. . . . I believe injecting a North American mindset in the mix is very valuable for a Japanese company, from my side of the fence.” Scott Tullis, head of Global Recruiting at MODE, also endorsed a mix of non-Japanese and Japanese work styles. “We’re a unique hybrid,” he said. Thanks to our Bay Area origins, we have the Silicon Valley tech startup culture in terms of entrepreneurship and innovation, and we also incorporate some of the great aspects of Japanese work culture around teamwork and collaboration. “We’re fortunate to not have any of the more notorious elements of Silicon Valley startup culture here,” he added. “The term ‘bro culture’ comes to mind and is well known in the Bay Area, which we thankfully do not have at MODE. Rather, we foster a more collaborative, thoughtful, and humble culture where people are truly trusted.” While the Japanese side of the company has inspired an atmosphere of humility and cooperation, the American side has contributed a fully remote work policy which, as Tullis pointed out, “is a relatively newer concept in Japan.” “We have offices in San Mateo and Tokyo, as it’s still important to have face-to-face interactions to collaborate effectively and continuously build our culture,” he said. “At the same time, the option to work remotely makes our work environment very flexible, which is beneficial for many team members, especially working parents. Our team comes from a diverse range of backgrounds, so this flexibility is key to better meeting the needs of each individual.” When it comes to work policy, Dippon at Beatrust has leaned on his European background. “ So I come from Germany, with German work culture,” he said, “which is like, we take care to take holidays and take time off and don’t do immense overwork and so on. So I try to bring that culture into my team, which is often difficult, because especially [people from] Japan, China, Taiwan, and so on—they used to work lots of overtime all the time.” So when I told them, ‘Please take the day off,’ and they said, ‘Okay, I’ll take the day off, but I can work in the morning and evening,’ I told them, ‘No, take the day off, don’t come in.’ They were confused at first, but over time I think they adapted to some extent, and now they really enjoy it, and when they come back they come back fully-refreshed and eager. That being said, Dippon takes great care not to impose his own European work paradigms too much. In fact, he finds the cultural differences amongst his team members both fascinating and useful. “Every day is very interesting,” he said. “You learn a lot about their countries, about their work style, and you can benefit from their experience in their work style as well.” Like Santonja, Dippon has noted how international hires lead to a more open style of communication. “The culture benefit is huge . . . when you can foster open communication in your engineering team, which we have achieved now. . . . So everybody can clearly state their opinion and not hold back,” Dippon said. “Which is very different from Japanese culture, from what I’ve heard,” Dippon added. “Even the Japanese people we have, they like that, so they can clearly say their opinion without having to fear any rejection.” All three of the executives quoted above are, notably, international hires themselves. But many Japanese managers also cite the benefits of adapting their company’s work environment. In fact, Tatsumi of Yaraku compared the company’s international members to the introduction of Western culture into Japan at the end of the Edo period, which led to profound cultural changes. Makiko Nakayama, Yaraku’s Human Resources manager, agreed with this. Foreign members are very frank about the issues they face, which is why we’ve created an environment that’s easy for them to work in. Those changes include a new approach to employee communication and collaboration. When work output is low or the team runs into difficulties, rather than immediately thinking, “Maybe someone is slacking off,” Yaraku employees tend to ask, “Why is it like this?” and “How can we improve it?” They said that the chance to actively communicate and think of ways to improve together creates a cooperative corporate culture, which has become one of the biggest attractions of working at Yaraku. International hires also led to new policies around paid leave. As Nakayama explained, employees from overseas told HR, “It takes four days to go home and back, so even if I use my paid leave, I really don’t have much time to rest.” As a result, Yaraku now allows employees to work remotely overseas for 30 days a year. Likewise, DeepX reported that its foreign engineers enjoy their new holiday substitute leave system. This system allows engineers to take a lump sum of vacation any time they like, by treating normal Japanese holidays as working days, and granting the same number of paid holidays. In this way, engineers can take longer vacations when returning to their home countries. But according to Satomi Makino, the system isn’t just used by international hires—many Japanese engineers are happy to take advantage of it as well. I feel DeepX is a comfortable working environment that incorporates the good points of overseas companies. In our interview with Givery, they offered some specific recommendations to other Japanese companies looking to build multinational teams. They suggested starting hiring early in the formation of the company, before internal policies had been well-established. Their newly-hired international employees, Givery’s management found, had different needs and expectations from their Japanese workers. For example, international engineers made requests like, “Can I go to the gym for two hours during lunch?” or “I want to go back to my home country in December. Can I take a month off?” Because Givery didn’t have too many procedures in place, it was able to consider suggestions like these and implement more flexible, globalized workplace practices. If Givery had waited to build its multinational development team until its policies were more firmly established, it may have struggled more to adapt to the needs of its international employees. It’s fun It may seem like an odd consideration, but multiple interviewees cited an interesting reason for hiring international employees—it’s fun! Yaraku’s engineering team was born out of CEO Suguru Sakanishi’s question to himself: What would happen if I created a global engineering team in my own company? Before founding Yaraku, Sakanishi had previously been to the US and worked in an international environment. This experience made him realize how fun it is to work with people from various backgrounds, and inspired him to hire people from abroad. KOMOJU shared a story about a newly-hired Indonesian member’s introduction to Japan. In Indonesia he had a 10 megabit Internet line for 6,000 yen a month; then he learned that in Japan, he could get a 10 gigabit line for the same price. The new hire was so surprised he exclaimed, ‘What’s going on?!’ The whole team enjoyed hearing that and sharing in his excitement. Members at KOMOJU believe that seeing and appreciating cultural differences, especially through casual conversations like this, is one of the unique attractions of multinational teams. Dippon, at Beatrust, describes this kind of cultural sharing as “one of the biggest pluses for me.” It’s so interesting, sitting together after work and talking about, ‘Oh, what’s going on in your country?’ . . . You get this kind of information in the news and so on, but you almost never hear from a person from that country. Conclusion For developers interested in working at Japanese companies, these interviews should offer insight into why Japanese managers are also interested in hiring them. Most businesses like these are looking for candidates who can bring more to the table than their work skills alone. They’re searching for applicants who can contribute the international knowledge and English proficiency that their teams need to level up. These companies also don’t necessarily expect candidates to conform to Japanese business norms. In fact, employees who forthrightly (but politely) explain their needs and expectations can benefit all the workers at the company, not just those from overseas. That being said, developers should be prepared to meet these companies halfway, mostly by being genuinely interested in Japan. It isn’t just a question of being willing to adapt to a new country: these managers appreciate the fun and interest of employing someone from another culture, so they’re keen to share their own as well. As Yaraku put it, they place importance on whether or not the candidate is specifically interested in this country, because that’s one of the greatest values that Yaraku can offer: “enjoying Japan.” To learn more about how you can work in (and enjoy) Japan, check out our job board or extensive library of articles. To continue the conversation, join the TokyoDev Discord.

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.