Warm up
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- What industry do you work in and what is your role?
- What are your responses in your role / position?
- Can you describe to the function of your workplace / company?
- How many departments, how many offices. National or International?
- What are the minimum requirements for employment ie Education or Experience?
- How many opportunities are there to ‘move up the ladder’?
- What is the process for changing job roles ie Interview? Test?
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General discussion about your workweek:
- Current projects? Deadlines? Opportunities?
- Anything of interest happening?
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Script
1. Back in the bubble period, I was able to get a job at a Japanese bank in Tokyo with language skills that were intermediate at best. With a lot of intensive effort (and classes kindly paid for by my employer) I was able to improve quickly and was eventually writing reports in Japanese.
Looking at the non-Japanese working in Japan today, however, I see a lot of people who are coming into their jobs in Japan with much higher skills than I had when I started out. And I often hear job-seekers wondering how much Japanese they really need to work in Japan.
2. So I asked some Japan-based recruiters for their view on what Japanese levels they see their clients requiring.
I got a very consistent answer: With the exception of certain specialized positions, you’ll need to speak Japanese pretty well, with Japanese Language Proficiency Test Level 2 certification (N2) being a commonly-used benchmark.
3. Skills needed to do the job
As Casey Wahl, CEO of Wahl and Case, puts it, “More firms are getting comfortable hiring foreigners, but they don’t have too much tolerance for lower level Japanese and for those not willing to conform to the standing corporate culture.”
“(N2) should open most doors and get you in for an interview,” Wahl says. “Then it will be up to your speaking communication skills (usually prioritized over written) to pass the language requirements.
4. Akemi Hamano, a recruiting consultant at Hays, says that, with the exception of blue-collar positions, companies are looking for a business level of Japanese ability sufficient for frequent back-and-forth communication and being able to make decisions together.
David Price, client services director at Robert Half, is more succinct. “In most cases it’s pretty simple — if your co-workers and/or clients can’t or won’t speak your language, then you must speak (and often read and type) theirs,” Price says.
5. At the same time, whereas expectations for conversational level abilities are high, Alan Adkins, president of The Refined Group, notes that there is more flexibility when it comes to reading and writing, due to an awareness that learning kanji is hard.
The value placed on Japanese ability may not be only related to ease of daily communication.“Many companies also look at business level Japanese ability as a sign of commitment to Japan as well as solid work ethic as most Japanese people seem to understand how difficult their native language is,” says Anthony Blick, a senior consultant at PowerUp Solutions.
6. Gary Schrader points out this competition factor, noting a recent influx of non-Japanese labor entering the Japanese market with at least N2 level certified Japanese. This includes both those who have studied in their home countries, and the growing number of non-Japanese studying at Japanese universities.
7. Personally, in recent years I have worked with many younger employees at my Japanese clients who are natives of China or South Korea and speak excellent Japanese, often at a near-native level.
Given the competition, just a basic level of Japanese ability may not be very meaningful. “some Japanese is basically as useless as no Japanese. Nobody cares about N4 or N3. Things only start getting interesting from N2.”
8. Programming skills
The one sector where the recruiters I talked to uniformly highlighted an exception to language requirements was for highly technical positions – system development, programming, data analytics for IT consulting and valuation in mergers and acquisitions advisory as examples.
“Recently we have seen the bar for Japanese requirements dropping to nothing for engineers,” Wahl says. “It is getting more and more common for tech companies to hire foreign engineers with no Japanese skills.”
9. Other fields that are reported to be more open to hiring non-Japanese who lack Japanese language fluency are language teaching, recruiting, and securities and investments.
In addition, some Japanese companies are hiring non-Japanese for jobs facing overseas markets, where language skills may be less important.
10. Even when it comes to jobs requiring specialized skills that trump language ability, employers may not be looking for people in Japan to fill those posts. That’s often the case in foreign multinational corporations, but also more recently in Japanese multinationals, where people with the requisite skills may already be working for the company at other locations and could be transferred to Japan.
Discussion
1. Do you / have you work(ed) with any foreign people? What was their native language? what was their Japanese ability?
2. What level of language is the bare minimum to work in your office/workplace?
3. Do you agree that N2 should be the basic level of understanding to work in japan ?
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00583/english-abilities-crucial-but-lacking-in-japanese-workplaces.html
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2019/09/11/how-tos/much-japanese-language-skill-need-work-japan/
Keywords
-
intermediate =
having or suitable for a level of knowledge or skill between basic and advanced.
- intensive = concentrated on a single subject or into a short time; very thorough or vigorous.
- benchmark = a standard or point of reference against which things may be compared.
- tolerance = the ability or willingness to tolerate the existence of opinions or behaviour that one dislikes or disagrees with.
- conform = (of a person) behave according to socially acceptable conventions or standards.
- standing = Current / in use
- blue-collar = relating to manual work or workers, particularly in industry.
- sufficient = enough; adequate.
- succinct = briefly and clearly expressed. / concise
- influx = an arrival or entry of large numbers of people or things.
- meaningful = serious, important, or worthwhile. (substantial)
- trump = surpass (something) by saying or doing something better. (outshine / upstage)
- requisite = a thing that is necessary for the achievement of a specified end.
