Japan will always be my home away from home. It was my first love; my first teaching job abroad, the first place I lived overseas, and to this day it is a country that I have spent the most time in – other than the U.S., obviously. It is an awesome place to live, the people and the food are amazing, and – to misquote Anthony Bourdain – Japan is “sensory overload.” If all of this isn’t making you wonder how to get a teaching job in Japan, I don’t know what will! All it takes is a little research, beforehand.

The Good  

From a traveler’s point of view, Japan is probably the best country to work in. It is very hard to fit into Japanese culture in general. To be frank, as a tourist you never will. There are so many nuances and idiosyncrasies to Japanese social norms that even the Japanese struggle with them at times. But, lucky for you, working there will give you time to acculturate. You will meet people who will teach you, and they will open doors to that side of Japan that you have been dreaming about.

The Not-So-Good

As I’m sure you are already aware, Japan is VERY expensive. Now, imagine that salaries for English teaching jobs in Japan have been stagnant for literally 20 years, and you can imagine how far your money is going to go there. What this means is you really need to do your due diligence when choosing the city you will live in because it is unlikely you will have much money left over to do much traveling around the country. (For a cheaper alternative, consider working in Korea.)

The Bad

A LOT of jobs in Japan are outsourced to middlemen companies, a sort of staffing agency, that will either hire you out to local schools, or truck you around to a hodge-podge of one-off contracts that they have with businesses in your respective city. While this is not bad in-and-of-itself, these middlemen obviously keep a portion of your already meager salary. They also work you just enough so that they don’t have to supply you adequate health insurance and are notorious for bait-and-switches.  The only reason they get away with it is simple: Japan is such an awesome country that teachers put up with it just so they can stay there. 

I really recommend not taking one of the jobs described in the paragraph above because it will rob you of the most important thing you get out of working abroad: cultural immersion. You won’t actually be an employee of the schools that you are working at, nor will you interact much with the overlords at your agency. This leaves you kind of isolated and you won’t have as much of an opportunity to bond with the Japanese like you want to. Anyway, sometimes you have to take one of these jobs just to get your foot in the door. Just make sure you have a transition plan in mind, otherwise you probably won’t be staying long.

So, without further ado, here are my tips and tricks on how to get a teaching job in Japan. Full disclosure, while I don’t believe I have ever broken any laws, I’m sure I have bent them when looking for jobs there. Do so at your own risk. All information valid pre-Covid.

Route 1

There are two routes you can take to finding a job in Japan. The first is to hunt for a job from home, wait for your new employer to sponsor your visa, and come over the “legitimate” way. This is how I got my first job in Japan with a language school called AEON. I had to fly to San Francisco on my own dime to attend a two-day hiring event, and if I remember correctly, they were only looking to fill two positions out of the 50 sum-odd people who showed up. Not great odds. I know a couple of the other large chain schools do their hiring the same way. You might be able to converse directly with one of the mom-and-pop language schools and get them to sponsor you. Otherwise, you can try route 2.

Route 2

The second way, and the way that I recommend doing it now, is to fly to Japan and job hunt on the ground. This works best in the Kanto region, which is the only place I’ve tried it in, but it would probably work in other areas as well. It’s going to be expensive to do it this way, but your odds of finding a job are much, much higher. So if you really have your heart set on working in Japan, this is how you do it

• Double check how long tourist visas are valid for your particular nationality. Americans are given three months, which is probably what you would need to do this safely. Could work with two perhaps, but I don’t think I’d gamble it.
• Look for a guesthouse or a room to let in the city you are wanting to work in. To give you an idea, I rented a room in a guesthouse in Yokohama a few minutes from Yokohama station for about $700 a month. You can’t rent your own apartment in Japan without the proper documentation, which you won’t have yet.
• Go to Japan during the main hiring season: during summer vacation, or shortly before it ends. June is probably your best bet.
• Hit the pavement, figuratively speaking. Seeing as you are already in-country and available to begin work ASAP, you hold great value to two parties: ALT companies (the middlemen above mentioned) and smaller, family operated language schools who can’t afford to recruit overseas. 

If you come during the late spring or summer months you should be able to find an ALT job relatively easily. I recommend really hunting for a smaller language school job, though, and only settling for an ALT job if you can’t help it. I don’t want to totally turn you off to them, because they can be just fine, but it’s a lot more rolling of the dice than working for a Canadian man and his Japanese wife who are running a language school out of their living room.

Timeline 

So, obviously the major caveat with the second method is the time limit. You have, in theory, three months to find a job in Japan if you enter on a tourist visa, but you need to factor in the time it takes to process the visa as well. While some might tell you it can take up to three months, if you are in-country, it almost never takes more than a month – usually it’s about three weeks. This gives you two months to find the job, but do your best to really hit the pavement and try and secure something in the first month.

And that’s it! I’ve used the first method once and the second method twice. The first method I got lucky and got an offer on a long shot that was literally the last place I applied to; the second method, not only have I always found a job, but I’ve always gotten multiple offers. So if you are really committed to working in Japan, budget what you think it would take for you to live in Japan for three months, buy a ticket, and go! Worse comes to worse, you can take a job in China at the drop of a dime if you didn’t find anything in Japan. Oh yeah, and bring a suit to interview in!