What it's like to join a startup in Japan | Hacker News Reader

What it's like to join a startup in Japan

mygengo.com

43 pointsKlonoar29 comments

Not to be dismissive, but a more correct title is 'How I describe the company I work at from the rose-colored glasses that come with the first few weeks/months of employment at a new place'.

(or if I was more cynical: 'our company is great! come work for us! remember to tell the CEO that I referred you, it may influence my bonus!')

I read the headline and actually laughed out loud at the thought of it.

In my mind* North American Startups probably have the work hours of regular Japanese corporations. So a Japanese startup must be some order of magnitude higher than that... they probably manage to squeeze a 25th hour out of you every single work-day or something.

*completely ignorant mind that is, I've never worked in Japan, just from what I've read.

Hmm... sadly the article has very little substance in terms of the Japanese culture in a startup environment. Disappointing.

Is this just keyword spam for myGengo or something?

I was wondering about working in Japan - I'd love to know how the scene/pay/hours/good parts/bad parts/visa acquisition is compared to other countries.

the visa part can be (as in many countries - except maybe as eu citizen in another eu country) a bit annoying.

as an engineer (programmer) you either need a degree or (documented) 10 yrs+ of work experience. if ou fulfill that you basically have to stick to the checklist of what to hand in in what form like sticking to an rfc. reason i mention this is that i heard of/from quite a couple of people who did not - going like "i did not have X so i handed in Y which is basically the same...". does not fly...

then you either need a company "sponsoring you' or have proof that you have enough income (ie. several contracts as a freelancer).

in the end it is less scary than many posts on the net make you (made me) think.

Getting a working visa is rather easy if you have a company sponsoring you - certainly much easier than for the US for a EU citizen, and much shorter. If the company has experience doing it, it can take less than 2 months between the very beginning and you getting the visa. You are almost guaranteed to get it if you have company sponsorship.

OTOH, anything permanent is a chore.

Bit more background info here (I co-founded the company that the person blogging here is working for, s'pose he'd better answer about the pay :)) http://blog.500startups.com/2011/01/24/how-to-create-a-succe...

Visa: If you have a college degree and/or significant experience it helps a lot but we know people who've managed to self-sponsor with just the experience.

But working for a traditional Japanese company is normally a soul-crushing experience for foreigners. There are not a lot of startups here :)

How exactly does visa-self-sponsorship work? Is it required that you've had a company-sponsored visa before applying for self-sponsorship (or can you self-sponsor your first visa)?

How is it determined whether you are allowed to self-sponsor?

It's complicated. This is one of my favorite hacking-a-non-technical system situations: you are allowed to self-sponsor if you can convince the examining clerk that you are allowed to self-sponsor. Points in favor: you are capable of writing a letter in support of your application which repeat the requirements of the Japanese immigration law and convinces him you pass them, you have contracts and invoices which demonstrate a level of income that the clerk accepts (variously phrased as "enough to live on", "more than the average Japanese person", or "3 million yen" -- he has wide discretion here) plus tax receipts which match them for the latest year, you have an attorney or someone in your corner who knows how the game is played, and in general your comportment and presentation scream Desirable Foreigner.

Can you self-sponsor your first visa? Do you want the technical answer or the useful answer here? Technically, yes, I suppose you could. It would help if you have a stamped letter from the Emperor attesting that your freelance web programming skills are the only thing standing between Japan and total annihilation. If you have that letter, I'd give you fifty-fifty odds.

How's working in $YOUR_NATION? A fairly diverse experience, right? You've got scrappy startup programmers and 7-11 clerks and toilet-plunging janitors and people kept on a government payroll for no discernible reason, right? We have those, too. Whatever job conditions you have seen, we almost certainly have someone here.

Concrete for techies, work at myGengo is very different than being a salaryman at a particular Japanese multinational I have intimate experience of. That multinational is different from Toyota. Toyota is very much not Sony. There's a raft of Big Freaking Foreign Megacorps in Tokyo and the experience of working for them is, I'm told, not salarymanesque and also different from their home offices.

So assuming I would be interested in gaining employment in Japan, which I actually am, working for a BFFM in Tokyo would be one of the better options to pursue? Any particular ones that you have heard to be nice places to work?

From HN meetups, which is most of my exposure to the Tokyo tech grapevine, I have heard good things about a gigantic multinational advertising firm and an assortment of finance companies. Tokyo's a big place and every industry you've ever heard of, and most multinationals in those industries, has some presence there.

How do I get into these HN meetups.

I went to my first one last month a week after the earthquake and saw it here on HN. You should definitely come out for the next one which will probably show up here:

http://blog.makeleaps.com

It looks like the founders of MakeLeaps (po and jason_tko on HN) have been organizing them roughly every two months for about a year now. I was thinking of bugging them pretty soon to see when they were thinking of having the next meetup.

The Good: very safe country; Tokyo is an amazing city; public transportation is extensive and fairly cheap (no need to have a car); good, inexpensive food; no tipping; if you are a straight guy, dating will be somewhat easier than in Silicon Valley.

The Bad: as Robert says, working at Japanese companies can be soul-crushing; IT salaries are much lower than in comparable US areas; foreign web/software companies' presence here is very small in terms of R&D; rent in Tokyo is expensive; jobs that use English or otherwise hire foreigners are extremely concentrated in Tokyo; most Japanese cannot speak English, you need to learn Japanese; Japanese is not easy; many train lines in Tokyo are somewhat crowded.

The Ugly: Tokyo is ugly; you cannot easily get permanent residence even if you're married to a Japanese person, has a job and have lived here for years; most tenants refuse to rent to foreigners (discrimination is not illegal); we are subject to somewhat big earthquakes.

> if you are a straight guy, dating will be somewhat easier than in Silicon Valley.

Only "somewhat"? Haven't you read Charisma Man? Dating in Japan is like paradise for a nerd if you like Asian women. Actually, even Caucasian women are easier to get in Japan because you'll have no competition because all the other Caucasian guys will be with Japanese women.

Yeah, I meant it as an understatement (same for "somewhat big earthquakes").

I have never gotten this. And I've been here eight years. You're wrong afaik :-)

The rent situation is accurate, in that discrimination is not illegal. On the other hand, it is definitely not something that prevents you from getting a decent place full stop, by any means. And none of my married (to Japanese) friends report any trouble at all, for that matter. And permanent residence is certainly on the table if you've been here long enough.

The dating scene is awful though, don't let anyone tell you different :-)

It's hard to get a visa. The pay is bad and the hours are bad, but you can sometimes skip out early because you're the white guy. I don't think it's even possible to get a visa - I just worked under the table. You can't rent an apartment legally without a Japanese guy signing your lease. The scene is weird. If you're white you get lumped in with the gaijin weirdo underclass by default. You end up meeting a bunch of shady characters who you'd probably never have to deal with back in your home country. One interesting detail is that train fare for everyone with a job in Japan is paid for by their employer. But not you. At one point I was paying 3x as much for the train than I was paying in rent.

This is my experience working at a small firm. If you can work for somewhere like Morgan Stanley you'll have good hours, good pay, they'll find you an apartment, pay for your trains, and so forth. You'll still have to deal with the weirdo scene. However, the banking scene is filled with creeps everywhere, so it probably won't be much different people than back home.

My advice to any non-Japanese considering working in Japan is to skip it unless you're a "big in Japan" underground celebrity. It would be great to be a semi-famous DJ or artiste in Tokyo. Working a typical programming job... not so much.

That all said Japan is a really fun place to hang out. It's just not a really fun place to work.

Edit: this was 10 years ago.

Wow. Can you be a bit more specific? My experience is mostly opposite to yours in most respects, actually, but I've heard similar horror stories so I'm curious to know how you are (were) trying to get by. I don't think you're entirely typical though. Send me a mail if you're uncomfortable discussing here (although it does seem you've already left?)

(The apartment bit is not accurate, btw, and neither is the visa, compared to the States.)

At any rate, just a quick point of order that the parent may not be an entirely typical case. I know a guy working at smart.fm (or whatever they call themselves now) and he's having a good time of it.

This was 10 years ago. Maybe my comment seems too negative. It wasn't really a horror story. That's interesting if you don't need a guarantor to rent an apartment anymore, I'll have to ask my friends over there about that. When I lived there the housing options were either: have Japanese guarantor, rent from Yakuza owned building in Ugusudani, or pay $5000/m for luxo month-to-month rental. I guess the other non-guarantor option would have been to sub-lease from a Japanese person going abroad for a while.

Most places still require a guarantor, which basically means you pay the estate agency to act as a guarantor. In light of the fact that key money and other deposit requirements have generally gone down over that past few years (nothing to do with foreigners here this is motivated by Japanese), I think it's a wash.

Getting a place is definitely more a pain in the ass than it ought to be, for Japanese but moreso for foreigners, but I don't think it's quite as bad as you've painted it.

edit: okay things have changed since you've left. I've been here since 2003 and I can confirm that, at least

I slag on being a salaryman, frequently, but we never have these sorts of problems. Visa issues? The CEO will write the Minister of Justice a letter. Problem solved. (I am not joking in the slightest degree.)

Your boss must have liked you more than mine liked me. On the other hand, getting paid via a giant envelope filled with cash was pretty cool.

I was a little confused, thought there would be more about "in Japan" and less about "join a startup". Helpful confusion for your traffic, though. ;)

Point of note: "a Startup in Japan" does not necessarily mean "a Japanese Startup." I don't think I see any Japanese people in that picture, and I seem to remember from my sources that there are only one or two Japanese people working at the company.

Interestingly enough, I have worked for a Japanese Startup, and it really wasn't much different from a regular Japanese company, other than a lot more freedom when it came to procedures. Also the fact that I got to help build our entire development platform.

(Also, I think I see a familiar face third from the right...)

coincidentally, this week I used myGengo's services for the first time, after wanting to get a web app translated. Seriously impressed, speedy service, and the strings tool makes life very easy. Highly recommend - and can't complain about the price either :-)

What does this have to do with Japan?

I've sent in my internship application to them. fingers crossed

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