The Heart and Soul Commitment Paradox

If you’re going to fail at something, at least fail by being too aggressive, rather than failing by default through passivity.

If you ever have the opportunity to come to a Tokyo HN meetup, you'll get to meet Jason, who wrote this and runs them. He's one of the few people at the sweet spot on the Venn diagram "personality is a force of nature" and "would gladly spend time hanging out with."

On the specific topic of getting a job in Japan: if this is really your goal in life, star the part where it becomes 100,000x easier to do this after you have some "in" in Proper Japanese Society (TM). If you are a force of nature like Jason is, then you'll end up getting one sometime between landing and convincing the Prime Minister's secretary that he should be having tea with you. You can do it in meek-friendly ways, or I never would have managed it. (I applied to an exchange program, got placed as a translator, and used a happy client as an introduction into the wonderful word of salarymandom. So that's a route. There might also be one that passes through the river Styx, in which case, use that one instead. But there are definitely options.)

Key take away, though: like Jason says, virtually anything you can possibly do here is more effective than the halfhearted typical resume spray-and-pray from abroad that most people who say they want a job in Japan do. Resume spray-and-pray is a terrible idea in general, but it's terrible-squared in the particular circumstance "foreigner wants a job at a Japanese company" because of the way gatekeepers work here.

BTW: You can get status in Proper Japanese Society (TM) by working for a high-status organization outside the country which you can convince to lateral you over to Tokyo. Think of a massively high-status US organization: they probably have dealings in Tokyo. There are a variety of ways to convince them to send you to Japan. One fairly straightforward one is to know more Japanese than you can find printed on a sushi menu, which will catapult you ahead of 99.8% of their US employees for that opportunity. The specifics of how to do this and how hard it would be depend on the organization: I have heard of places where Tokyo is considered a hardship post and have heard of places where Tokyo is considered the kind of place you kick butt and take names for a career to get a stint in. (And would have had ZERO luck identifying those prior to hearing anecdotes from inside. Sorry, can't identify them without breaking confidences.)

Anyone can be good by ability, the great manifest it forcefully.

Having tried it, my advice is don't go to Japan and then look for work, unless you're lucky enough to be from a country with Working Holiday agreements (not the US), or have a lot of connections.