Hacker News Reader

Comment by fzeroracer | Hacker News Reader

The key thing is that the ESI category includes a lot of work which you don't need to know Japanese. For example, software engineering jobs in Japan are often at either larger multinational companies or companies with enough presence outside of Japan that they have teams which are in English.

Japan has been on a recent anti-immigration kick via making visas harder and more expensive to get while also blaming them for all of their problems which, isn't really gonna work out for multiple reasons.

View on HN

> software engineering jobs in Japan are often at either larger multinational companies or companies with enough presence outside of Japan that they have teams which are in English.

Just because you work in a multinational company where they have English speaking teams does not mean that you should not know the language. It is weird to assume that just because your first job is with an English speaking team you will always work with those teams or in that company at all.

What about daily life? Communication is a fundamental part of your activity as a civilian imo. Not understanding what is going on in a country without using some device to translate for you is not acceptable. Whether in a train or during an earthquake you must always be able to communicate.

> Not understanding what is going on in a country without using some device to translate for you is not acceptable

I knew an American guy who worked for Yahoo Japan in Tokyo for 10 years, and still had zero desire to learn the language.

But the law doesn't apply to all ESI jobs, just a subset which (ostensibly) do need to know Japanese.

This is true that it primarily applies to jobs which say they need to know Japanese as an attempt to prevent fraud, but realistically it doesn't actually accomplish anything beyond punishing honest businesses. Companies will just lie about the language requirements, and visa holders will have no incentive to properly report the fraud because they run the risk of their visa being revoked and kicked out of the country.

There are smarter ways to implement a language requirement, and really this is part of a trend of Japan tightening up restrictions on foreigners to try and solve a perceived problem by a fraction of a fraction of individuals.

See, I would have figured the "Specialist in Humanities" part of it would not include software development.

I just looked up the definition/qualifications for it and I misunderstood the bit.

I thought it was sub categories. Engineers, who are Specialists in Humanities, who are doing International Services.

But it's more like three different categories. Engineers OR Specialists in Humanities OR International Services.

It seems like they could just move International Services to its own category. (Based on the information in this link: https://portal.jp-mirai.org/en/work/s/highly-skilled-hr/giji...)

Teaching English is humanities though, not IS, so that doesn't work. (To clarify, teaching at any sort of private company. A K12 school has a dedicated Instructor class that can't be used for anything else.) And translating (which requires proficiency) is IS in some cases I think?

I also initially read it as "this is an example of the type of category that would have the requirement". Which doesn't preclude other categories also needing the requirement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com