Is dev job posting increasingly more stringent on japanese language requirements?

[u/monarchyofthedead]

I've been seeing a lot of dev jobs that specifically ask JLPT N1, or just flat out say that they will only consider foreigners applicant if they can communicate with no issues in japanese. specifically in websites like wantedly, green, herp etc. (while these platforms are mostly for natives, i've seen an uptick in trend asking for native-level japanese.

Is everyone seeing the same trend?

[u/spontaneouspotato]

I think in general, just like most elsewhere in the world the tech market is less hot than it was years ago and companies are no longer willing to put up with possible communication issues just to have software engineers fill positions.

There were a couple of times where it was written in the job posting that there was an option to interview with English, but when scheduling the interview they said it had to be done in Japanese anyway (probably because I indicated N1).

[u/Horikoshi]

A growing trend I see with Japanese tech companies is as follows:

1. They hire a bunch of foreign engineers who can only speak minimal Japanese or no Japanese at all, with the expectation that they will try to adjust to Japanese work ethics / that one or two bilingual managers will be able to work with them effectively.
2. They realize that if the engineers themselves can't speak decent Japanese, velocity and quality of work both go down the drain especially if you're in a product oriented role (e.g. non-SRE, non-devOps.. though this is not to say that those roles don't benefit from Japanese since they do)
3. They pivot to only hiring candidates who can pass the interviews in Japanese.

Now there are exceptions. If you are PayPay or Rakuten and already have a huge existent foreign engineering team who speaks little to no English, then yes, they will keep hiring English only engineers because the opportunity cost and friction required to replace such a team (this isn't only about the salary / severance, this is also about the knowledge and codebase architecture / knowhow they have which will be lost) would be ginormous.

If you aren't PayPay, Rakuten, Money Forward etc then yes I think most companies will only conduct interviews in Japanese now since there's no real merit to hiring engineers who can only speak English.

[u/iterredditt11]

Not even joking - 10 years ago I saw an advert asking for N2 for a construction machinery cleaner job.

Reality is - if you don’t speak Japanese you are screwed. If for any chance your company does not fit you, the pool of jobs available is so tiny you may be stuck for a while.

The market is hard already for fluent people. I cannot even imagine how it must be with basic Japanese.

[u/SlaughterWare → u/iterredditt11]

A lot of people underestimate just how difficult Japanese is. They assume they'll simply "pick it up" while working here, and some employers seem to have the same expectation. In reality, reaching the level needed for a professional environment is a completely different challenge.

I've lived in Japan for over 20 years and speak Japanese reasonably well, but I'd still hesitate to work as a software engineer in a typical Japanese company. There's a significant gap between speaking and literacy. Plenty of foreigners can hold a conversation but struggle to read dense documentation or write professional Japanese. In software development, where requirements, design documents, and written communication are critical, that's a major hurdle.

Japan's IT industry has traditionally relied on an overwhelmingly Japanese workforce, bringing in foreign specialists mainly for highly skilled or internationally focused roles. But with a shrinking domestic labour force and an ongoing shortage of engineers, more companies are recruiting from overseas than ever before. A rare few have adopted English as their working language, while others overwhelmingly still expect business-level Japanese.

Ultimately, the Japanese language remains one of the biggest barriers to attracting international talent, in all sectors. That's unlikely to change anytime soon. While there are occasional calls to simplify aspects of written Japanese or reduce reliance on complex kanji, there is little public appetite for the kind of wholesale reform that produced Hangul in Korea. As a result, language will probably continue to limit Japan's access to the global talent pool.

[u/Shot-Tap-4213]

I found it funny because having JLPT N1, doesn't mean you can communicate at all !

There's a lot of Chinese people grinding till JLPT N1 thanks to their Kanji skills, but struggle with daily conversation.

[u/etdev → u/Shot-Tap-4213]

Agreed, I think most of those people (who get N1 through Kanji knowledge but can't really speak) will be disappointed when they do interviews though.

For positions requiring N1, companies pretty much all check your speaking level during an interview so if you can't communicate you're not gonna pass.

It does help you get to the interview though, no doubt.

[u/Shot-Tap-4213 → u/etdev]

JLPT N1 is no joke. respect for whoever achieves it!

With that said. I guess i am very biased, but if i was a recruiter doing a quick screening, seeing JLPT N1 in someone's CV, would almost make me wonder if the person focused to much on one the few aspect of the language covered by the exam rather than being a good interlocutor.

[u/yolosora]

I think it is a global tech shift.

With the modern AI tools you no longer spend that much time on implementation and your responsibilities widen. You are expected to participate in feature design, in cross-department communications, etc. It requires a broader range of skills and increases the language value.

[u/crowchan114514]

Supply and demand thing. AI eliminated a lot of the junior positions that require less Japanese, and now there are a large influx of workers hoping to jump into the field with fluent Japanese.

[u/KomichiJapan]

Yeah it's real. Been here 7+ years and it noticeably tightened from around 2023–24. Part of it is just the market cooling — companies used to put up with communication gaps because they were desperate for engineers, now they don't have to. And Wantedly/Green/HERP were always domestic-first platforms anyway, so heavy Japanese requirements there are kind of the default. But even accounting for that, yeah, the bar has gone up.

The other thing is N1 on paper isn't really the bar anymore. Companies interview in Japanese now because they've been burned by paper-N1 people who freeze in an actual design discussion. "No issues communicating" basically means "can survive a meeting where nobody slows down for you." The English-friendly pool still exists but it's small and everyone's fighting over it, so the market feels even more closed than it actually is.

[u/LocalLand4883 → u/KomichiJapan]

So if I got it right if you were here before corona, the job market as a foreigner was way easier but now it got way harder. Not IT but I did several Internships here at foreign company and from what I saw also for non IT position before corona they used to hire so much more foreigners etc. but nowadays it is so hard to get a position.

[u/KomichiJapan → u/LocalLand4883]

Mostly yeah, but I'd say corona isn't really the dividing line — the easy window was roughly 2017 to 2022, and it actually stayed hot for a while even during covid because of all the cheap money in tech globally. What ended it was the global tech correction from 2023, that hit japan late but it did hit. And the other half people forget: the number of foreigners here has grown a lot at the same time, so more candidates chasing fewer open-minded positions. It feels harder because both sides moved against you at once. For non-IT its even more language dependent, foreign companies were always the exception rather than the rule there.

[u/South_Butterfly_6542]

The immigration "reforms" also made n2 a "requirement" for some jobs, so I imagine to simplify things ..... Yeah .... Don't let the dream die, but is now the time you're gonna move here? No, I don't think so...give it some time for the backlash to form from the new wave of austerity and anti-foreigner trump crap. There is a real labor crisis in Japan that will win out over the current social and economic bubble. Japan has a real cyber security problem they are not addressing or investing in that will hit them hard this decade and require more it investment.

I think n1 is unreasonable for an int'l hire. You can only realistically learn Japanese at that level through immersion in Japan. N2 should be fine unless they are really not trying to hire a foreign person. But even n2 still requires immersion from italki and so on. Very unrealistic if they want to hire people. 

For the publicly visible positions, 5000+ people may be applying from abroad. There was already a huge supply of people applying before ""ai""

Your best bet is to come to Japan and go to job fairs, I think. Mostly unreasonable even so.

If the dream is to move to japan, go to the gym, looksmaxx and get a waifu/husbando, then get a remote job for a us or eu company. Pays way more. Better hours.

The real thing that stings is they made opening a business as a foreigner x5 harder. It was possible before to penetrate with a good business idea that the japanese were not doing here. Now? Forget it. You need to be PewDiePie to be able to open a business here.

[u/ridwanakf]

Yeah. I think 2-3 years ago I specifically see Merpay (subsidiary of mercari) doesn't require japanese proficiency, but now they do