Insider guides, visa intel, salary benchmarks, and honest stories from the ground — written for foreign professionals building a career in Japan, and for employers hiring them.
Written by people actively working in the Japan tech market — not recycled advice.
Engineer/Specialist in Humanities, Highly Skilled Professional, 特定技能, Business Manager — which visa fits your situation, and how companies actually sponsor them.
Real salary ranges by role and company tier, how bonuses and equity work in Japan, and where foreign professionals get underpaid.
Why your English resume gets ignored, how to read a Japanese JD, and which channels actually work for landing interviews.
Housing, health insurance, taxes, commuting, pension, bringing your family — the practical stuff nobody explains before you move.
Conferences, meetups, and the communities where engineers and recruiters actually connect in Tokyo and beyond.
For employers: how Japanese hiring cycles work, where foreign talent lives online, and how to cut 90+ day time-to-hire.
Everything you need for the HSP1-to-HSP2 transition — documents checklist, common additional document requests from immigration, point calculator thresholds, and the PR timeline for tech professionals.
A working list of tech employers actively sponsoring Engineer and Highly Skilled Professional visas — and what "sponsors visas" actually means in practice.
Japan doesn't issue "work visas" — it issues a status of residence that must match your exact job. Gijinkoku, HSP, SSW, Business Manager — plain-English breakdown of all of them.
Real ranges by role and company tier — from traditional JP companies, to foreign-owned, to scale-ups. Yen, USD, and what your take-home really is.
The 14-day notification rule, how job gaps are handled, and what changes if you hold a Highly Skilled Professional visa.
Every visa category, the documents and process to get one, and the path from work visa to permanent residence and citizenship.
Rakuten, Mercari, LY Corp, Google, Amazon, and the scale-ups moving fastest — what each tier pays, requires, and how reliably they sponsor.
Three hidden bottlenecks killing your engineering hiring process — slow screening, outdated tests, and poor candidate experience — and how AI fixes them.
Stricter income thresholds, pension benchmarks, spousal criteria, language evaluation, and a new revocation clause — Japan's biggest PR shake-up in decades, broken down.
The 3 pathways, mandatory prerequisites, step-by-step application roadmap, and 3 critical pitfalls to avoid — all updated for the 2026–2027 rule changes.
Ward office, My Number, health insurance, pension, bank account, phone — the exact order you need to do them, with time estimates and costs.
The format, length, and missing signals that make Japanese recruiters skip English resumes — and the 4 fixes that work.
Key money, guarantors, foreigner-friendly agencies, and the best neighborhoods — with actual cost breakdowns.
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