As Christmas approaches, most people in the west will be huddling up to the fire with their family, looking forward to a glass of mulled wine and some slightly too dry turkey to forget the troubles of the previous year. However for myself and many other ex-pats living in Japan, Christmas is but another day at work, only noticeable by slightly longer lines than usual at KFC.
I moved to Japan from England almost 10 years ago to undertake a physics PhD, with almost no understanding of the culture, language skills, or ability to use chopsticks. Thankfully at my university almost everyone spoke very fluent English — even the newly minted Japanese masters students had it forced upon them. However when I graduated and decided to find a job in the real (japanese) world, things changed very quickly.
I have been working at Cyberagent (Tokyo) for the last 6 years, and honestly it has been a great time. As I alluded to in the last paragraph, the language barrier will be the biggest problem. No one speaks English past a few broken words (apologies to my friends who are trying their best to study!). It may be possible to get by with you have a very patient team, or communicate mostly by text, but if you do not have a decent level of Japanese you will find yourself ostracized quite quickly I suspect.
That is not to say people are unwelcoming. On the contrary — everyone has always been very friendly to me and I never felt excluded from anything due to my race. My friends here are just as close as any friends I have back in the UK. It just takes a lot of patience to talk to someone when there is a large language barrier, and while there is some novelty to it when you just meet them for a few hours on a night out, it is not something most people will want to deal with in someone you have to work with every day of the week. There are other foreigners working here, but I can count them on one hand and they exclusively speak fluent Japanese.
The process of application was quite easy really, I just applied through a recruiter. They give you a list of companies with open positions, you pick which ones you are interested in and apply. Many recruiters catered to foreigners will not even suggest Japanese companies, and you will get 10 different people trying to refer you to a job at Rakuten (who operate primarily in English). I went through Recruit RGF eventually, who I very much recommend.
The interview process will be quite different depending on what team you are applying to. I was very lucky, I just had one interview with almost no technical questions, they just wanted to know about my PhD, which I already had plenty of practice explaining. At that time though data scientists were few and far between. Nowadays you have fresh graduates who used deep learning for image analysis in a school project, so I suspect it will be much more competitive.
So what do I do? I have worked on a lot of different projects in my time here, primarily designing the Ad auction bidding logic for AmebaDSP, but also recommend engines for Ameblog, Tapple and Dokusho no Jikan. My work consists of algorithm research and design, and the development and maintenance of those algorithms in production systems. However probably most of what I do on a daily basis is not the sexy stuff, but data analysis to see where our weak points are, how to improve our bidding logic, and design of new features to add to our algorithms. I have also built a couple of admin pages for system management and metrics analysis. Favourite language is Rust if I have the choice, but spend a lot of time on Java, C++ and Golang too.
As you can probably gather, there is a huge amount of variety. Despite being a large company with many data scientists, we have an even larger selection of media that we have to support. Most of the time as a data scientist you will also be building and deploying the algorithms you design. It is possible to join just as a maths guy and avoid much coding yourself, but it is a difficult path as you have the added step of needing to convince someone else to give up whatever they were working on and build your project for a month.
What about the work environment? For me, it is nothing like the stereotypical image of a Japanese company. I can start and stop work whenever I like, provided I have been working for about the right amount of hours. There is no overtime culture (at least in my teams). I have actually been reprimanded a couple of times for working TOO much. At least before lockdowns we would go out as a team a couple of times a month, but there is no nomikai-every-day that you might expect.
Overall, I would thoroughly recommend my company (this is not meant as a recruitment message but it may read like one). And while I can’t guarantee that every Japanese company is like this, do not be put off by all the negative stereotypes you hear. Unfortunately the Christmas stereotypes are totally accurate, so please spare a prayer for myself and the Japanese people digging into our boneless buckets and chicken twisters while you have your feet up by the fire this year!
