Adventures on a working holiday visa
After I finished up at university near the end of 2010, I decided to go to Japan for at least a year on working holiday visa. WHV systems are generally reciprocal, which means that if you have WHV people coming to your country, you can very likely go to their country as a WHV holder.
This is of course the case with Australia and Japan. In fact, because of the big imbalance of so many Japanese coming to Australia, the scheme has seen many changes to try and encourage more Australians to go to Japan. After some research, I made some enquiries with the Japanese consulate (embassy is in Canberra) and filled out my form. The basic requirements involve money, and it depends on whether you have a return ticket or not on the amount of money needed.
Working in my favour is that I could put down Japanese nationals as my contact/emergency contact in Japan which makes my application a lot stronger but this is not strictly necessary.
Finding work
There are many options for working in Japan and speaking Japanese is not always necessary. Personally I didn’t want to do English teaching because my main goal was to improve my Japanese, and speaking English at work was not going to help with that goal. I was hoping to end up in some position that involved paperwork (so I could read/write Japanese), business level conversation (so I could speak formal Japanese) and something with customer contact (so I would get a lot of opportunities to speak about lots of different things).
I started attending HelloWork which is a government job hunting service. They have offices all over Japan so I went down and sat on the computers looking for jobs. From memory, most of the jobs were carers, factory workers and office jobs but there was a whole variety. The staff were helpful and friendly but reading job advertisements all written in Japanese is a bit of a hard slog.
Once I had a shortlist of positions, I would somehow make notes of them and then ask the staff on the next steps. Often they would look at my shortlist and cross off some jobs which were special positions meant to help stop unemployment and were only available to Japanese nationals. Or jobs which required certain things which I did not have like licensing etc.
After the OK from them, I would take my list home after swinging past the convenience store to pick up blank 履歴書 and then go through and fill them out for the position. Things may have changed now, but I was told to write it out by hand. If you make a single mistake, you’re supposed to start all over again. Writing out all my personal details etc many times got old fast. I used my host family to help out with any questions but I’m sure the Hellowork staff would do the same. However the whole process was pretty arduous and I’m extremely thankful to my host family for helping me out!
Hearing back from people
After many many applications, I started getting back a lot of rejections or I just heard nothing at all. I would also get occasional calls from people responding to my applications. Bizarrely, most of the conversations went like this (of course in Japanese):
Hello is that… Kendall?
Yes.
Thank you for your application… do you speak Japanese?
Yes, I graduated university with a Japanese major and I have JLPT N2. I lived in Japan for over a year.
Yes, yes. Thank you. Can you read and write Japanese?
Yes. I did that 履歴書 that you’re reading off right now.
Understood, we’ll get back to you with a decision soon.
That decision was always “No”. But of course you have to keep trying. This process went on for about 2 to 3 months and was a lot of work. The reality is that most jobs in Japan do require a very high level of Japanese, and I probably wasn’t quite good enough to be able to do these jobs. I did some odd jobs like data entry (would not recommend) and some other things but eventually an application I made to a nearby hotel was successful and I started there on the front desk.
This became my main job throughout the entirety of my stay and was very good for my Japanese. The role itself was a bit up and down as I did a lot of nightshifts and not much happens, but in the end it was ticking all the boxes and I can definitely say my Japanese improved.
Changing jobs
The pay was not great at the hotel and the hours were terrible. But considering how hard it was to get that job I wasn’t about to quit it to find something better. But as time went on and my contacts grew, I got offered many other opportunities to make some money. The best one was that I was an extra on a Japanese miniseries called 真珠湾からの帰還. I appear a few times and even got a voiceover! The pay was a lot better than the hotel although not much exposure to Japanese as most of the extras didn’t speak Japanese.
If I could do the working holiday again, I would probably consider living in Tokyo and joining some agencies to do TV work as there are many opportunities. But unfortunately you only really get one WHV and I had to return to Australia for another opportunity.
All in all, it was a great year and I’ll do some more posts about how I found housing etc so keep your eyes peeled!
