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Hand-picked jobs in Japan that need your Japanese. Written up in English, with visa and language details included. For N2+ learners.
Is N2 enough to get a job in Japan?
Yes. N2 is the level the jobs on our board ask for most, and it isn't close: about two-thirds of them are filed under it. Don't frame the certificate just yet, though. N2 gets your resume past the filter. What gets you the job is whether you can sit with a Japanese customer and talk, and nobody in that room is going to ask for your score.
N2 is the pile, and N1 barely exists
Of everything else, native Japanese takes about a quarter and no-Japanese jobs roughly one in ten. That leaves N1, the level you might be grinding for next, with 8 postings. Eight. On the whole board.
The shape is strange, but it makes sense once you read the postings. Our guess is that companies rarely write "N1" at all. They write "business level" or "fluent", which we file as N2, or they write "native", and there's very little in between. So if you're studying for N1 because you think it opens a secret door to better jobs, it doesn't, at least not on paper. (It might make the interview easier, which is a different and better reason.)
Meanwhile the N2 pile is crowded with names you know. Woven by Toyota alone has 58 of them, and Zscaler, Databricks, OpenAI, Datadog and Veeva Systems fill out the top.
Mostly, it's selling something
If you're an English teacher hoping N2 is your way out of the classroom, here's what's waiting on the other side: sales. Account executive is the biggest role in the N2 pile, more than a quarter of it. After that come solutions engineers (the technical people who join the sales call), then consultants, then software engineers.
The titles tell you who you'll be talking to: Senior Account Executive, Hotels at Airbnb, Advertising Sales Manager at Taboola, Principal Renewal Specialist at Zscaler, which asks you to be "Fluent in Japanese and English." We think nearly every one of these puts a Japanese customer on the other end of the call, and your Japanese is what that customer hears.
And don't expect the postings to tell you the pay. Exactly one in the N2 pile does: Illumio's Sr. Sales Engineer, at "¥12.4M to ¥15.5M, Offers Equity, Offers Commission." Everyone else saves that conversation for later.
Tokyo, nearly all of it
Nearly nine in ten N2 postings sit in Tokyo. Osaka gets a handful, Fukuoka gets one, and fewer than one in ten can be done remotely from anywhere in Japan. We suspect the reason is simple: the customers are in Tokyo too.
If you're teaching somewhere rural, plan on moving. One of the few N2 jobs outside Tokyo is On's Store Leader, Osaka, which is retail, not software, if that suits you better.
Bring your English too. About two-thirds of the N2 postings also want business-level English. Notion's onboarding enablement posting asks for "Fluency in Japanese and business-level in English," and that's the usual deal: Japanese for the customer, English for your own team.
The catch: "fluent" isn't the same as N2
Here's the part you hoped wasn't true. We file postings that ask for "business level" or "fluent" Japanese as N2, because that's the closest JLPT level to what they describe, and that's exactly where the trouble starts. We'd bet plenty of them mean more than that, and the postings themselves give it away.
Payoneer wants "Native or fluent Japanese and business-level English," and that's an N2 posting. MongoDB asks for 「日本語・英語ともに流暢なレベル(ビジネスレベル以上)のコミュニケーション力」, which means fluent communication in both Japanese and English, business level or above. Crunchyroll says "Native to business-level proficiency." That's a wide range for one tag.
It cuts the other way too. Schrödinger's computational chemist posting lists 「ビジネスレベルの日本語（必須レベルではありません）」: business-level Japanese, not a requirement. So for that job, N2 is a bonus, not a gate.
Our take: the interview doesn't check your certificate. It checks whether you can explain a product, take a pushback and stay polite in keigo while you do it. The JLPT never asks you to say a single word out loud, and that's the gap. We go deeper on this in what "business level" really means.
What we'd do
Open the N2 jobs and start with the account executive and solutions engineer postings, since that's most of the pile. Read how each one words its Japanese requirement, and sort them into "fluent" and "native or fluent" in your head.
If you write code, go to the software engineer jobs. 39 of them sit in the N2 pile, and software engineering is also the biggest role among the jobs that need no Japanese at all.
Then practice the part the test skipped. Go through the interview questions companies ask and answer them out loud, in Japanese, every day. When a Japanese posting stops you, look up the word that stopped you. You'll run into 堪能 (proficient) in the Woven by Toyota and Waymo postings, and 必須 (required), which Schrödinger uses to tell you its Japanese isn't.