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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.
Can you get a job in Japan without speaking Japanese?
Yes, but the door is small and the line outside it is long. About one in ten postings on our board asks for no Japanese at all, and a little over a third of those are software engineering jobs. So "tech runs in English now" is true, but only at a short list of companies, mostly in Tokyo. On the rest of the board, Japanese is the job.
Everywhere else, Japanese is the job
Only 60 postings say you can do the work without Japanese, and just 19 companies wrote them. Now look at the pile that wants N2, which is roughly business-level Japanese: that's about two-thirds of the board on its own. Postings that want native Japanese make up another quarter.
Read the English-only titles and you'll notice something. Some of them aren't really Japan jobs at all. Cohere's Revenue Enablement Manager - APAC and On's Retail Planning & Allocation Lead - APAC (excl. China) read like regional jobs that happen to sit in Japan, and we'd guess English is the one language everyone on those calls shares.
So is it all engineers?
Mostly. Software engineering leads with 22 postings, a little over a third of the no-Japanese jobs. Think Release Engineer at ClickHouse or Safety System Engineer at Wayve. After that it thins out fast: half a dozen support jobs, a handful each in consulting, operations and marketing, then a long tail of ones and twos.
If you're the partner who isn't an engineer, that tail is your list, and it's short enough to read over coffee. There's an AirCover Specialist, Claims Experience at Airbnb, a Customer Success Manager at Planet Labs and a Managed Services Consultant - R&D at Veeva Systems. And Recorded Future has a Network Intelligence Analyst whose title ends with "Join Our Talent Network!", which makes it sound less like a job than a waiting room for one.
Two self-driving teams hold the door open
Woven by Toyota has 16 of these postings and Wayve has 11. Nobody else comes close; Datadog and OpenAI trail with a handful each. If you're an engineer, start with their postings on the . And if you write self-driving software, the two biggest names on this list want exactly you, starting with Wayve's .