Who makes this site

I have worked in customer service in Japan for many years. As a team manager and then as a supervisor at a call centre, I sat on the hiring side of more than fifty job interviews.

Some of the people I interviewed were foreign nationals. I was never able to hire one. A call centre is a job where the whole work is Japanese, on the phone, with no face and no context to help — so the bar for the language is unusually high, and again and again I had to say no to people who would have been fine somewhere else.

That is why this site exists. I have seen, from the interviewer's chair, where things go wrong — and most of the time it is not the answer. It is that the question did not land.

What comes from experience, and what comes from sources

I have never applied for a job in Japan as a foreign national, and I have never taken the JLPT. So there is a line here that I want to be honest about.

What an interviewer is thinking, and what makes them uneasy, I can write from my own experience.

What foreign applicants are actually asked in Japan, I cannot. That part is not from memory. Every question on this site was collected from real interview footage, from guides written by the people who do the hiring, and from teachers explaining Japanese interviews in Nepali and other languages. The sources are printed at the bottom of every question, with links, so you can check them yourself.

Where neither my experience nor a source can back something up, it is not on the site. There are questions in our collection that are not published for exactly that reason.

What we will not do

We will not tell you to lie.

In some countries, students are taught small tricks for Japanese interviews — say you have no relatives here, say you will not go home often. We report that this is taught, because it is true and it is useful to know. But we do not repeat it as advice. Some of it does not even work: the immigration application form has a section for family living in Japan, so hiding it at the interview changes nothing, and a false statement on that form can cost you your status of residence.

An interviewer who asks one more question will find out. We would rather help you give a true answer that still lands well.

This site is not finished

The questions are translated into more languages than I can read. If something here is wrong, or worded strangely, or simply would not work in a real interview in your country's context — please tell us. We will fix it.

That is not a formality. Accuracy is the only thing this site has.