Moved to Japan and failed – a “wolfy”(WSO user) story
A “wolfy” story for you (famous WSO user). I graduated from a public ivy in Economics (doing financial modeling during college) then got myself a one-way ticket to Japan to study Japanese. I thought that if I could get Japanese Fluency on paper (JLPT 1) I would at least be able to get a back office job at a bank in Japan, if not anything.
During the course of all of this I went to literally all the career fairs in Japan during the last few months, taking trains and shinkansen all over the country(saw Mount Fuji looking out the window when it was covered with snow), even took a 20 hour plane ride back to the US for the Boston Career Fair for bilinguals, still ending up with nothing. It’s painful to put in 2 years of hard work, and hours and hours into late night study of a language only to end up with nothing.
Hours and hours spent on cover letters written in both Japanese (which would literally take 6 hours for one) and English, Preparations for interviews all in Japanese, memorization of accounting terminology in Japanese, all for nothing.
My absolute low point was when a 5-person company asked me if I went to a 2 year school or a 4 year school(they basically had no idea about US colleges), or have a non-Japanese person tell me during an interview that my Japanese wasn’t good enough.
Is it possible to break into banking for non-Japanese? I’m very lost at this point and have tried everything, from Recruiters to bilingual websites, coming up empty handed.
If anyone can offer some guidance I would be very thankful and be indebted to your help.
op have you tried going to a pokemon tournament ?
I hope you take this the right way, but you should really do more research into what is actually possible in Japan before you go through all that trouble of learning Japanese to get a job there.
I worked in S&T in Tokyo without speaking any Japanese, and tons of people do that in S&T at the foreign investment banks, as well as on the broker-side. However, in the past two years the vast majority of banks have migrated their S&T capacities (especially in equities) to HK and to a lesser extent Singapore. Tokyo is very quickly becoming extinct on the S&T side, to the point that only the cash business is still onshore. My opinion is that it is no longer possible for you to join S&T in Tokyo--there is very little foreign headcount there and it will be quantitative students from the top schools who get those roles. This does not appear to be your background.
Speaking Japanese as a foreigner is a good skill to have, but it is not the thing that will get you a job. Regardless of how good you think you are, I guarantee you that there are Japanese people who speak much better English than you speak Japanese. Moreover, it is very unlikely that they will ever trust you to learn kei-go to the extent that you can be put in any kind of serious Japanese client-facing role.
It would be best for you to get into a bank in the US and then try to lateral over in a few years.
I'm a non-Japanese American currently working as an FX trader for a BB. I've been in Japan for six-years now, previously w/ long/short equity hedge fund, and prior to that w/ a BB that famously went under in 2008 (you can use your imagination). Let me provide a little prospective on how things have changed in the last six-years and some advice on how to approach your job search.
I graduated university back in 2005 when the economy was going gang-busters. Back then, if you came from a relatively respectable school with a quantitiative major you could easily grab several job offers at the Boston Career Forum with a western bank. Things are obviously very different now post-Lehman crisis.
Because corporate taxes are prohibitively expensive in Japan and because domestic growth has come to a standstill (I mean isn't there a problem when Moody's downgrades Japan's economy to negative watch to no market reaction?!) most western banks have pushed all non-Japan businesses to Hong Kong and Singapore. The hedge fund business has also shrunken significantly w/ only a few funds now w/ an onshore presence. In addition, it also doesn't help that private equity activity has been lukewarm w/ plenty of the megafunds flush w/ cash from the bubble-era but with lack of investment opportunities. As a result, many jobs that would have been available to you back in 2004-2008 don't exist anymore.
IB is out of your grasp IMO as it's still a very domestic business and requires native fluency. Plus, while we all would like to believe that in this modern age racism doesn't exist, business in Japan is still an old-school boys club. Finally, softskills are a major dealbreaker in Japan. Do you understand the proper mannerisms when doing settai w/ senior managers? Is your cultural awareness sharp enough to use the right keigo/sonkei-go based on seniority? Plenty of native Japanese don't even know how to use the right politeness correctly.
S&T is a much more reasonable expectation but comes w/ its own caveats. In my experience, the majority of entry S&T front office jobs go to two types of kids. First are the international kids of Japanese decent who went to international high-schooling (ASIJ, Saint Mary's) and then an Ivy-league hence their English/Japanese is perfect and have the pedigree to get their resume through HR. The second are smart domestic Japanese kids who went to top private elementary/middle/high-schools like Kieo, Waseda or the best public schools (Todai, Koyto). The former tend to work in more international related products, i.e. equities, fx, non-Yen bonds, etc. The latter tend to work in more domestic related products. In both cases, there is a strong alumni network of MDs that will go to bat for these new hires. Coming outside of this network puts you already in a distinct disadvantage.
The best way I would approach your situation is by initially forgetting about Japan and focusing on getting a job w/ a BB in the states with a strong presence in Japan. Then after 1-2 years try transferring internally. Several co-workers in my trading division have done this and some of them speak no Japanese. That said, they were transferred because there is a strong business need for their skillset. Furthermore, they were transferred on expat packages, so suffice to say their living accomodations and compensation was more than reasonable to compensate for the "cultural transition".
Hope this helps.