Working in Japan
I was hoping to ask you all an individualized question after learning so much from reading all of your comments in this forum. I am possibly looking into working as an Analyst (not quite sure which area yet...but I hope to see what you all think about the respective divisions) in Tokyo and was hoping to get some information as to what I can expect because I am not as knowledgeable as many of you about Investment Banking. The key areas that I am interested in finding about is the salary, hours, and how much of the work deals with English in the case that I would be hired as a bilingual who studied in the US. I ask about salary because I had heard rumors that there may be a large difference in how much you earn in the States compared to Japan...although that might be for Investment Banks whose home base is Japan as opposed to elsewhere. And some additional questions that I would be interested in as well would be how to impress in the interviews as well as the taxes in Japan. I have dual citizenship in the US and Japan and was wondering what method there might be to avoid paying more taxes than need be. If anybody can help me out, I would really appreciate it.
Dont work in Japan, the comp's so low they might as well pay you in onigiri.
japan office at my firm is full of idiots... i believe they do absolutely nothing there... not good for exit ops
I see...I would definitely like to hear more about this in detail as well as other opinions.
Would be interested to learn more about IBD in Japan as well. I thought BB firms pay the same in all locations (NY, London, HK and Tokyo) !
Can anybody else contribute? I don't want to believe that this is the entire picture...
If your goal here is Asia/international experience that can then be leveraged to work in other countries you should be looking at Singapore or maybe Hong Kong. If you want to move to Japan for your career, by all means go, I'm sure it's a perfectly nice country. However if you only plan on living in Japan for a few years I would recommend caution. Due to a lot of factors that I don't fully understand the general trend is for BB's Japanese offices to be somewhat culturally isolated from every other office. For example, a cause/symptom of this is that my firm's japanese ibd office is the only ibd office in the entire company (including all of the other international offices) that has very few English speakers. Pretty much nobody transfers into that country, and nobody transfers out. People transfer in and out of most other locales all the time. This is a BB btw.
Do you think that the lack of movement is an inability to move or a lack of desire to move from what is considered a comfortable position for them? Is it frowned upon if I were to apply for a higher position in the US having gotten the banking experience in Japan?
I don't think it would be frowned upon for the typical position, international experience is a good thing. However the insularity issue may affect networking and your ability to find out about job opportunities outside of the country. I would ask around about where some of the exit opportunities are, and where previous alumni from the office have gone. If no alum has ever left Japan, that's probably a warning sign.
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