Next development plan

August 11, 2025 development notes international student japanese life finding job part-time job hunting

In recent years, the number of international students in Japan has been increasing. Roughly 400,000 people arrived in the country each year, and while the number plummeted during the COVID-19 pandemic, the numbers have since returned to normal, or even exceeded expectations.

One characteristic of these students is that while some are learning Japanese through me, others have arrived in Japan completely out of the blue, barely able to even remember hiragana. In such circumstances, it's difficult to earn a living. Many of them come from developing countries (Vietnam, Nepal, Indonesia, etc.), and many of them have arrived with significant debts.

The number of Chinese students has declined significantly since the collapse of the Chinese bubble economy. Only about 50% of them are working part-time, and the number of Chinese students who have come to Japan on debt is lower than for other nationalities. However, there has recently been an increase in students whose family's financial situation has worsened, such as when a parent is suddenly laid off, cutting off their source of funding for their studies and forcing them to return home midway through their studies.

Going back to the original topic, even international students who suddenly arrive in Japan with limited Japanese language skills and a lot of debt—a very difficult situation—can find jobs that support Japan's infrastructure, even in Japan's restaurants and logistics industries, especially night shifts, where there is a severe labor shortage and even Japanese university students rarely take part-time jobs. It's no exaggeration to say that the night shift at Kuroneko Yamato, a well-known delivery service, is currently largely run by Nepalese people.

While there are currently many job sites aimed at Japanese people, there are very few that are targeted at foreigners, especially students with little Japanese language ability. Even if they do exist, the homepage is often only displayed in English, or if you don't understand English, you can't access the site at all. Many international students currently coming to Japan are poor English speakers and would not be able to travel to Australia, the UK, the US, or Singapore.

And until they become fluent in Japanese, it can take six months to a year, or even a year and a half, for them to find a decent job, leading to extremely difficult lives. It's not uncommon for students to eat only one meal a day, or to never eat vegetables or fish since arriving in Japan, and to be hesitant to even buy a 100-yen pen.

So I came up with the idea of creating a service that would help these students smoothly find easy work, even for those with beginner-level Japanese, once they arrive in Japan.

My current vision is outlined below.

I'd like to name the service Konnichiwork, and create a website that compiles job listings from Hello Work in an easy-to-understand format for international students who have just arrived in Japan and have Japanese language proficiency levels of JLPT N5 or N4. I have an API for Hello Work, and I want to create a service that automatically updates the website with daily information such as job type, job description, work address, contact information, staff nationality, and required Japanese proficiency (hiragana, katakana, greeting level, JLPT N5, N4, N3 [daily conversation]). Users can choose English, Nepali, Vietnamese, Chinese, Burmese, or Indonesian, and view translated versions of the website.

The nationality of staff can be detected to a certain extent by searching for "Nepali" or "Vietnamese." Required Japanese proficiency can be determined by searching for "JLPT N1" or "daily conversation," with daily conversation treated as JLPT N3. I actually looked at Hello Baitoru, and found that only the top page is in English or Chinese; everything else is in Japanese, so it's safe to say it's not multilingual at all. The rest of the site is too long, so I don't think most foreigners read it or even try to.

Information is retrieved from the Hello Work API, translated into English, Vietnamese, and Nepali using Hugging Face and the Google Translate API, and posted on the website. The Nepali version of the website is also updated using Hugging Face's translation API based on the English version.