Back in 2013, programmer Anditto Heristyo wrote a piece about what it was like to apply for a programming job at Nintendo. This post captivated thirteen year-old me, and I remember hoping that one day I would be able to go through the same process, ultimately with success. Though I applied, unfortunately I was dropped out of the system before I got an offer. Though it was certainly a unique experience which further prepared me for graduate job hunting in Japan.
I originally published this article back in 2022 just after I had received a job offer to work in Japan as a type designer. Since then I have come to learn a lot about how companies, specifically older more established companies in the Kansai region, operate. That is a story for another time, but I thought that it would be good to re-post this article so that it might be of use to anyone looking to work in the games industry in Japan, or any traditional role in a Japanese company.
When I began applying for jobs in my third year of university, I began to share bits and pieces from my experience going through the Squid Game-esque ‘shuukatsu’ (就活) system that every graduate-to-be in Japan gets funnelled through in order to get a job. In the end I took a massive risk and gave up on applying to Western companies in order to focus solely on getting a job in Japan (as was my original hope), due to a lack of interest from British and American companies. However it paid off, and I managed to get hired for a role which suits me perfectly, from outside the country no-less! I’ve learned a lot throughout the shuukatsu process which I want to share with others so that people know that it is possible as a foreigner to get a non-English teaching job in Japan, and what to expect with it all. First, though, I want to talk about my experience with Nintendo.
Step One: Pre-Entry (プレエントリー)
First thing I did was register for “Pre-entry” – this is before a company starts the hiring of that year’s graduates. You “pre-enter” by registering an account, either with the company itself or through a recruitment website so that you’re on the system and the company in question can get in touch with hiring information. Nintendo has you do this through their own dedicated portal for your graduation year, so I was in “Entry 2022”.
I actually had a little bit of trouble as Western and Japanese graduation dates are a few months apart, so when my graduation date got rejected by the automatic cut-off, I had to contact the support email to ask why there was an issue with the form. At the time (2020), my Japanese, especially my business Japanese, was nowhere near as good as it is now, so looking back on the communication between me and the hiring manager, I feel a little embarrassed with how tersely I wrote. Another thing that proved to be an issue was that I couldn’t properly write my name on the form, on account of my hyphenated double-barrelled surname. I ended up squashing it together, which is something that I still have to do when I fill in Japanese forms.
At this stage, you don’t commit to applying for one discipline – you do that during “Entry” as they all have different time frames, but you can indicate what your preference is when you first sign up. I wanted to apply for a “Planner” (プランナー) role – which is more or less analogous to what in the Western world would be called a game designer. But wanting to hedge my bets, I chose ‘mitei’ (未定) – undecided.
You can also check a box saying that you would like to receive a company information booklet. Nintendo’s are frequently scanned and uploaded online for foreign otaku to gawk at on Twitter (my first claim to fame on Twitter was actually translating scans of their 2020 booklet). Their 2021 booklet ended up being the same as their 2020 one, but I wasn’t able to apply for one because you needed a Japanese address. Normally I would ship something like that to a friend in Tokyo, but unfortunately the address needed to be the same as what you put for your contact address, which I entered as “overseas” (海外) – something which I did not expect to be an option.
Step Two: Seminar (会社説明会)
As Heristyo wrote in his 2013 article, attending company seminars is not mandatory, but like many things in Japan, it is tacitly required if you want to seriously vie for a job. Nintendo usually hosts company seminars a few times throughout the year in-person, but luckily for me, Mr. Foreigner Not Even In Japan, by the time I signed up the virus had forced Nintendo into holding them online. I attended their game planner seminar in December of 2020. The seminar started at around 3PM Kyoto time, so with there being nine hours of time difference between Japan and the UK in the winter, I got up at 5:30 and sat down in front of my PC for 6AM.
I don’t remember all of the details of the seminar, but they went through the same motions that other companies do – describing the company culture, its goals, what kind of people they’re looking to hire, and some recent products that they’ve made that have been successful. There were a couple of employees who gave short presentations on their experiences entering the company as graduates, how they utilise their degree majors in their work and what they ended up working on once they joined. One was a man who studied architecture at university, and was surprised to learn of the Switch’s existence when he joined the company when it was still under development. The other short presentation came from a woman who studied Japanese literature at university. She recalled how she brought up her experience helping to organise school events like sports days when applying for a job.
Both talked about some of the projects that they worked on, and provided slides with images of what are probably never-before seen glimpses into the development of a few different games from the Wii era up until the early Switch titles. There was a variety of development content from concept art, to flowcharts and early animations. Everyone also had a laugh at a bug showcase from one of their Switch games. A year later, a foreigner with no intention of applying for a job entered a planning seminar solely to leak the contents of the presentation online, which really, really annoyed me. As someone who stuck to Nintendo’s requests not to take photos, record or share the contents of the presentation on social media, it made me feel like in the future it would make them more suspicious of letting foreigners apply. Seeing as the contents have been well circulated now on both the Japanese and English net, I don’t think there is any particular harm in briefly describing some of the things I saw and experienced here.
The next thing brought up was the company schedule, if you were to join as a new graduate. I’m not sure if the other seminars gave different schedules or not, but this one seemed to be somewhat tailored towards planning. They made a big point out of the company’s COVID mitigation measures such as using hand sanitiser while signing into the office, as well as showing people remote working during meetings.
09:00 – Start work
10:00 – Mid-morning meeting, then back to work
12:30 – Lunch (One hour break in total)
13:00 – Break (some free time to spend as you wish)
13:30 – Afternoon meeting, then back to work
14:30 – Play-testing
15:30 – Work (Completing your own tasks)
16:30 – Coffee Break (I think – my notes here are a bit vague)
18:00 – Finish up and head home
After this, there was a panel with several employees from the planning teams, and an opportunity to ask questions through Zoom’s Q&A function. I barely understood anything that went on after this point – not necessarily because of my Japanese ability, but because the whole time I was in the seminar, the horrendous audio quality made it sound like I was listening to everyone from the bottom of a swimming pool. Once the annotated slides stopped, it became incredibly difficult to understand what people were talking about.
After the seminar finished, I was given an online survey to fill in. Again, as Heristyo mentioned, these are essentially optional, but you should ALWAYS fill them in.
