When interviewing with a Japanese company, you’ll naturally want to know: “Is this a good place to work?” And while Glassdoor is the standard in English-speaking countries for employees leaving online reviews, the site is only rarely used in Japan, and then primarily by non-Japanese workers.
Many countries have a culture that endorses directly reviewing employers in an open, public environment—Japan does not. However, there are still sites where you can find important information on your potential employer.
What to watch out for
In particular, you want to avoid signing on with a company that engages in exploitative practices—or as they’re known in Japan, a “black company” (ブラック企業, burakku kigyou). The Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare has a FAQ describing what defines these companies:
- Imposing extremely long working hours with high quotas.
- Recognition of workers’ rights is low throughout the company; unpaid overtime and/or workplace bullying (パワハラ, pawahara) are common.
- The company assigns shifts to workers without consent.
- The company discriminates among workers in the above circumstances.
In a 2023 survey, those who had worked for such toxic companies listed high turnover rates as the most common sign that something was wrong, followed by long working hours and unpaid overtime.
If you discover, for example, that the company can’t retain employees, shows no history of internal promotions, and has just issued a return-to-office order out of the blue, it’s safe to assume you don’t want to work there.
OpenWork
OpenWork, also known as Vorkers, hosts over 19 million company reviews. The reviews are represented in a radar chart for easy visual reference, and are also broken down into different categories, such as work-life balance, the ease of working for women, and reasons for considering quitting. In addition, applicants can post questions for employees to answer.
If you don’t speak Japanese, the site is still readable with Google Translate. You’ll need to make a free account to see all of the information, but much of it is accessible even without an account.
Other Japanese sites
JobTalk and Engage Hyouban are other Japanese-language review sites. JobTalk contains 4.4 million reviews of around 230,000 different companies, and Engage Hyouban boasts 30 million reviews for 220,000 companies.
Neither of these sites offer as much information on tech companies in Japan as OpenWork does. If you’re applying to a large company such as Rakuten, you may find some additional reviews there, but many of TokyoDev’s clients are smaller companies that aren’t listed at all.
Google Maps Reviews
An unusual but occasionally helpful place to find company reviews is on Google Maps. If you search for a business’s main corporate office location—usually in Tokyo—you will sometimes find reviews written by current or former employees.
Whether these reviews are high-quality or trustworthy is another matter. Rakuten, for example, has reviews with a range of opinions. Cybozu, by contrast, mostly has reviews from those who would like to work for the company but currently don’t. Still, the reviews of its corporate office are consistently positive, so you can at least get an impression of the physical environment.
“If you’re worried that a company might be a poor place to work, try contacting current or past employees via LinkedIn,” suggested Paul McMahon, founder of TokyoDev. “This probably works best if you’re late in the hiring process.”
You can send a connect request saying, ‘I’ve received an offer from company X, and want to confirm what it’s really like to work there as an engineer. Mind if I ask you a couple of questions?’
Whether or not they respond, you can still glean good information from the profiles of past and current employees. Check to see if developers tend to leave the company quickly, for example, or how long the average employee goes before being promoted.
You should keep in mind though that LinkedIn is not popular in Japan, for several good reasons. If you are applying to a primarily Japanese company, many of your future coworkers won’t be active there, which means you still may not be getting a complete picture.
TokyoDev
In 2020, TokyoDev began interviewing developers in order to provide a more complete, boots-on-the-ground picture of daily life at specific companies.
The goal is to give applicants a good sense of how a company operates on a day-to-day basis, from the perspective of those on the inside. So far, TokyoDev has interviewed developers from Mercari, PayPay, Givery, HENNGE, KOMOJU, and more.
In addition, TokyoDev’s job board is a selective one, listing only companies that we feel good about sending applicants to. In the rare event that employees later reach out with poor reviews of a business, if those reports can be confirmed, then TokyoDev will end its relationship with that company.
Conclusion
In short, the answer to the question “Is there a Japanese equivalent to Glassdoor?” is, “Not really.” However, by combining some of the alternatives—OpenWork, LinkedIn, TokyoDev, and perhaps even Google Maps—you can gather enough information to decide whether you want to work with a particular Japanese company.
You could also ask fellow developers in our Discord. Curious about working in Japan in general? See our articles on the subject, as well as moving to Japan, living in Japan, starting a business in Japan, and more.
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