A reader wrote to me asking about a friend who has a PhD in Computer Science and who is working as a professor at a prestigious US university. His wife is Japanese and they are thinking about returning to Japan for a while. The friend wants to get an academic job here in Japan and wants to know how to go about it. This is not the first time I've been asked this question, but information about the subject is extremely limited. Indeed, I don't think I've ever seen a traditional academic (university) job in Japan advertised...

An acquaintance asked me several weeks ago about the unspoken rules for socializing with clients. As a female, she was particularly concerned about whether her eagerness to close a deal might be misconstrued as something else. Hmmm, interesting topic... Let's start with male-to-male socializing. It is often said that the biggest deals in Japan get done on the golf course...

Just as with pay raises, the topic of asking for leave in Japan can be a thorny one, if you don't follow the unwritten rules. But before advising you on how to ask for the unusual, let's take a look at just which leave is specifically allowed. As I have written previously, there are 3 levels of contract when...

For the last 2 months, Web chat rooms in India have been buzzing with speculation about jobs in Japan that sound too good to be true. A company called Saturn Jobs in Dubai (as of writing, the web site is still running at www.saturnjobs.com) was offering a range of positions in Shibuya, including those for accounts clerks and...