Building a Durable Career in Japan

The Japanese government is moving toward tougher requirements for foreign nationals seeking to establish themselves here permanently. Proposed changes to the permanent-residence framework would place greater emphasis on income, the ability to make substantial payments into the Japanese pension scheme, Japanese language ability, and an understanding of Japan’s systems and rules. The requirements for obtaining and maintaining a Business Manager visa have also become substantially more demanding.

For people considering whether and how they can remain in Japan, those developments are understandably unsettling. They are also another reminder that the skills and experiences that persuaded someone to hire you or purchase your services won’t be sufficient to ensure longevity here. Foreign professionals must continually re-earn the market’s confidence and have a compelling answer to an existential question:

“Why should clients, colleagues, and employers continue choosing me?”

As you become more senior, the global perspective and capabilities that first made you valuable become less rare, and the market begins demanding increasing degrees of value generation potential. It’s easy to look up one day and discover that you’re relatively highly paid but needing to play catch-up to stay relevant. While most professionals think about how to be more successful in their current role, I think it’s much more helpful to think about what skills and experiences one needs to cultivate now in order to be seen as more valuable five years from now.

Deciding what work to accept, skills to develop, relationships to invest in, and which experiences to seek beyond your own profession will help you move from pursuing a succession of increasingly scarce and competitive roles to someone who has optionality with respect to where they live, which roles and organizations they are willing to associate with, and when and to what extent they wish to work.

I think of this as career durability, which is about having a career that can withstand a lot of tumult and still retain or increase its value.

Here’s the part worth sitting with: a durable career is not something that gets handed to you. The job offer was handed to you. The visa was handed to you. What comes next is not. It has to be built, deliberately, a decision at a time, over years. That can sound like a heavy thing to add to an already full plate. In practice, it rarely is. Building a career on purpose is less about doing more and more about doing a few things on purpose. As I’ll get into, it sometimes means doing less of what you’re doing now, not more.

In this article, I make the case for taking ownership of your career, and then walk through four things that go into doing it well: assessing where you stand and where to focus next, the habits that keep you in demand, how to produce more value over time even as more things compete for your attention, and making sure “good enough for Japan” is never where you settle.

Whether you are considering a move to Japan or have already spent years building your life here, my hope is that these ideas help you build a career that continues becoming more valuable over time, and with it, the freedom to shape your life on your own terms.

Take Ownership of Your Career

For many professionals, success creates an unexpected risk. As you become more experienced, your work becomes more familiar, people begin trusting you with more important work, and your compensation increases. While this is all positive, it can also lull you into believing that your job is simply to keep doing good work while someone else figures out where your career should go next.

Even the best organizations make decisions based on their own commercial priorities, strategic objectives, and talent needs. And they should: building a successful business is their responsibility; building a successful career is yours.

An organization may invest heavily in your development because doing so makes you more valuable to the business today. That does not necessarily mean it is preparing you for the career you ultimately want to build or even a career that will be in demand over the long term. You should certainly take the opportunities your employer provides, but you should also consistently be asking questions such as the following:

Is the path I’m on moving me toward the career and life I want, or merely preparing me to do more of what I already do?

What changes in my industry, technology, and the wider world could increase or diminish my value, and what am I doing to prepare for them?

How can I become so valuable that I have more compelling opportunities to choose from than I can accept?

“Take ownership of your career” is easy to say and, on first hearing, a little vague. If you’re not sure what it actually means to do on a Tuesday, that reaction is fair, not a failing. It rarely means an overhaul: a new five-year plan, a total rework of how you spend your time, a long list of new commitments layered on top of an already demanding job. Most of the professionals I’ve seen build the strongest careers made a small number of deliberate choices, sustained over time, rather than a dramatic reinvention.

It also does not always mean adding something. I’ve worked with lawyers who were the person everyone in the office could rely on for anything: the associate who’d take the urgent-but-thankless assignment, sit on every ad hoc committee, and always say yes when someone needed a hand. That reputation is genuinely valuable, and I’m not suggesting anyone stop being reliable. But when I’ve helped people map out where that time was actually going, we often found that a meaningful share of it was going toward work that made them useful in the moment without making them more valuable over time. In those cases, the highest-leverage move wasn’t a new habit. It was stepping back from one or two of those reactive commitments and redirecting the hours toward something more deliberate: a relationship worth building, a skill the market was starting to reward, a piece of work that would still matter in five years. Less of one thing, on purpose, so there’s room for more of another.

The foreign professionals who build the strongest long-term careers in Japan tend to think a little differently. They approach their careers like entrepreneurs, even when they work inside large organizations. They think about where demand is heading and create opportunities instead of waiting for someone else to provide them. Getting there might mean accepting an unconventional assignment, building relationships with people in unrelated departments instead of only socializing with people in yours, or taking on more work than what’s asked of you so you can get smart on things you don’t know much about. It might just as easily mean quietly stepping off a committee that no longer teaches you anything, so you have the bandwidth to do one of those things well instead of five things adequately.

Taking ownership of your career requires vision and action. Like with the capital markets, you should assess your value in the labor market based on whether you have the skills needed to capitalize on future opportunities, rather than on what you’ve accomplished to date. If you intend to build a long-term career in Japan, running that assessment often and ensuring you have the skills you need is one of the most important exercises you can do.

Understand What the Market Values and Where You Stand

Knowing that you should take ownership is not the same as knowing what to do next. You need a way to assess your current situation, decide where improvement would have the greatest impact, and gather reliable information about what the market values. I developed what I call the PARCS framework to help with this. The framework looks at professional development across five areas:

Professional Performance: how well you understand your stakeholders’ implicit and explicit expectations and the extent to which you meet those expectations;

Alliances: your ability to (i) identify key people who can help you reach your career goals (ii) create opportunities to meet them and (iii) forge strong relationships with them;

Resources: how well you have identified the people, tools, training, and opportunities you have access to that can help you, and to what extent you have actually made use of them;

Career: the extent to which you (i) know what you want to achieve in your career, (ii) have developed a plan to get there, and (iii) are executing that plan; and

Self-Care and Personal Interests: maintaining the physical wherewithal and mental clarity and focus that will allow you to accomplish your career objectives and enjoy those accomplishments.

I’ll explain how each element can help you take ownership of your career, and then I’ll provide some concrete steps you can take.

Relevance of each element

Here is why each element of the PARCS framework is important:

Professional Performance

Being good at your current job gives you knowledge, experience, and credibility that form a foundation from which you can pursue new opportunities. Even if you don’t like your current job, doing it well is extremely important, so don’t fall into the trap of doing the bare minimum to spite your current employer.

It’s much easier to persuade others to support you when you have already demonstrated that you can deliver in the role you have now. If you’re in a suboptimal environment but still performing well, people will see that and are likely to think you can accomplish even more under better conditions.

Alliances

People can recommend you for opportunities, introduce you to people who can assist you in your career, and provide market intelligence that’s not readily available. In Japan, where important information often travels in secret through trusted relationships, alliances are one of the best ways to learn what clients and organizations increasingly value and to be well positioned to take on opportunities that fit your skill set.

Many professions struggle with networking, but it is critical. There are many ways to do it, so part of the challenge is figuring out a cadence and style that makes consistent networking easy for you.

I call this “Alliances” and not “Networking” because meeting people is just the beginning of the process. People have to know, like, and trust you before they will vouch for you or offer you opportunities. In Japan, that often means having multiple interactions with people over a protracted period of time. You should therefore judge the efficacy of your networking efforts in years, rather than months. As such, you need to start the process early and do it consistently.

Resources

This element is about recognizing who and what around you can help you, and then actually using that help. Think of friends and associates who can help you understand an industry or topic that’s unclear to you. Identify courses, events, databases, and opportunities that you can access by virtue of being employed at your current organization. Most of us have far more resources at our disposal than we even realize.

Once you know what resources you have, you need to determine which of those resources will most help you achieve your goals and then actually use them. This is where many professionals fall short, and it’s often because they think they can do things on their own. That’s likely true, but doing so slows growth and typically makes the process more painful. Not everything needs to be done the hard way to make it worthwhile. You also don’t have to feel shame about using the advantages you have. Be grateful for them.

Career

The information you gain through your performance, alliances, and resources should inform your view of where your career could go next. You don’t necessarily need to develop a twenty-year plan, but you should think five or ten years out and have a working hypothesis of how the market and the world will change, what problems clients and organizations will increasingly need help solving, which of your skills, interests, and proclivities could uniquely position you to address those problems, and what additional capabilities you need to develop.

The important point is that your trajectory should reflect a judgment you’ve made based on what you’re learning about yourself and the market. It should not simply be the product of whatever assignments or promotions other people happen to bestow upon you.

You’ll almost certainly have to refine your hypothesis with time, which means you’ll make mistakes and be proven wrong sometimes, or even often.

That’s part of the process.

Self-Care and Personal Interests

None of the above matters if you lack the physical and mental capacity to act over time, and to enjoy success when it comes.

Building a career requires energy, judgment, resilience, confidence, and creativity. Those qualities become much harder to access when you’re chronically exhausted, physically ill, emotionally depleted, too busy to think, or living a life devoid of joy.

I posit that self-care is central to your professional endeavors because self-care is what makes career development sustainable, and, frankly, worth doing in the first place.

How to Start

Now it’s time to get out of your head and take some action. Before you reach for something new to add, it’s worth pausing on one question: is there something already on your plate that’s earning you less than it’s costing you? For a lot of people, the first real move in taking ownership of their career is subtraction, not addition: freeing up the time and attention that a deliberate step actually requires.

With that in mind, the first step is to take the time and actually assess yourself. If you want to use the PARCS framework but want some help assessing yourself, you can answer the questions here and get some immediate feedback.

Once you see your score for each PARCS element, I’d select one or two areas to improve. Just one or two, not all five at once. Those will usually be the areas where either (i) there’s a big gap between where you are and where you need to be to achieve your goals or (ii) you get the most impact for the least expended energy.

Now that you know what you want to focus on, you should develop a plan to improve, which must include a way to measure that improvement.

“Build my network” can be difficult to act on. Try to be specific. For example, “Meet five people outside my organization who understand a part of the Japanese market that I want to learn about and set up follow-up meetings with each” is much more useful. From there, you can clarify what exactly you want to learn about and where to find the people who can help you learn those things.

You should also set a deadline and have a check-in halfway so you can change tack if you’re not on track to meet that deadline.

Lastly, I’d think about what could get in the way of your making progress on time and what support you need to stay focused when other important things inevitably come up. Creating accountability and getting assistance early can be the key to accomplishing your goals.

If you have a plan and support mechanisms in place to perform well at work, build alliances, use available resources efficiently, think about and move your career forward strategically, and maintain the physical and psychic capacity to execute and enjoy life over time, you’ll very likely stay in high demand.

Build the Capabilities Every International Professional Needs

Over my years of living and working in Japan, I have noticed that the international professionals who build the strongest careers here tend to share certain attributes. Unlike your one or two PARCS priorities, which reflect your individual strengths and development areas, these attributes are broadly applicable. How you develop and demonstrate them may vary, but all of us working in Japan should continually get better at the below.

Being a trusted pair of hands

When a client has a difficult problem, you want to be the first person who comes to mind.

They don’t need to believe that you personally know every answer. They just need to trust that you’ll quickly grasp what they’re trying to accomplish, bring in the right people, and find a way to get things done on time and as painlessly as possible.

That matters particularly in Japan, where professional relationships often cover a wide range of needs. In law firms, for example, clients may ask for help with matters that cross practice areas, and sometimes professional disciplines. Because the legal market is smaller than the U.S. or UK, many successful lawyers develop relatively broad practices, rather than being highly specialized.

A client could go directly to the leading technical specialist every time, but they often don’t. They want someone who understands their business, knows how they like to work, appreciates their internal constraints, and can translate specialist advice into something they can actually use. That requires a certain degree of technical competence, but beyond that threshold, legal brilliance is not necessarily the differentiating factor. It’s about trust.

That trust is built through repeated interactions. Clients see whether you remain dependable when the work is difficult, inconvenient, or less profitable for you. They notice whether you keep your word and continue to invest in the relationship over time.

The same principles apply beyond law. Whether you work in finance, consulting, technology, or another professional field, long-term value often comes from becoming the person who understands the client, navigates the systems they operate in, assembles the right expertise, and reliably moves the problem toward a resolution that is acceptable to the client.

Making things work in Japan

While most executives working in Japan understand what headquarters wants to achieve, they’re also aware of the stark differences in how decisions are made, people are motivated, and work gets done in Japan.

Changes in process and strategy made by headquarters may come too quickly, disregard important relationships, rely on incentives that do not motivate the local workforce, or require people to act in ways that feel inconsistent with how the local environment operates. It can therefore feel like what headquarters wants to achieve in Japan, or the way it intends to achieve it, is off base.

These situations are often murky, politically sensitive, and uncomfortable. But finding a workable path through complex and highly sensitive situations is what makes the best practitioners highly sought after and allows them to command a significant premium.

They also need the trust of the local workforce. Employees must believe that local management understands their concerns, respects the local context, and is looking out for Japan rather than simply carrying out instructions from headquarters.

At the same time, these leaders must have credibility with headquarters. That credibility gives local management more time and budget, as well as the latitude to do things differently than in the home market.

It takes time and considerable effort to become trusted and to develop the requisite knowledge to be an effective leader in Japan. But once you have that skillset, you are in a rare position.

Creating demand instead of waiting for it

One of the clearest differences between professionals who continue advancing and those who plateau is how they think about the boundaries of their role. Some focus on performing the work they’ve been assigned and meeting the objectives placed in front of them. Others think like entrepreneurs inside the organization. They understand that the work that once made them indispensable may gradually become standardized, automated, less profitable, or simply less important to clients.

The most successful professionals in Japan anticipate what clients are likely to need and develop a strategy for providing it before that need becomes obvious to everyone else. That requires staying close to your clients even when they don’t have work to give you and continually looking beyond the limits of your current understanding and skillset.

Even if you come up with innovative ideas, you have to persuade people inside your organization to support you, inspire colleagues to help you build a viable product, and keep people motivated during the period when success is uncertain. And then you have to sell the idea to your clients by showing why your innovation matters.

Lawyers are grappling with this right now because they tend to charge based on hourly rates. As AI and other technologies help to streamline processes, clients are asking for discounts. Lawyers need to think about how they are going to continue providing value in this environment, as well as what people, processes, and other resources they’ll need in order to deliver that value. Getting this right could prove to be very lucrative, while ignoring it or waiting for someone else to solve the problem and copy it could prove costly.

The professionals who create the greatest opportunities do not wait for someone else to tell them what the market needs. They are the ones pushing the profession forward, even if that means some discomfort along the way.

Increasing the effectiveness of everyone around you

The most valuable professionals use the skills they have to make the people in their organization better. They do so by first understanding what the organization needs and how they can leverage their knowledge, skills, and abilities to create value beyond the main job they’re paid to do.

Someone who is a strong conversationalist may help build cohesion across a team, surface concerns that would otherwise go unspoken, and create the trust required for people to work well together.

Someone with deep technical expertise may raise the standard of an entire practice by teaching others, developing guidance, or helping establish clearer standards of conduct and performance.

Someone who is politically savvy may be especially good at navigating tense internal relationships, resolving thorny issues with clients, or finding a path through situations in which formal authority alone is not enough.

Someone who understands technology may introduce tools and working methods that improve how the organization operates.

As organizations grow, they become more complicated and, at times, unwieldy. This can be especially true of organizations that are large enough to have substantial complexity but not large enough to have mature systems or a dedicated team to manage all of that. People who can fill those gaps become extremely valuable.

When the business is going well, your primary skill may already be generating sufficient revenue to justify your existence. When conditions deteriorate, doing your main job well may no longer be enough. The additional value you bring to the organization can become the reason for an organization to retain you.

It’s not that easy though.

Valuable work not directly tied to the bottom line can easily disappear into the background. People can forget, or not fully appreciate, that your contributions are causing a team to function well, preventing internal conflicts, or creating useful workflows or other systems that save time and reduce critical errors.

So you have to remind people.

That does not require constantly promoting yourself or claiming credit for every positive development. It does, however, require explaining what you are contributing to the right people and connecting that contribution to outcomes the organization cares most about.

There is a broader reason to provide value to the people in the organization. As your career progresses, your value depends less on what you can accomplish alone and increasingly on what your leadership enables others to accomplish. If you’re a leader who has a proven track record of making everyone around you better, you’ll be in high demand.

Avoid the Traps That Erode Your Value

After years of expending considerable energy learning an industry, navigating organizations, and understanding how business is conducted in Japan, it’s understandable to feel like you’ve finally arrived and to want to coast. But doing so is often one of the first signs of a career on the wane.

Work that once required tremendous effort becomes easier with experience. The danger is continuing to produce roughly the same results going forward. For a while, that may still be the standard of success, but over time, other people acquire similar knowledge, relationships, and experience. What once distinguished you gradually becomes the minimum expected of someone at your level.

You have to consistently produce greater value.

That does not have to mean working longer hours or continually pushing yourself closer to exhaustion. In fact, this is another place where the answer is often subtraction rather than addition. As you become more experienced, you should actually be able to expend less energy while producing a greater result.

Everything you’ve done to date gives you leverage.

You can draw on relationships that took years to build, avoid mistakes you’ve seen before, use the organization’s resources more intelligently, and deploy the right people so you don’t have to do everything yourself. But this only works if you’re actively cultivating key relationships so that people are willing to help you when you ask.

You should also continue expanding your network, strengthening your profile, ensuring that you have the authority to deploy required financial and other institutional resources, and staying ahead of trends so that your organization continues to be successful and you’re considered critical to that success.

Every few months, it’s worth asking yourself:

What assumptions about my industry am I taking for granted?

What capabilities am I relying on too heavily?

Which people, systems, relationships, or resources around me need to become stronger?

What am I building now that will allow us to create more value five years from today?

This may sound like a lot, but if done right, it can be far less taxing than doing the work you were tasked with earlier in your career. You just need to develop a system to ensure you’re using your strengths and most valuable personal assets in the most productive ways and allowing others to fill in the gaps.

Benchmark Yourself Against the World

One of the best ways to avoid complacency is to keep exposing yourself to people and environments that raise your standards. If you spend enough time in one organization, industry, or country, it’s easy for your sense of excellence to be based on what’s around you. The professionals who continue growing rarely look only to those proximate to them. They compare themselves with the best people they can find.

That does not necessarily mean leaving Japan, but it does require deliberately staying aware of how other markets, organizations, and professions are developing. Visit other offices and business centers when the chance comes up. Work on matters that involve people in other jurisdictions. Attend conferences where practitioners from around the world talk about how their markets and practices are changing, and maintain relationships with peers at a similar career stage so you actually hear what they’re working on, not just what they post. Read outside your immediate field, too. Developments in technology, design, and other creative industries tend to offer useful ideas for your own work long before they show up in it on their own.

You need regular contact with people whose assumptions, ambitions, and standards challenge your own. There is a meaningful difference between understanding what people in another market do intellectually and actually experiencing the pace at which they operate, the intensity of the competition, and the standards they expect from themselves and others. That kind of exposure will cause you to notice new opportunities, ask better questions, and recognize emerging patterns earlier.

None of this is based on the assumption that another market is automatically better than Japan. The point is to prevent any single environment from becoming your entire frame of reference. It’s hard to appreciate how quickly an industry and the world are evolving if everyone around you is adapting at roughly the same pace.

I would encourage you to aim to be exceptional from Japan rather than simply exceptional in Japan. There are many ways to accomplish this. Look to others for inspiration, but then look inward to determine how to stand out. The professionals who build the strongest long-term careers in Japan do not allow geography to determine the limits of their ability or ambition. They use Japan as the base from which they continue developing world-class capability.

Decide What You’ll Do Differently

The ideas in this article are not very complicated. But most people don’t do them, even though they’d be further along if they did. Oftentimes, we try to improve everything at once and usually give up when we’re not able to keep all of the plates spinning. A better approach is to identify the one or two areas where change would have the greatest effect on your career and begin there.

Define what you want to improve. Decide what progress would look like. Set a reasonable timeframe. Identify what could prevent you from following through. Then build in a way to review your progress and adjust the plan when reality differs from what you expected. And before you add anything new to the list, take one more look at what’s already on it. There is a reasonable chance the most useful thing you do this month is stop doing something, not start.

This can be hard to do while managing a demanding job, family responsibilities, and everything else competing for your attention. It is easy to agree with an idea, intend to return to it later, and then allow another year to pass without making a meaningful change.

That is where outside support can be useful.

A coach, mentor, or trusted adviser can help you determine which issue deserves attention, challenge whether your goals are ambitious or specific enough, and help you distinguish a real plan from a collection of good intentions. They can also provide accountability when urgent work begins crowding out the important work of building your future.

If you finish this article thinking, “Yeah, this all makes sense and is pretty straightforward,” ask yourself one further question:

What am I therefore committed to doing differently going forward?

If you can’t answer this question with conviction, you could likely benefit from getting support to help you make the changes necessary to improve your career. Building a durable career begins with insight, but what it requires most is taking consistent action from a place of conviction: not a leap, but a handful of deliberate choices, some of them about what you finally let yourself stop doing.