B.A East Asian language and culture Japanese

My goal for years now has been to work and live in Japan. I have decided on this major because I love learning about the Japanese language and culture but I don�ft know what I can do with it. A lot of people tell me it is useless to get jobs in Japan with this major and I should do something else like international business or international marketing with a minor in Japanese. I wanted to ask if any of you know if I can make a career out of my degree and live in Japan for a long period of time or am I better off doing something else. What�fs jobs can I get with my degree besides being an English teacher or translator? Is it possible for me to work in sales or anything business related with my bachelors degree in East Asian studies?

There are Lot of possibility to work in japan
Some of my Friends work as TA or
Teachers Assistant

Some of my Friends work and earn money as
RA or resident assistant

Some of my Friends work in Factory(28 hours per week)

Some of my friends work in restaurant

Some of my indian Friends rent a shop and sell indian food and earn money

But you must know significant amount of japanese.If you dont know japanese language,
How you will communicate with them

Some of jobs which are suggested above are impossible if you only have a degree.

For example, if TA means •â�•‹³ˆõ, most B.O.E require a Japan's national license (if it was ALT, I guess that is what you said as English teacher and your question was for the other options?)

If you do a part time job for a factory, you need to be a student with a work permission, a spouse of Japanese national, or a working holiday maker, etc, as there is no visa for that.

If you work for a restaurant as a chef of your country dishes, you need some years of experience to get a visa for that. If it was waiter/waitless job, dish washing, or cleaning, it is same as factory job (even if you work full time).

If you do a business, at least you need some money to get a visa for that.

Which languages will you study in this BA? Only Japanese or also other East Asian languages?

What is the expected language level at the graduation? JLPT N1 or less?
Eg I know a friend she studied Japanese in Germany at university and they only reached N3.

I would say for learning a language a dedicated language school IN the country is best. Just as an example: I learned Italian in Italy and lived there for about a year. When I came back to Germany I wanted to continue using Italian, so I went to a school for language secretaries. I vividly remember one classmate who was studying since several years Italian at university and her level was nowhere close to mine and I had done only 2 months of intensive language classes plus a year of just using it 24/7.

The focus at university is different. You learn many other things apart from speaking/reading/writing the language. Eg literature, politics, economics�c

Just look up the curriculum of the university you are targeting.

So if the goal of studying East Asian languages at university for you is ONLY to learn Japanese then I would choose a language school in Japan instead. It will roughly take 2 years of intensive courses to learn Japanese to fluency.

Which still leaves you without a university degree though. So you could either first study Japanese and then enter a university or senmon gakko (not sure how to translate this to English, maybe college or so) and continue your education in Japan. Or you can do it the other way round and first study something in your country and then go to Japan for language courses.
For finding work in Japan probably graduating from a Japanese university/college would be better. Without work experience abroad and just a university degree and Japanese language skills your options are more limited.

Plus consider that you can�ft work in just anything in Japan. You need a proper work visa which isn�ft available for any type of work. Only for some specific job types and generally requires a university degree. (There are some exceptions like working as an experienced cook).

It's the kind of degree you take if you want to go into academia and continue your research about things like Asian languages, culture, etc. By itself it isn't really something that employers are looking for. You won't land a sales job or any kind of "business-related" (I guess you mean corporate) jobs on the strength of your degree. You would need something in addition to the degree that the prospective employers were REALLY looking for and that made you stand out as a special candidate.

And FYI it's not even the best choice for teaching or translation. If I wanted to make a serious career out of language teaching I would go the pedagogy route. As for translation, BA in something like creative writing followed by a master's in translation studies would be a good way to go.

Also the vast majority of BA programmes focussing on the Japanese language won't get you anywhere near the level you need to carry out any kind of professional responsibilities in the business world, talk to customers if working in sales, etc. I know a few people who majored in Japanese and then moved to Japan, and if I'm being blunt, every one of them sucks at Japanese. Of course the odd one or two will graduate with good language skills (because they studied really hard and watched anime for 5 hours every night after classes), but generally speaking it just isn't a good way to get good at Japanese.

My advice: find something you are genuinely interested in doing regardless of country and self-study Japanese to fluency by the time you graduate. Chances are if you work really hard at it you will at least have a shot of taking your career to Japan. But don't hedge all of your bets Japan. People fall out of love with this country every day for various reasons. You want a skillset and qualifications that you can take with you to Japan, back home, and maybe even to other countries. I say this as someone who worked really hard to make her career work in Japan... and then I moved back to the UK where I belong. Trust me, this is the sensible way of doing things.

Getting a degree in Asian languages/Japanese might be useful in a country other than Japan. It is like getting an English degree and wanting to move to England - there are already tons of people that speak the language, and for Japan that is 125 million native/fluent speakers you are competing against for a job.
Also consider that trying to learn a language through a university programme is unlikely to deliver a high skill level - you simply do not get enough hours needed to gain proficiency.
Also, an English/Japanese set can have limited appeal. As one bi-lingual person told me a while back (he was working for Odakyu helping lost tourists), being able to speak English wasn't actually very useful for him when there was demand for multi-lingual people with more diverse language skills. Still, I know several Japanese people that speak English well, and that is not to be scoffed at, despite the woeful level of ability churned out by the local education system.

I knew someone who went to the SOAS university (London) because he was interested in and was very good at learning languages, but he also studied accounting. Later he found a job in Japan at a financial institution. It is this kind of combination of language(s) and other practical skills that come in useful for pursuing career in Japan. I know someone else who attended a language school in Japan, then returned to his home country and completed his studies in business administration, preparing for a career in Japan.

if you major in the Japanese language, when you graduate you might be fluent in the language, but that is spoken by the locals in Japan. For English language teaching, you are usually not supposed to use Japanese to explain, but just stick to using English. For translation, you�fd need to have some industry experience (otherwise you would not understand the substance of what you are translating and might just produce �gliterally correct but not useful�h translation).

That described degree would be near useless in Japan.

Other than having a bacholars to get you into a English teacher role, I see no value in it.

In the past 6 months, there seems to be a large number of high school or university students who want to move to Japan to live. Many ask about what university degree or major they should take to get a job in Japan.

To be honest - getting a degree is only part of the story. People then need to get experience in their home country in their area of expertise before they are highly employable in Japan.

On knowing if "Asian Studies" will help you live in Japan - it's a difficult question to answer without knowing what the degree is specifically about.

It's true that your degree (if from an English Speaking Country) will give you the basics needed to teach English for something like the JET program or similar. If you speak along with read/write Japanese, there is a second branch called CIR where people work outside of teaching English. Could this be an area of work?

CIR= Coordinator For international relations
Means kokusai koryuin

Do you think,Am i correct?

JET and CIR positions with the official JET Program are very very competitive or at least were pre-Covid. You also get assigned a location and can not pick and choose. If you just want to be in Japan anywhere that can work for you but if you want to be a specific location it will be problematic. There are teaching opportunities outside of the JET Program but they really vary in quality and many are not designed for living in Japan long term. Even the JET Program is for 5 years tops and then you will need to find a position elsewhere if you want to stay.

I know people who got relative fluent taking specifically Japanese language classes in college or University. But it depends on the program at their specific school and nearly all spent a semester or two abroad in Japan. (Which is not the same as an intensive language school as it is part of your degree, but gives you the experience of living and using the Japanese language in day to day life.) Most either had a dual major of Japanese and something else or minored in Japanese. And again this is specifically Japanese as a language vs. a major or minor that involved culture or other Asian languages or cultures. I took some Japanese history classes in college but I didn't really learn any Japanese.

I can only speak for the US, but I know schooling can vary enormously here in every single subject and at every single level. I have a 6th grader and her schooling has varied enormously across the 3 school districts we've lived in.

Just to share related information.

Many municipalities have a kind of exchange contract (Žo–…“sŽs) with one or two municipal outside Japan today and CIR are often employed among people of that related country, rather than people of a program by Japanese government. So possibility of CIR could be even less, not just competitive. Also CIR is a position not only for English speakers from English speaking country, but also any other people from the other country.

When I made the decision to change majors in my first year of college because I realized I hated Computer Science, I asked one of my Japanese teachers if I should major in East Asian Studies. She told me flat out, no, I shouldn't. Keep in mind she worked in the East Asian Department. She told me that it was basically useless, especially in Japan, where it doesn't exist and they probably won't even know what it is. It's like bringing an "American Studies" major to the U.S. Uhh, so you studied us? Cool, I guess?

The point is you might as well have no skills at all. Major in literally anything else that could be useful to you in the future.

Degrees are signalling devices. That's all they are. They tell employers where your skills are.

You think you need a degree to tell your employer you speak Japanese? Wrong, you don't.

You need one to show that you studied medicine, law, engineering, etc.

But not language skill.

All you need to signal to an employer that you speak Japanese is to open your mouth and speak it. If you are fluent, they will know within one sentence. You will sound natural.

You get this way by just studying, not majoring in something. Just study the language, take the JLPT if you need some sort of signalling device (works better than a major) and keep at it. Go ahead and take classes, but don't make it your major. For the record my minor was Japanese, but that's only because I had so many credits from CLEPing out of classes that it basically meant less work for me at the time.

Similar to what someone said above, I had friends my age who were majoring in East Asian Studies who were still studying for the JLPT N3 while I had already passed the N2, while majoring in something useful. They had even been studying for longer than me. I can say with certainty majoring in a language will not make you learn it faster, if anything it might hinder you. Just study it as much as possible, and set your own goals. Classes are WAYYY too slow anyway if you're serious, especially the ones given at universities outside of Japan.