Who makes this site

I have worked in customer service in Japan for many years. As a team manager and then as a supervisor at a call centre, I sat on the hiring side of more than fifty job interviews.

Some of the people I interviewed were foreign nationals. I was never able to hire one. A call centre is a job where the whole work is Japanese, on the phone, with no face and no context to help — so the bar for the language is unusually high, and again and again I had to say no to people who would have been fine somewhere else.

I do not think those people were worse at the job. They were worse at one conversation, on one day, in a language that was not their own. And I was the person who had to write that down as a no.

That is the part I would like to undo. I cannot go back and hire them. What I can do is write down what I saw from that chair, and give it to the people sitting on the other side of the table.

That is why this site exists. I have seen, from the interviewer's chair, where things go wrong — and most of the time it is not the answer. It is that the question did not land.

Why there are stories here too

You cannot pass an interview in a language you have only studied. At some point you have to read something that was not written to teach you.

The problem is the gap. Material made for beginners is usually too small to be a story. Real Japanese is a wall. A lot of people stop somewhere in between — not because they are lazy, but because there is very little in the middle to stand on.

So we made that middle ourselves. Momotaro, Kaguya-hime, Urashima Taro — the stories every child in Japan grows up with — and two that children everywhere grow up with, The North Wind and the Sun and The Emperor's New Clothes, retold in Japanese simple enough to finish in your first week. Furigana on every kanji, a translation under every line, and a voice reading slowly enough that you can follow along.

Read one all the way to the end and you have read a Japanese story. Not an exercise. A story.

What comes from experience, and what comes from sources

I have never applied for a job in Japan as a foreign national, and I have never taken the JLPT. So there is a line here that I want to be honest about.

What an interviewer is thinking, and what makes them uneasy, I can write from my own experience.

What foreign applicants are actually asked in Japan, I cannot. That part is not from memory. Every question on this site was collected from an interview on video — a real one, or a filmed practice interview — from published guides to applying and interviewing in Japan, and from teachers explaining Japanese interviews in Nepali. The sources are printed at the bottom of every question, with links, so you can check them yourself.

Where neither my experience nor a source can back something up, it is not on the site. There are questions in our collection that are not published for exactly that reason.

The names you will see here

You will meet four names on this site, and they are all the same two people.

Nihongo Work is the site itself — the house the other names live in. Nihongo Tales is the name on the videos and the books: one YouTube channel, with two shelves on it — the folk tales, and the real-life scenes like the hospital and the phone call. Seikatsu no Nihongo (せいかつの日本語) is what the working-and-living side is called here on the site. Sazanami is the name the shop is registered under, so that is what you will see when you tap through to buy something.

We are saying this here because it is confusing otherwise, and because a site that asks you to trust it should not hand you four names without explaining them.

What we will not do

We will not tell you to lie.

In some countries, students are taught small tricks for Japanese interviews — say you have no relatives here, say you will not go home often. We report that this is taught, because it is true and it is useful to know. But we do not repeat it as advice. Some of it does not even work. Immigration paperwork asks about family living in Japan, so hiding it at the interview changes nothing on the form — and what you write on an immigration form is a far more serious matter than an interview answer. We are not immigration advisers and this page is not advice: check the Immigration Services Agency's own pages, or ask someone qualified, before you decide what to put on a form.

An interviewer who asks one more question will find out. We would rather help you give a true answer that still lands well.

We also do not run practice interviews.

I sat on the interviewer's side of the table, but not recently. What I would have marked down years ago is not a safe guide to what a company will mark down tomorrow. And the format does a harm of its own: once I ask and you answer, whatever I say next is heard as a verdict — and a verdict from someone who is not going to hire you is worth nothing, and it lands hard.

So the questions go on the site instead, with what the interviewer is listening for underneath each one. The room itself we leave to the people who are actually in it.

About the audio

Every story here is read aloud by a person, line by line, at home — most of them by my wife, and one of them by me. There is no synthesised voice left in any of the stories. We are saying so plainly because one of them used to have one, and that page said so at the time.

Every line has been checked against the script by a native Japanese speaker. That is not a formality either — it has caught real mistakes. One recording said おにじま where the script said おにがしま, and another slipped an extra sound into ももたろう. Both were re-recorded.

A learner cannot hear that something is wrong when they do not know the word yet. So we check, rather than ask you to trust it.

About the pictures, and where AI is used

The illustrations are made with AI. So is the first draft of the simplified Japanese. We say so plainly, for the same reason we say it about the audio: you should know what you are learning from.

What AI cannot do is notice when it is wrong. Pictures come back with a treasure chest that belongs to another country, a tomato in a village that would never have seen one, leather shoes on a farmer who should be in straw sandals, a face that has drifted since the scene before. Every picture is looked at, and the wrong ones are made again until they match the story.

The Japanese goes the same way. A draft is cut down to a beginner's level, then checked by a native speaker, then read aloud by one. It does not go up until all three agree.

The tool is fast. The checking is the work, and the checking is a person.

What we count, and what we do not

We count which pages are read, in which language, and roughly which country they are read from. Two things do the counting: Cloudflare, which manages it without cookies, and Google Analytics, which uses them. There are no ads on this site, and nothing about you is sold to anyone.

The second one went in when the shop opened, because a tap that leaves this site for another one is invisible to the first. We would rather find out that a story is not worth printing on a bag than keep guessing.

We are telling you this because most sites measure you and say nothing. If we ask you to trust what is written here, we should be straight about that too. The whole of it is on the page called "What this site collects", linked at the bottom of every page.

This site is not finished

The questions are translated into more languages than I can read. Only the English is written by me; the rest starts as a machine translation, and every page in a language no person has checked yet says so at the top. If something here is wrong, or worded strangely, or simply would not work in a real interview in your country's context — please tell us. We will fix it.

That is not a formality. Accuracy is the only thing this site has.

If you have an interview coming up

If you are here because you have an interview coming up: the questions on this site are the ones that came up again and again in the interviews and guides we could find. They are not difficult questions. They are unfamiliar ones — and unfamiliar is what makes people freeze, go quiet, and answer something that was never asked.

You should not have to hear them for the first time in that room.

Why I really made this

Two people are the reason this site exists, and neither of them was looking for a job.

One is a friend of my wife's. She is not from Japan, and her Japanese is still a work in progress. That has never once been the point. Our families spend time together, our children play together, and she is now the first person my wife talks to about anything.

The other is a girl who transferred into my daughter's class. She went to the same ballet lessons. She could not speak Japanese at all — not one word — and she became my daughter's best friend anyway. Three months later her family moved to another city.

Neither of those friendships waited for the Japanese to get good.

Since then we have met many more — friends from other countries, and their children. Enough of them that I stopped thinking of it as unusual.

So this site tries to cover the whole way. Stories simple enough for your first week at one end, and the questions you will be asked when you go to work at the other. Read something and have it stay in your head. Look at a word and find out what it means.

I made this hoping it gives those children, and everyone like them, somewhere to grow.

If you have come to like Japan, or come to like this language, then as far as I am concerned you are already a friend. This is for you.

Who runs this site

Nihongo Work and Nihongo Tales are run by one person in Japan, under the name Sazanami.

Address: Osaka Ekimae Dai-3 Building 11F Room 2, 1-1-3 Umeda, Kita-ku, Osaka 530-0001, Japan (〒530-0001 大阪府大阪市北区梅田1丁目1番3号 大阪駅前第3ビル11階2号室)

Contact: hello@nihongo-work.com