Hello from Japan. I've been reading DEV for a while and finally decided to stop lurking.
My career
I've spent about 20 years as a software engineer in Japan, mostly backend work in Java and PHP, plus AWS architecture for the last stretch of it. Large systems, the kind with two decades of history and a few modules nobody wants to touch.
Somewhere along the way I also started teaching languages, which I've been doing alongside engineering for the past 10 years. That combination is unusual enough that people ask about it, so: I never left engineering for teaching. I just do both, and they turned out to overlap more than I expected.
Why I started using DEV
Most of what I know is about a place that doesn't get written about much in English.
There's plenty of content about Japan as a travel destination, and a fair amount about Japanese companies as an abstract cultural topic. There's much less about what it's actually like to sit in a Japanese dev team's stand-up, or why the code review comment you just received is more critical than it sounds.
I've watched engineers arrive from other countries and hit the same walls repeatedly. Not language walls exactly. More like: they knew the words, but not what the words were doing. I ended up explaining the same things over and over, one conversation at a time, and it seemed worth writing down properly.
DEV felt like the right place because the readers here are engineers. I don't have to explain what a pull request is before getting to the interesting part.
What I'm currently working on
I recently finished building a course about workplace Japanese for software engineers. Not textbook Japanese. The phrases that actually appear in stand-ups, code reviews, Slack threads, and incident calls, plus the cultural reasoning behind why they're phrased that way.
That project made me realize how much of this knowledge lives only in people's heads, mine included. Which is part of why I'm here.
What I'll write about on DEV
Mostly the intersection of Japanese dev culture and everyday engineering work:
- How Japanese teams handle code review, incidents, and decision-making, and why those patterns exist
- The gap between textbook Japanese and the Japanese engineers actually use at work (they are surprisingly far apart)
- Legacy systems in Japan, which is its own genre of archaeology
- Occasionally, working with AI tools on old codebases, because that's what I've been doing lately
If you're an engineer in Japan, thinking about moving here, or just curious how things work on this side, I'd like to hear what you're wondering about. Questions are genuinely useful to me. They tell me what's worth writing.
Nice to meet you all.
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