Work
The law lets you work 28 hours a week. At a language school, most of you will use nearly all of them.
Two in three international students in Japan have a part-time job. That number hides the thing that actually matters: at a doctoral programme, one student in five works twenty hours or more. At a Japanese language school, it is seven in ten.
Start with the rule, because everything else sits on top of it. If you hold a student visa in Japan and you want to work, you apply for permission to engage in an activity outside your status. That permission comes with a limit written into the regulations, and the limit is 28 hours per week.
What the regulation actually says
Article 19, paragraph 5, item 1 of the Ordinance for Enforcement of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act sets the permitted activity at 28 hours or less per week. Three things in the same sentence are worth knowing, because they are usually left out:
During a long vacation period defined in your school's regulations, the limit becomes 8 hours per day instead. Read the sentence carefully: the daily figure replaces the weekly one for that period rather than sitting inside it. This exception is written for holders of a student status specifically. How it is administered in practice is a question for the Immigration Services Agency, not for us — but the text is unambiguous about which limit applies when.
Work in the adult entertainment industry is excluded — not capped, excluded. The regulation lists the categories by reference to the Act on Control and Improvement of Amusement Business, etc., and none of them are available to you at any number of hours.
The permission only covers work done while you are enrolled. If you leave your school, the permission does not survive it.
Now the data. JASSO asks 7,867 privately financed international students whether they have a part-time job, and 5,133 of them — 65.2% — say yes.
That figure has fallen at each of the last three surveys: 70.4%, then 67.0%, now 65.2%. The survey does not explain why, and we are not going to guess.
Whether you work depends a little on your school. How much you work depends enormously on it.
The share of students with a job runs from 48.0% to 80.8% depending on where they study:
Shares of students at each school type. National average 65.2% (5,133 of 7,867).
A spread of thirty-three points is real, but it is not the interesting number. Ask instead how many hours the students who work actually work, and the schools stop looking like variations on a theme.
Shares of the 5,133 students who reported having a job, grouped by what they are studying. Adds the survey's "20–25 hours" and "25 hours or more" bands.
At a Japanese language school, 27.2% of working students report 25 hours or more. The cap is 28. There is almost no room left in the week — the band has a ceiling three hours above its floor, and 463 students are inside it.
At a master's programme the same figure is 3.6%.
Where the hours go
Two industries take two thirds of everyone:
Multiple answers allowed. Shares of the 5,133 students with a job. Food service and retail together account for 67.6%.
Both of those are jobs where you talk to Japanese customers for your entire shift, in Japanese, whether or not you feel ready to. That is the mechanism behind a finding we wrote about separately: when students are asked where they actually mix with Japanese people, the part-time job beats every channel the school organises. It is not that the workplace is unusually welcoming. It is that twenty-two hours a week of being obliged to speak is a large amount of practice, and nothing the school runs comes close to that number of hours.
What it pays
Half of all working students earn between ¥1,000 and ¥1,200 an hour.
Shares of the 5,133 students with a job. Two years earlier, 34.1% were under ¥1,000 — that band has shrunk by more than a third as minimum wages rose.
Put the pay together with the hours and you get the monthly figure, which the survey also asks directly. Among students who earn from work, the average monthly amount is ¥81,000 at higher education institutions and ¥106,000 at Japanese language schools.
That second number is worth checking against the first table. ¥106,000 a month at ¥1,100 an hour is about 22 hours a week — which is exactly where the language-school distribution sits. The two questions were asked separately and they agree.
The legal maximum, in yen
28 hours a week at ¥1,100, over a month. Nobody can lawfully earn more than this from term-time part-time work.
What language school students average
About 80% of the ceiling. The room left over is roughly six hours a week.
A scholarship does not get you out of it
You might assume the students with scholarships are the ones who do not need to work. The survey asked, and the answer is barely:
| Students | Have a job | Do not |
|---|---|---|
| Receiving a scholarship | 62.4% | 37.6% |
| Not receiving one | 66.8% | 33.2% |
Four and a half points. That is the entire difference a scholarship makes to whether you work. Scholarship money in Japan is mostly not sized to replace a job — at Japanese language schools the average award is ¥35,000 a month, which is about a third of what the job pays.
There is one place where the scholarship does show up, and it is not in the hours worked. It is in the hours studied. Students with scholarships spend more time on study and research outside class than students without — the survey reports it plainly, across every level.
So, before you choose a school
The brochure will tell you about the curriculum. What the numbers add is this:
- If you are going to a language school or a vocational school, plan on working, and plan on it being close to twenty hours a week. Seven in ten of the students already there do.
- Expect food service or retail. Two thirds of working students are in one or the other, and the reason is that those are the jobs available to someone whose Japanese is still arriving.
- Expect ¥1,000 to ¥1,200 an hour, and treat anything you are promised above ¥1,400 as unusual — 8.6% of students are in that territory.
- The 28-hour cap is per week, not per job. Two employers do not give you two allowances.
- Long vacations are the exception, at 8 hours a day. If your annual budget depends on part-time earnings, this is where the slack is.
Sources. The hours limit and its exceptions: Ordinance for Enforcement of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act (Ministry of Justice Ordinance No. 54 of 1981), Article 19, paragraph 5, item 1 — full text at e-Gov. All survey figures: Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), FY2023 Survey on Living Conditions of Privately Financed International Students, Tables 8-1 to 8-10 and Table 5-5 — survey PDF (Japanese). On reading the percentages: Table 8-1 and 8-2 are shares of all students (7,867 and the school-type totals). Tables 8-4, 8-5 and 8-10 are shares of the 5,133 students who reported having a job, so they describe workers, not students. Table 5-5 averages are among students who earn from that source, not among everyone. The ¥133,000 figure is ours, not the survey's: 28 hours × ¥1,100 × 4.33 weeks. It is an arithmetic ceiling, not something anyone measured.