Since this is my first blog entry, I’d like to express my thanks to you for at least reading this sentence, and say that this blog’s angle will be to offer practical advice and insights from the perspective of a long-time foreign resident in Japan. I’ve been here since February 2003, it’s been a great experience overall, and I hope you will be able to say the same after a few years here, too.
Anyway, getting right into it, if you’ve been a foreign resident in Japan for more than a few years like myself, you’ve probably gone through your fair share of employers. In this economy, with companies cutting back on everything from employee development (English teachers) and marketing (Japanese to [insert language] translators), and with foreign travel to Japan on the decline (for those of you in the hospitality industry), you may have found yourself “restructured” as they say here in Japan-in other words, laid off and out of a job.
So is it time to pack your bags and head back to your homeland? Well, the job market may be even worse there, so perhaps not. What about unemployment benefits? Can you even get those in Japan? Yes, indeed you can, if you’ve been paying into Employment Insurance (Koyou Hoken) for one continuous year while employed in a job that had you regularly working 11 days or more per month. The government requires that your employer deduct this payment from your monthly pay, and if they didn’t, then you better head over to Hello Work right now and rat them out so you can get the money that is now due to you.
Hello Work (officially called the Employment Security Bureau) is the place with the funny name where you can find a job after your previous employee said “Sayonara” to you. Here’s the Tokyo branch’s horribly translated English site, as well as a far more useful chart showing when an interpreter speaking the language of your choice is available at an office near you. Anyway, I’ve been through the process of receiving benefits twice myself, the first time when the English school I was working at went bankrupt just 11 days after my wedding and I found to my surprise that I only had 25,000 yen in my account on payday, the day before rent. That sucked. What made it suck even more was finding out that I couldn’t get benefits right away, but that it would take a couple months or so. In the end though, things worked out okay. A colleague of mine from that time gave up applying because he found it too much of a bureaucratic hassle-which it is-but he missed out on over 500,000 yen to supplement his part-time income over the next few months!
You see, the way it works is you are eligible for up to a certain number of days’ worth of benefits until you either use them all up or a prescribed period of time elapses. This all varies with what your previous income was, age and other factors, but in my case I was 26 and had had a monthly income of less than 300,000 yen. I got 90 days’ worth of benefits valid for one year, all of which I used. I say “worth” because if, for example, you work four days in a week, then for that week you get three days’ worth of benefits (including weekends and national holidays), while the other four days you didn’t use you can take some other time. This means that with the right part-time jobs that have high hourly rates (but maybe lots of prep or travel time) or cash-in-hand work like teaching private lessons, combined with your unemployment benefits, you can end up making a decent amount of money while you figure out what to do once the cash from the government runs out. My 90 days’ worth lasted me a good five months. (Note that if you report an average of 20 or more hours worked per week, you may become ineligible to receive further benefits.)
By the way, if you’re in or near the Tokyo area and you’ve got visa problems on top of your employment woes, you’ll be glad to know that the government has set up “One Stop Centers” to deal with both employment and immigration issues for foreign residents.
So what should you do during this time? Lots of people in the U.S. are going back to school, though I can’t fathom how they’re paying for it since everyone over there is supposed to be broke. If you’re staying in Japan for a while, do yourself a favor and brush up on your Japanese. It is essential if you ever want to get out of being confined to teaching English, proofreading and headhunting, all of which are generally dead-end careers. In fact, that’ll be the topic I take up next time when I begin addressing the “English Teacher Trap.”
Good luck!
http://www.proz.com/translator/786770
