Moon Unit is graduating high school this spring. She’ll be 18 and has studied Japanese throughout.
She’s trying to decide what she wants to do when she goes to college and is planning to take a gap year for a number of reasons.
We suggested she consider working as an au pair in Japan - and recently she’s really gotten interested in the concept.
I know we have a number of Dopers who live or have lived in Japan.
Is this a fantastic idea? a terrible one? Any other thoughts?
I can’t find any agencies that work like the ones that place au pairs here in the US, so I get the impression it’s not nearly as formal a thing there as it is here.
There is no formal au pair program in Japan. There are agencies (commercial enterprises) that will take your application and try to place you with a family in Japan for a fee, but you will have very little say in where they place you. In fact, there are more agencies in Japan that cater to Japanese who want to work as an au pair outside of Japan.
As I understand it, you will need to sign a contract for at least a year, have some sort of professional child care experience, and speak proficient Japanese. The host family will provide you room and board along with health insurance. You need to work up to 35 hours a week and the family will give you a weekly stipend of 10,000 yen. Vacation time can be negotiated directly with the family.
I know of some people who came to Japan on a working holiday visa and found a job as an au pair/nanny not because of their childcare experience, but because the family wanted a native speaker interacting with their child(ren). This might be another route to find an au pair job in Japan.
Whether becoming an au pair in Japan is a great or terrible idea is depends on what your daughter’s motivation is. If she wants to experience life in Japan with a Japanese family with guaranteed room and board, it might be a great experience. If she’s looking to travel around Japan and earn money for whatever her next endeavour might be, there are better options.
It’s been nearly a decade since I lived in Japan so my information about life in the country isn’t really up to date, but I don’t think I ever even heard of any Japanese family having an au pair or nanny. The Japanese tend to have small homes, and most women stop working when they have children. It is/was fairly common for them to go back to work part-time once the kids were in school, but I knew exactly one Japanese woman who had both children and a real career (she was a chemist).
To the best of my knowledge, it’s very difficult to get a Japanese work visa unless you have a college degree or special skills (e.g. you’re a professional entertainer or athlete). Saturn Dreams mentioned working holiday visas, but unfortunately this is not an option for American citizens.
It’s true that your average working family wouldn’t host an au pair not only because of the size of the home and language barrier, but also because they are loathe to having “strangers” take care of their children, unless it’s a professional service. Babysitting is virtually unheard of in Japan.
With that being said, there are families with the means to own a fairly decent size home who do take on au pairs, mostly to expose their children to different cultures and languages. I am not sure what the most common route to find an au pair in Japan is, but the two examples I personally know of had the families posting an ad in a region-wide newsletter publication that caters to foreigners, meaning they were hired when they were already in Japan with their own visa.
There are also patches of ex-pat communities who are here on 1-3 year work contracts. The companies put them up in nice large western homes and they sometimes hire Japanese au pairs to help them settle into daily life in Japan, as well as to help them learn the Japanese language.
I’m not an immigration expert, but getting a visa for au pair work may be difficult. The most common visa for westerners in Japan is for “Specialist in Humanities and International Relations”, and one of the requirements for the sponsor of such a visa is that they must show why the job requires a foreigner. It’s easy for language teachers, translators or interinational business, but may be harder for a housekeeping/child-care job unless it also includes teaching.
On review, I missed that your daughter just finished high school. The visa I mentioned requires a college degree. If you were from Canada, Aus, NZ or a few other countries, she could go on a working holiday visa (which has no job type restrictions), but unfortunately the US isn’t a participant.
She could do what a lot other young people do that are still trying to figure out their life…teach English. A quick google search appears to show a lot of sites seeking English teachers in Japan. Don’t know if they require a bachelors degree, as most of the people that I know that have gone overseas to teach English are already college graduates.
I don’t think she qualifies to get a visa without a college degree. She certainly doesn’t qualify for a visa to teach English.
Saturn Dreams hits it right on. Japanese just don’t have non-professionals babysit.
To give you an example, when our kids were 2 1/2 and six months, we took them to Taiwan and left them with the grandparents for a couple of months while the nuclear accident at Fukushima was playing out. During that time, as we didn’t have our kids, we offered to babysit for a couple of our friends to give them a couple’s night out. The reaction was immediate and “no thanks.”
That’s interesting, and meshes with what one sitesaid:
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Damn. That would seem to put a stop to the whole concept :(.
This is a kid who, per her teacher (who is Japanese) knows more about Japan’s current events and culture than the teacher does.
For teaching English: yeah, I’d assumed that a degree would be required. We actually know someone who did this, and “trying to figure out their life” might describe it (she was 22 or so). We knew her after that, when she worked for a small computer firm with my husband. She was later hired on by the client (a government agency), then went to medical school, and is currently practicing as a surgeon near here.
Doing a search for au pairs in Japan gets a lot of hits, including individual ads from families. Some are from outsiders living in Japan which would seem to be ideal (as in, English-speaking family but living in Japan), but the bottom line is that if it’s illegal - and inability to get a “working holiday” visa would suggest that it is - we’re not eager to risk it.
Never heard of it but I checked out the site. Basically it’s a match-making service for volunteer farmhands and organic farms looking for free help. Volunteers work for six hours a day and they get one day off per week. Host farms provide bed and board. The average stay is 1-3 weeks. You’ll still have to arrange your own visa though, although you can go on a tourist visa because it’s not “work”.
FTR I would say that’s a fairly tiny amount of spending money, at least, if you’re living in a place in Japan where there are things to do that cost money… (Especially if you’re going to be hanging out with people much.)