Work Exchange in Japan
Clean a few beds, and get a few beds
My day is relaxed. I wake up at 11 am and collect a list of beds to clean. There are twenty beds, a busy day. I negotiate with the other volunteers from Japan, Denmark, and Canada. I offer to clean all the showers if they clean all the beds. They jump at the idea of not having to clean bathrooms.
I put on my headphones and listen to an audiobook as I wipe the shower from the floor to the ceiling. Two hours later, the guesthouse is clean and our boss gives us candy. It’s 1 pm and we are free to explore Okinawa, enjoying two days off a week.
We get no salary, but we get a place to stay, taken out for meals and provided some simple food to cook ourselves. In other work exchanges, we’ve been provided with a car, surfboards, wet suits, snowboards, ski passes, and three cooked meals a day.
This is what my life looked like for a year, enjoying Japan’s Working Holiday Visa.
Finding a Work Exchange
While you can ask directly at hotels and guesthouses to work in exchange for accommodation, there are plenty of good websites to find more interesting work. In Japan, I found that HelpX, Workaway and Worldpackers had a plethora of work.
These services all require a small fee for a subscription, cheaper than one night in a hotel for a year’s membership. I recommend finding a few you like the look of and checking to see that the posters have replied to any messages in previous days. Many work exchanges replied within the hour, while many others took months.
While the work options are plentiful, I think it’s best to find opportunities with a theme making them more interesting than a simple guesthouse. While you could work somewhere in Tokyo I decided to look for seasonal work, taking advantage of Japan’s diverse weather.
Where I worked
In the cooler months, I went to Okinawa and worked in a capsule hotel.
In the warmer months, I worked in Miyazaki on one of the world’s most famous surfing beaches in exchange for a bed, a surfboard and a wetsuit.
In the winter, I went to Nagano and worked in exchange for a private room, ski pass, skis, snowboards, a car and three meals a day. This was an amazing deal, and the work accounted for this by being more difficult.
The host is everything in these situations. A good rule I found was that if the person running the work exchange seemed excited to meet people, you would be well rewarded. The hosts would happily share their culture with you, and bring you along to local festivals. If you get the sense that the host is trying to save money, this is normally reflected in the work conditions, accommodation and beyond.
Getting a Visa
Work is work, meaning the above would not be legal if you are on a tourist visa. Some hosts don’t care about that but most do. It’s tricky to get a visa in Japan. A recently added Digital Nomad Visa paves the way to a more accessible Japan.
As I mentioned at the top of this article, I came in on a Working Holiday Visa as part of a scheme that Japan started in 1980. If you are from one of the following countries and are under the age of 30 you have the right to live and work in Japan for at least one year.
Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Republic of Korea, France, Germany, The United Kingdom, Ireland, Denmark, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Norway, Portugal, Poland, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Spain, Argentina, Chile, Iceland, Czech, Lithuania, Sweden, Estonia, Netherlands, Uruguay, Finland, Latvia
If that’s you, I highly recommend it. The friends I made in these exchanges continue to host us and visit us in England as friends years later.
