Getting ready

My old supervisor (a woman) used to wear sneakers with her otherwise normal business attire. Recently I've been wearing sneakers as well (wearing them right now actually) and nobody has said anything.

Definitely depends on the office though. Some CIRs have to wear suits every day.

yevi, standard dressy shoes should be fine.

I actually commute to work every day in sneakers/tennis shoes (I often walk to work -- takes about half an hour at a normal pace) and then change into my nice shoes when I get to the office. I keep my nice shoes on a little shelf under my desk; they live at my office. I have other pairs of nice shoes at home and occasionally swap the pairs, but usually they're just the nice black flats I own.

A lot of people here do the opposite -- they commute to the kencho in really fancy shoes and then change into casual/more comfortable shoes when they get to the office because they have no actual interaction with the KENMIN and never leave their office for other meetings or whatever.

My division, on the other hand, often hosts visitors from other government entities, the private sector, and overseas, so we need to look nice in the office -- meaning nice shoes. Occasionally I've gotten away with black, no-laces tennis shoes on days where I am 100% positive no one is visiting and I don't have a 出張. (Though sometimes I do wear the black, no-laces nice tennis shoes when I go on 出張 that involves a lot of standing or walking around and generally get a pass.) I think you could get away with black/black vans, especially if they have no laces, for less formal days. Just make sure a pair of nice shoes lives at your office and you'll be prepared for all occasions! Maybe wear the nice shoes for the first few weeks to cultivate that lovely first impression and see what your coworkers are wearing, then wordlessly throw in days where you have more casual shoes on.

Fellow CIR (the CIR who sits next to me at the office) is a guy and wears a suit (or a non-suit Cool Biz attire in Cool Biz season) and nice shoes every day. For most of my first year I did, too, but then I've slowly gotten more toward the "business casual" side during warmer months and I've almost never gotten comments. (I do wear blazers, suits, or nice sweaters all winter because it's cold and I want the extra layer.) I still make sure to wear a suit on Important Days regardless of how ridiculously hot it is, though. I think what women wear is more flexible, but it can be hard to know what's best because there's no prescribed formula of suit-and-tie.

tl;dr: For a job at the kencho, have at least two pairs of nice dress shoes; have one pair live at home and one at the office. (If you have the space, you might want to keep a blazer/suit jacket at the office, too.) Dress formally for the first few months and observe what your coworkers wear. Adjust accordingly. Ease slowly into the more casual attire -- if you can go more business casual, do it!!

Sparkles, むちゃRABU❤, Thank you!

Thanks for the advice Sparkles, むちゃRABU❤, and G-Rex! I'm also thinking over my shoe situation now while I still have access to stores with a wide selection of dress shoes in my size. I hadn't thought about keeping an additional pair at work & swapping 'em out that's a really good idea!

I'm fairly certain I'm shiyakusho but I'm still waiting on contact with job/housing details. My city is taking on JETs for the first time getting 8 ALTs and 1 CIR. We're all in a FB chat and they've all gotten their deets come on...

Like G-Rex, I used to suit and tie every day.

Today, I am in a check shirt with rolled up sleeves for cool biz, have grey chinos on and blue boat shoes.

Feels right.

I didn't really use it at all, but I feel like it was better than the Translation and Interpretation Course book.

I was in a similar position to be honest. I remember looking at the very first sentence of my welcome packet and thinking "shit, I can't even read this". When you are getting into the sort of legal/formal speak that is common in that type of paperwork it can be difficult if you're not familiar with some of the vocab.

I don't think I ever looked at that textbook to be honest. Though I had a business Japanese textbook from college that I was already familiar with and read over before coming here.

I definitely looked through the whole thing once and picked out parts that I wasn't as familiar with to practice a little bit -- mostly the phone and email etiquette sections. It can't hurt to look through it and study parts that you're not comfortable with. Since a CIR's work varies wildly depending on their placement, the textbook is much more general and may have situations that don't apply to you. But like snell said, I don't think it would hurt!

You'll get much more used to formal/business/contract Japanese once you're on the job, and it's okay to leave learning all of that until you're actually on the job. I'm willing to bet a good chunk of 英語圏 CIRs had never encountered (much of) Japanese like that before becoming a CIR. Still, it might be a good idea to take a bit of time and slowly work through the welcome packet if you have time. Be patient with yourself! You can do it!!

Thanks everyone for the advice! I'll definitely go through the textbook once and hold on to it just in case. I think going through all the papers and translating everything through instead of just reading it is helping a lot.

I feel like the most useful vocabulary list though would be those related to 公務員 stuff. Like ~書 and all that. I had no idea what any of it were and many a times, I'd just type away into my dictionary as my colleagues talk around me. You can think about that. But I think if you get a lot of translations or you voluntarily translate stuff, you can pick up the related terms a lot faster. In any case, there isn't really not much learning you can get done before getting here, really. I mean, Japan offices also differ in language use by region. See: Aomori hue

leave the toothbrush at home. bring toothpaste. toothpaste here has zero or very little fluoride (they do it on purpose to support the dental industry). 

Thanks for reviving this post, it's so WAKUWAKU to read through it and it served also as a process for me to realize that I'm really IN! (This is gonna go on for two more weeks I think)

In terms of the information I've gathered from hulemdos who are on jet right now (mostly ALT), bringing about 1k US=100 000yen is a reasonably amount. But if you have a VISA credit card, you can always draw more cash from local convenient stores or post offices, which is what I plan to do. Bringing large amounts of cash feels very insecure for me so...

Money
Ditto sven. You really don't have any idea of how much you'll need to pay, so better to aim high for 200,000-300,000 yen. It really depends on your situation (ESID: every situation is different) if you'll need to pay things like deposits and key money, or if your apartment is owned by your CO and you only have to pay rent (and if you're really lucky, not even that.) If you are inaka, you might very well need a car, which can have high start-up costs as well.

Personally I only brought about 50,000 in cash and took the rest out from ATMs for the first month as I needed it, but you might find it easier to just bring it all in cash. I would say you don't necessarily need that 300,000 in cash, but you do need to have it available in your bank account to withdraw at any moment.

Apartments
I did have to pay deposit and key money when I moved into my current place, but that's cause I didn't take over my pred's apartment. (And I was able to do that because I was already in Japan and able to talk with him and decide it sounded like shit, which I was right about. And he recommended me my current place, too. Probably will be less possible for most of you.)

Again, it depends, largely on who has the contract with the apartment (you or your CO) and if you have a pred (you very well might not, in which case you'll likely have to spend a lot on furniture unless you have a very nice CO). Also depends on if your pred is staying in the area or not - sometimes they stay put and keep their apartment. Honestly, I wouldn't even begin to think about this until you know your placement and can get in touch with your pred/soup.

Clothes
Again, depends to an extent on your placement. Most of the time I don't have to be very formal. A lot of my coworkers wear sneakers with their business casual clothes, for example. However, I live in a very rural place and so there's not really anything in the way of second-hand clothing stores (or first-hand clothing stores...) I wouldn't count on that being an option. Although you can get a decent work wardrobe for a decent price at stores like Uniqlo and Shimamura, which are pretty ubiquitous, if not particularly fashionable.

I think people at kenchos do have to be more formal as a rule. On the other hand if you're a BOE CIR who mostly does school visits, you can probably get away with pretty casual stuff on your school visits.

It is good to have at least one suit, for when you meet the mayor and if you have to interpret for any bigwigs. Dress code for conferences like Mid-Year Chaos tends to be fairly formal, so you need at least three day's worth for that (although you can certainly rewear your suit). Also, there's big differences in weather (and you have to bundle up in winter because there's no such thing as insulation here...) so be sure to have both summery and wintery formal options. But you can probably get away with bringing just one formal thing at first, and buy more here.

Omiyage
Agree with sven - you really don't need to do anything all that fancy.

1. CO is contracting organization

2. The Eternal Overlords can make it so that when you type certain words (or people's names) they're cheeky huleezued into other things. s.cary is one and also f.riend turns into hulemdo.


I will add for anyone who may be lurking and ends up needing a car, that lots of places will let you pay in installments. I'm in a fairly small-ish town and my kakaricho lives really close to the dealer where we got my car, and since I'm a city employee they just let me pay it in two big chunks very informally.

Actually, the car was pretty much the only thing I had to pay for in my first month. It was 150,000 yen in total and I payed about 70,000 up front. I had no up-front costs for my apartment because it's rented by the city, and it was well furnished with stuff I actually like (although I did eventually buy my own sofa). I also got a really cheap phone so I don't think I had to pay much for it until I got my first bill.