Construction Work in Japan: How to Actually Get In

Chapter 04

Which Category You’d Apply Under

Three categories, not thirty trades

The construction field is divided into three categories, and you apply under one of them:

1. Civil Engineering — roads, ground, water, outdoor infrastructure
2. Architecture — buildings
3. Infrastructure Facilities and Equipment — the systems that make a building work

Your trade sits inside one of these. The category is what appears on your status; the trade is what you actually do all day.

What’s inside each one

These are the work types JAC lists under each category. (JAC, checked September 28, 2026)

Read those columns again and you’ll notice something.

Several trades appear twice

Carpentry is in two categories. So are scaffolding, reinforcement, steel structure work, painting, waterproofing, masonry, sheet metal, thermal insulation, and pipe work.

That isn’t a mistake in the list. A carpenter on a bridge and a carpenter in an apartment building are doing recognisably different jobs with the same tools.

The rule that decides it

This is the sentence worth memorising, because it answers most of the questions people have here:

“The work classification for the status of residence is based on the nature of the work, not on the type of work site. If the work is included in the construction business that is approved for the status of residence, you can work regardless of the type of work site.” (JAC, checked September 28, 2026)

So the category follows what you’re doing, not where you’re standing. Once your work is covered by the approved category, the kind of site doesn’t restrict you.

Practically, that means you don’t need to worry that taking a job on a housing project has locked you out of infrastructure work forever. What you should actually check, carefully, is that the category you apply under matches the work you intend to spend years doing — because that’s the work your career, and later your No.2 application, will be built on.

Where this bites: the exam

The skills exam from chapter 3 is taken per category. Choosing a category isn’t only a paperwork decision — it decides which exam you sit.

So the order is: work out which category your trade belongs to, confirm it against the list above, and then look for the exam in that category. Doing it the other way around is how people end up studying for the wrong test.

A note if you’re a steel fixer

Reinforcement work — tying the rebar cages before concrete is poured — appears under both Civil Engineering and Architecture.

I mentioned in the opening that rebar crews are where I personally saw the biggest change on my sites. If that’s your trade, the practical consequence is that you have two doors rather than one, and the choice should follow the kind of structure you want to build: bridges and ground works, or buildings.

Chapter 05

What the Company Has to Do (and Why You Should Care)

The chapter I’d read first

Everything so far has been about what you have to do. This chapter is about what the company has to do, and I’ve put it here on purpose.

Most guides treat this as back-office detail for employers. I think it’s the most useful thing on the page for an applicant, because it hands you something you otherwise wouldn’t have: a way to check, before you commit, whether a company is set up properly.

What a construction employer must have in place

Before a company in construction can take you on as a Specified Skilled Worker, it has to:

1. Hold a construction business licence.
2. Belong to JAC — the industry body, joined directly or through an association. Membership is required before it can even apply.
3. Register you in the Construction Career Up System (CCUS) — the national card that records who you are, what you’re qualified in, and every day you’ve worked.
4. **Get an acceptance plan approved by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism.** This is specific to construction; most industries don’t have this extra step.
5. Pay you at least the same as a Japanese worker with equivalent skills.
6. Put you through the required training within six months of taking you on.

(JAC and the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, checked September 28, 2026)

Why this is your checklist, not theirs

Every item on that list is something a company either has or doesn’t. That makes it answerable.

You can ask, in an interview or through an agent:

• Are you a JAC member?
• Has your acceptance plan been approved?
• Will I be registered in CCUS, and when?
• What is the required training after I arrive, and who gives it?

A company doing this properly will answer these in a minute, because it has the paperwork sitting there. Hesitation on these questions is information.

And on wages, note the wording carefully: not “a fair wage,” not “the legal minimum,” but equal to a Japanese worker with equivalent skills. That’s a comparison you’re entitled to have made.

On CCUS, one extra reason to care

The card isn’t only administration. It accumulates a record of the days you’ve worked and the skills you hold, and that record is what your later career — your No.2 application, your move up the levels — is built on. I wrote about the card system and its levels in the shokunin article.

If a company is slow to register you, you’re not just missing paperwork. You’re working days that don’t count.

Someone independent is checking

Construction has a monitoring body called FITS (the Foundation for International Transfer of Skills and Knowledge in Construction). It makes patrol visits to accepting companies and runs the post-arrival training.

More importantly for you: it runs an advice hotline in your own language — Chinese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Filipino, English, Khmer, and Burmese — by phone, fax, or email. (FITS, checked September 28, 2026)

Write that down before you need it, not after. The moment you need a hotline is rarely the moment you feel able to go looking for one.

What the checklist can’t tell you

Now the honest limit of all this.

Everything above is a floor. It tells you a company is legitimate. It doesn’t tell you whether the company is any good to work for, and those aren’t the same question.

Here’s what that looked like on my own sites. The new-entry safety briefing — the session every worker sits through before their first day — we had rewritten into English, Vietnamese, and Tagalog, because that was who was coming through the gate. Nobody made us produce a Tagalog version. We did it because the alternative was people nodding at a safety briefing they hadn’t understood.

That’s the kind of thing you can’t find in a certification. But you can ask about it. “What language will my safety induction be in?” is a small question that tells you a great deal about how much thought a company has given to people like you.

Chapter 06

What the Work Is Actually Like

The shape of the day

If you get through all of the above, here’s what you’re actually signing up for.

A typical day on the sites I’ve run looks roughly like this: people arrive from about 7:00, the chōrei — the morning meeting — starts at 8:00, the craftspeople take a break at 10:00 and again at 15:00, the foremen meet around 11:30, lunch is at 12:00, and work finishes at 17:00.

Those two breaks have a name, ippuku, and they’re not optional extras that get skipped when things are busy. I’ve written the whole day out in detail in A Day on a Japanese Construction Site.

The parts that surprise people

Three things tend to catch newcomers, and none of them are about the physical work.

The morning meeting is a real event. Everyone on site, every day, standing in the same place at the same time.

KY comes before you touch anything. Kiken yochi — hazard prediction — is a short discussion of what could go wrong today, held in circles by company, so the group you stand in is your own crew. It isn’t paperwork you sign. Someone expects you to speak.

The instructions are written down. The work request sheet for the day exists before the day starts, and it exists because the alternative is people improvising near heavy machinery.

If any of that sounds unfamiliar, the safety rules article goes through the reasoning behind each one.

What you’ll wear and carry

You’ll be issued or expected to buy work clothing that looks different from what you may be used to, and a tool belt you’ll wear with your harness all day — the two go together here, and neither is optional while you’re working.

• Japanese construction workwear
• The Japanese tool belt

How we actually communicated

Back to the language problem from chapter 3, because I don’t want to leave it as a warning with no answer.

Two things worked on my sites.

A translation app, for direct instructions. Not elegant, and not something I’d rely on for anything safety-critical, but for “move this here, we’re pouring at two” it did the job. There’s no prize for struggling through in broken Japanese when a phone is right there.

Drawings and sketches, for everything else. This one is better than it sounds. I’d draw the detail — on the drawing itself, on a scrap of paper, whatever was to hand — and the conversation would simply move on. A sketch of a connection detail means the same thing in every language, and construction is one of the few industries where the shared professional vocabulary is genuinely visual.

If you take one practical habit from this article: learn to sketch what you mean. It’s faster to acquire than fluency and it works on your first day.

It isn’t the low-tech industry you might expect

One more thing worth saying, because the image of Japanese construction abroad tends to be either ancient carpentry or robots, with nothing in between.

Drawings on the sites I’ve worked on are increasingly produced in 3D, surveying is done by drone, and machine control is normal on earthworks. If you want to see what that actually looks like day to day:

• BIM and production design
• Drones on Japanese sites
• ICT construction

None of that replaces the trades. It changes what the trades are handed in the morning.

The honest summary of this chapter

The work is structured, the days are long but bounded, the safety culture is strict, and the language will be the hardest part — not the job.

That last sentence is the one I’d want you to carry into the next chapter, because it’s also what decides whether you’re still here in six years.

Chapter 07

Going Beyond Five Years

What No.2 actually asks for

Two things, and only one of them is a test.

The exam. The No.2 evaluation exam is longer and stricter than the one you took to get in: 40 written questions in 60 minutes, 25 practical questions in 40 minutes, and you need 75% rather than 65%.

The experience. You need a period of practical experience — JAC gives it as six months to three years, as specified by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism — working as a team leader or foreman. (JAC, checked September 28, 2026)

JAC also refers to the national Level 1 trade skills test in connection with No.2. If you already hold that qualification, it’s worth asking the ministry or JAC directly how it applies to you rather than assuming either way.

The requirement you can’t study for

Notice the asymmetry. You can prepare for the exam in the evenings. You cannot prepare for the second requirement at all — someone has to give you the role.

That reframes the whole five years, and it’s why chapter 5 mattered. The question to ask an employer isn’t only “is your paperwork in order?” It’s:

Do people in my position here ever end up leading a crew?

If the honest answer is no, that company is a five-year job, however good it is in other respects. You’d want to know that in year one, not in year four.

If you don’t pass the first time

There’s a provision here that isn’t widely known, and it’s new enough that older guides won’t mention it.

If you sit the No.2 exam and fail, but you scored 80% or more of the passing standard, and there’s a reason recognised as sufficient for staying beyond five years, your period of stay can be extended to a total of six years. It applies to exams taken on or after December 1, 2025. (JAC, checked September 28, 2026)

That’s a near miss turned into another year to try again, rather than a flight home. Worth knowing before you sit the exam, not after — and worth checking the current conditions with the Immigration Services Agency when the time comes, because provisions like this do change.

What separated the people who stayed

I’ve watched a fair number of foreign workers come through my sites. Some went home after their time was up. Some are still here.

The difference, honestly, was not skill. The people who stayed had a different level of Japanese comprehension than the people who didn’t. Not perfect Japanese — but they understood what was being said around them, including the half of it that wasn’t addressed to them.

For a long time I filed that away as an interesting observation. Writing this chapter, I realise it’s not an observation at all. It’s the requirement, showing up in real life.

Because think about what being a shokuchō involves. You take the day’s instructions and turn them into work for your crew. You run the KY discussion. You’re the person who says “stop” when something’s wrong, and you have to say it fast enough to matter. None of that is possible in a language you only half follow.

So the two requirements for No.2 aren’t really separate. The experience requirement is a language requirement wearing work clothes.

What that means for your first year

If you want the long version of this career, the useful thing to do in year one isn’t to work harder than everyone else. It’s to:

• Study Japanese continuously, not until you pass N4 and then stop
• Say things in meetings, badly, early, while the stakes are low
• Tell your employer you want to lead a crew eventually — so that when the chance comes up, your name is already attached to it in someone’s head
• Keep your CCUS record current, because that’s the evidence your experience actually happened

None of that is dramatic. It’s just aimed at the right target, which is more than most people manage in five years.