My First Day Working in Japan — Wrong Station, Right Ceremony

The job hunting series ended with a naitei and a shiny new visa. This is Part 2 — what actually happens after the offer, told from the very first day. And in my case, the very first day started at the wrong station.

Leaving Tsukuba First

Before day one, there was a move. I graduated on March 25th, 2025, and lived in Tsukuba until the very end of that month — closing out five years of student life in the same quiet science city. My new workplace would be mostly in Yamato City, Kanagawa, near Chūō-Rinkan station, so I moved to Kawasaki, putting the commute within reach.

New city, new commute, new life — all switched on within a single week. Japan’s calendar is merciless like that: graduation in late March, first day of work on April 1st. There is no gap to breathe; the system simply hands you from one life to the next.

April 1st, 2025 — The Wrong Station

My first assignment as a working adult in Japan: get myself to the 入社式 (nyūsha-shiki, entrance ceremony), held near Nihonbashi in central Tokyo.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about spending five years in Tsukuba: you can live in Japan for half a decade and still be a complete beginner at Tokyo trains. Tsukuba runs on a single line — the Tsukuba Express — plus buses and bicycles, and my own commute was almost always the bicycle or the bus. In my final PhD year I even bought a second-hand car, for getting around the city and escaping it on holidays. Trains simply weren’t part of my daily life. Tokyo, meanwhile, runs on a spiderweb.

So, on the single most important morning of my new career, I confidently got off at Shinbashi.

Shinbashi. Nihonbashi. To a nervous new employee reading station signs in a packed morning train, apparently close enough. I stepped out, realized nothing around me matched where I was supposed to be, swallowed the panic, got back on the train, and rode on to the actual Nihonbashi.

I made it — a little flustered, but there. Not the elegant start I had imagined for my career, and exactly the kind of first-day story that gets funnier every year it ages.

The Ceremony and the 辞令

The entrance ceremony itself is a genuinely Japanese ritual. Each of us received our 辞令 (jirei) — the formal letter of appointment that officially makes you a member of the company. A room full of new graduates in identical dark suits, a piece of paper with your name on it, and just like that: after all those years of physics, I was an employee.

Training: Two Weeks Together, Then Off to the Division

What followed was the classic Japanese new-grad onboarding, in two stages:

1. 合同研修 (joint training) — roughly the first two weeks, all new hires together, held around Kayabachō in Tokyo.
2. Division training — after that, we split by division. Mine trained in Yamato City, with occasional trips back to Kayabachō for more joint sessions.

Weeks of structured lessons, delivered gently, with no expectation that you already know anything.

Lab Life vs. Company Life — the Rhythm Change

Compared to research, the biggest difference wasn’t the content. It was the rhythm.

Training days started at 9:00 and finished at exactly 18:00. No overtime, no experiment refusing to cooperate at 9 PM, no publication clock ticking in the background. Every day we received real input — new knowledge, new tools, new context — and it was pitched so that it could actually be absorbed. Coming from a PhD that ran on four to six hours of sleep, a working day that ends when the schedule says it ends was a quietly radical experience.

One small ritual from that period stuck with me: the 日報 (nippō, daily report). At the end of each training day we got about ten minutes to summarize what we had learned that day — entirely in Japanese — and then five minutes of presentation, delivered by one person chosen at random.

I won’t pretend those ten minutes were easy. Compressing a full day of new material into a written Japanese summary, against the clock, was genuinely difficult at first — it took me some days to adapt to the task of summarizing what I’d learned each day. But that’s exactly what the ritual is for: writing it while knowing you might be the one standing up to present is how they made sure everyone actually digested the day.

The other challenge: the company works mainly in the automotive industry, and I was a physicist who had spent years on optics and thermal measurement, not engines. The comforting part was that I wasn’t alone — many of my fellow trainees weren’t from automotive backgrounds either, and we all struggled through the fundamental concepts together. And to be fair to the training itself: the materials were more than enough to understand everything. My extra cost was simply that they were written in Japanese, so each page took me a little more time than it took my Japanese colleagues.

Coming Next

Training ends, and then comes the question every PhD-holder in industry gets asked — including by themselves: does any of the doctorate actually transfer? In the next article: my first real project, a tool I had never touched, and the honest answer.