Writing a Rirekisho as a Foreigner — Why ChatGPT Wasn’t Enough
In the previous article, I shared how I decided to leave research and started job hunting in my second PhD year. Before any interview could happen, there was a quieter battle to win first: the documents.
The Language Baseline
By the time I started job hunting, I held JLPT N2, passed in July 2023. I had actually held N3 since December 2018 — before I ever came to Japan — but between the Master’s and PhD routines, the JLPT kept getting postponed.
Honest advice: take the JLPT earlier than your research schedule wants you to. Your lab will always give you a reason to postpone it, and job hunting will not wait for your certificate.
One nuance worth knowing: companies don’t really check the proof of your JLPT results — they’ll find out your real Japanese level the moment you sit in the interview anyway. But that’s exactly the point: having the JLPT written on your documents is what gets you to the interview. It’s the difference between advancing past document screening and failing silently at the very first step.
Starting in English
My rirekisho (Japanese resume) didn’t start in Japanese at all. I drafted everything in English first — my education, research, skills — because that’s where I could be precise about what I’d actually done.
For a PhD student, this step matters more than it sounds: you have to compress years of research into lines a non-specialist HR person can understand. Doing that in your strongest language first, then converting, beats fighting both the content and the Japanese at the same time.
The ChatGPT Pass — and Its Ceiling
Then I did what most of us would do: I used ChatGPT to turn it into Japanese and polish it.
The result was grammatically correct. And it was not enough. The Japanese it produced simply wasn’t natural from a Japanese perspective — the kind of writing that doesn’t contain a single error, yet still tells the reader “a foreigner wrote this with a machine.”
AI gets you 80% of the way. In Japanese job hunting, the last 20% is exactly where applications live or die.
The Human Fix
So I asked a junior from my research lab — a Japanese Master’s second-year student who was going through his own 就活 at the same time — to check and fix my documents by hand. That detail matters: he wasn’t just a native speaker. He was in the middle of the same game, so he knew exactly what recruiters were expecting to read that season.
The parts that needed him most were the 自己PR (self-promotion) and the 志望動機 (statement of motivation). These are the sections where foreign applicants get silently filtered: it isn’t about grammar, it’s about writing what a Japanese recruiter expects to feel when they read it. Sincerity and self-presentation, expressed in the culturally right shape. No AI of that era could produce it, and I couldn’t judge it myself.
If you have even one Japanese friend, classmate, or labmate willing to spend thirty minutes on your 自己PR and 志望動機 — ask. Especially if they’re job hunting too. It may be worth more than the rest of your preparation combined.
The Takeaway Checklist
- Take the JLPT as early as possible — nobody checks the certificate itself, but the line on your rirekisho is what carries you past document screening to the interview.
- Draft your content in your strongest language first, then convert.
- Use AI to polish, not to finish — it will not write natural 自己PR or 志望動機.
- Get a native check on everything, especially the 自己PR and 志望動機 — ideally from someone doing their own 就活.
Coming Next
Documents ready, N2 in hand, applications sent. What came back was rejection after rejection. In the next article, the hardest part of this story: ten rejections, and what they taught me about holding a PhD in the job market.