How US Tariffs Changed My Job in Japan

In March 2026, my first project ended. In April, I — a thermal engineer with a fresh datacenter cooling project behind me — started learning traffic simulation.

Nobody at my company did anything wrong to cause this. Neither did I. The cause was decided in Washington and on the earnings slides of Japan’s largest automakers. This article is about the mechanism nobody explains to foreign engineers before they sign: at an engineering services company, your career direction can pivot because of your clients’ balance sheets.

The Year the Automotive Industry Sneezed

My company lives mainly in the automotive world — and the fiscal year that ended in March 2026 was a historically bad one for Japan’s car giants. These numbers are public, from their own earnings announcements:

Toyota: operating profit down 21.5%, to ¥3.76 trillion — dragged down by a ¥1.38 trillion hit from US tariffs, enough to erase its entire North America profit and leave that region at a $1.9 billion operating loss (Yahoo Finance, WardsAuto, Toyota’s official results).
Honda: swung from a ¥1.21 trillion operating profit to an operating loss of ¥414.3 billion — a net loss of ¥423.9 billion — after roughly ¥1.58 trillion of losses and write-offs from a drastically scaled-back EV strategy, including cancelled North American EV programs (Honda’s SEC 6-K filing, May 14, 2026).

When the giants bleed like that, they cut spending — and one of the first things cut is the flow of outsourced engineering projects. Everyone downstream feels it: suppliers, contractors, and engineering-services companies like mine, whose projects are those budgets.

There’s a second, quieter mechanism stacked on top: the Japanese fiscal calendar itself. Most Japanese companies close their books in March. Even a client who wants to start a new project can’t simply do it in April — new budgets take months to be fixed after the fiscal year closes. So spring is structurally the season when projects end faster than they begin.

My project ended in March. The new ones hadn’t been born yet. I was, briefly, an engineer without a project.

The Company’s Move: Park, Retrain, Wait

What does a company do with an engineer in that gap? Mine made a practical call — and I want to be clear, it was the company’s choice, not mine, and a reasonable one: move me temporarily toward an ongoing direction while waiting for new projects to materialize.

That direction was ADAS — advanced driver-assistance systems. So from April to June 2026, my job was training: Python, SUMO (Simulation of Urban MObility), and CarMaker.

Becoming the Traffic God

Here’s the part I didn’t expect: it was fun.

SUMO — Simulation of Urban MObility — is an open-source traffic simulator that lives up to its name, and learning it felt like being handed the keys to a city. You define the roads, the lanes, the signals, the flows of cars — you set the rules of an entire world and then watch it obey. After a year of heat exchangers, I got to spend a quarter feeling like a traffic god. I mean this sincerely: if you ever get parked on a training project, the ones where you control a tiny universe are the good ones.

CarMaker, the other tool, I barely touched in comparison — in our workflow its role was simply to visualize the traffic in 3D. SUMO did the real work; CarMaker made it look like a world instead of a diagram.

What This Taught Me About Engineering Careers in Japan

If I could send one message back to myself at the naitei stage, it would be this: when you join an engineering services company, you are not just joining a company — you are joining the fortunes of its clients’ industries. Tariffs in Washington became losses in Nagoya, became fewer projects in Kanagawa, became a thermal engineer studying traffic lights.

That’s not a horror story. I was never idle, never unpaid, and honestly never bored. But it is the mechanism, and you deserve to know it exists before you sign: read your future employer’s client industries the way you’d read the company itself.

Coming Next

In July 2026 I moved to a new group — and a new project. I’m deliberately not writing that story yet; I want to finish the project first and tell it whole. When it’s done, it will appear here, along with the post this whole series has been building toward: the honest verdict — shakaijin life versus PhD life.