How I Became a Software Engineer in Japan With Zero Tech Background

I worked as a software engineer at one of Japan’s biggest tech companies for about three years. Looking back, it’s still a little surreal, because it was an extremely unexpected career turn for me. I’m writing this up in case it’s useful for anyone else trying to break into tech from a non-technical background, especially if you’re doing it in Japan, where the work culture doesn’t always seem built for that kind of pivot.

This covers the same stretch of my career as my longer 11 Years in Japan retrospective, but goes a lot deeper into the actual mechanics of the tech transition. If you want the fuller story of everything before and after this, that post has it.

Where I Started

I don’t have any background in tech, coding, or anything close to it. My academic background is in Japanese and education: I studied Japanese as a second language in college in the US, along with education, hoping to become either an English teacher in Japan or a Japanese teacher back home. Neither of those things happened.

Instead, I came to Japan exactly 10 years ago through the JET Program, usually known for placing people in schools to teach English, but I went a different route and became a CIR (Coordinator for International Relations) instead, doing translation and interpretation work rather than teaching. I did that for three years until my contract wrapped up, then started job hunting.

Purely by chance, I interviewed with Mercari, which at the time was a young, fast-growing company (it’s a much more established name in Japan now, but back then it was still very much in its scrappy growth phase). Good timing on my part. I joined as a translator and interpreter on their language team.

The Language Gap That Pushed Me Toward Code

Mercari was a young tech startup, and my job put me in constant meetings with software engineers and product teams, interpreting between Japanese engineers who didn’t speak much English and engineers from abroad who didn’t speak much Japanese. There was a real language gap to bridge, and I had zero technical background to help me bridge it.

Honestly, it was brutal at first. I had no idea what anyone was talking about half the time, and I mean that literally. I couldn’t translate concepts I didn’t understand. So I made a decision: I needed to actually learn about tech. Not necessarily to become an engineer, just to become a competent translator. I started spending my free time studying technical concepts — not just how to code, but how product development actually works.

Somewhere in that process, watching engineers build really cool products and ship them to the world, I got curious about something bigger: what if I became an engineer at this company? What if I got good enough at coding to actually ask my boss for a transfer to the engineering team?

It turned out I wasn’t the only one who’d thought about this. There were a few other people at the company who’d come from non-technical, business-facing roles and found their own way into engineering by picking up the skills on their own. Seeing that it was possible for them made it feel possible for me too.

Starting With Code in Place (Stanford)

I started taking it seriously. First step: I signed up for Code in Place, a free online coding class offered by Stanford during the first year of the pandemic. It ran about a month and a half and taught the fundamentals of programming.

This ended up mattering more than I expected, not just for the skills, but because it’s where I learned I actually liked coding. Something about using logic to solve problems and writing code just clicked for me. That was the moment I started thinking engineering might be a real career option, not just a curiosity.

Going Deeper: Le Wagon

From there, I signed up for a coding bootcamp called Le Wagon, a much deeper, six-month, part-time program. I kept working my full-time job the entire time and did bootcamp coursework on weeknights and weekends. It was intense: roughly 20 hours a week of studying on top of a full-time job. Not easy by any stretch, but I came out of it having learned far more than I expected going in.

Making the Internal Transfer

By the time I finished the bootcamp, I was ready to actually start the transfer process at my company. I had a real advantage here: I’d already been at the company for a couple of years, had built up genuine friendships and professional connections across different teams, and people who knew and trusted me. After talking to a number of people, including my managers at the time, we agreed I could transfer to engineering, provided I passed the same interview process any external candidate would.

They weren’t going to hand me the role. I had to prove I could actually code and think like an engineer. The hardest part by far was the first technical interview: algorithm-based, LeetCode-style. I spent several months grinding LeetCode problems, which was actually painful, but I eventually got the hang of it and passed. The interviews after that focused more on mindset, culture fit, and talking through projects I’d built. The whole transfer process took two to three months from start to finish — not fast, but it worked. I got my first engineering role and spent almost three years working as a backend engineer on the company’s app.

The Bigger Lesson

The whole experience still feels a little unreal to me. I was never a “technical” person growing up. I was bad at math and science in school and always assumed I’d end up in some career that didn’t involve much logical problem-solving. A few years into my career, I ended up a software engineer, which is about the last thing I would have predicted for myself.

What I took away from it is that your career can go in directions you’d never expect, and if you want to change direction, you probably can. There’s nothing stopping you from learning a new skill from scratch and using it to land a different kind of job.

There are a lot of paths into engineering, but if I simplify what worked for me, it looks something like this:

1. Join a company in a non-technical role, doing something you already know how to do.
2. Build real relationships across teams while you’re there: trust matters more than people expect.
3. Use your free time to learn the skills the new role actually requires.
4. Leverage the trust and connections you’ve built to make the internal switch once you’re ready.

This is surprisingly doable even in a country like Japan, where the work culture leans more rigid and less flexible than people might assume. It just takes some commitment and a willingness to put in the work outside your normal hours. I’m not the smartest person around, and I can be plenty lazy on a given day, but I managed to redirect my career, and I think most people could do the same if they wanted to.

That’s my story. Hope it was useful, or at least interesting. If you’ve got questions about working in tech in Japan, or working in Japan in general, drop a message and I’m happy to answer what I can.