Megumi Koiwai on the soul-destroying grind of the Japanese graduate recruitment system. Plus designer Elizabeth Goodspeed curates a selection of weird and wonderful vintage US job ads (main image and below)

For young people searching for a job in Japan, the sole objective is to become the ideal corporate candidate through a traditional, gruelling, year-long hiring process. This process, reserved for university students entering their final year, is so formalised that it has its own name: shūkatsu, short for shūshoku katsudō (job-hunting activity). Soon-to-be-grads engage in shūkatsu, and Japanese companies practice Shinsotsu-ikkatsu-saiyō (simultaneous recruiting of new graduates). If you grow up here, your entire life – from kindergarten to high school – is aimed toward job placement at the end of university.

Living by Numbers
When I returned to Tokyo after a year of studying abroad in the United States, I knew I had to begin shūkatsu right away. Shūkatsu is a numbers game; the average shūkatsu-sei (job-hunting student) will submit 20 to 30 application forms, and will interview with ten companies. I did the bare minimum. Over four months, I attended 20 job-hunting forums, wrote 24 application forms, took ten aptitude tests, and interviewed at six companies.
I felt dread at every unnatural step of this long, exhausting process. It was like an endless loop of waking up for the first day of school after summer break. In Japan, shūkatsu convinces us that we live to work, that work is the very teleology, or purpose, of our being – and strangely, many of us believe this without question.

Top Rank
I was loosely aware of which companies were popular among my peers and which were on the rise. I used to look out for the ranking snippets that recruiting companies posted on Twitter, in tabloids, or in national newspapers. They used various categories to measure things that candidates might find appealing about a company: salary, average employee age, number of women in leadership, potential for fulfilment, employee “attractiveness”. I didn’t take these lists that seriously, but still felt a sense of pride when I told a friend I was interviewing with a highly ranked company. Getting accepted at one meant being exceptional.

Back to Black
I wore an all-black business suit to almost every interview and forum. The expected dress code is comprehensive; a polished and well-groomed look is non-negotiable. Recruiting companies publish guidelines: white shirts can’t be see-through and skirts cannot rise more than six centimetres above the knee. Students are encouraged to dye their hair black, as lighter colours suggest impertinence. Accessories are strongly discouraged, though watches are acceptable since they imply a concern for punctuality. Analogue watches are preferred over digital ones, as digital is considered too casual. I, and thousands of other students, did what it took to be considered potential candidates: We all went to the same stores that sold ready-to-wear shūkatsu suits, which had their own sections on the sales floor from April, the start of shūkatsu season.

Drones Club
Before attending any interviews, shūkatsu-sei are encouraged to join forums hosted by companies, universities, and recruitment agencies. And you can’t come just to listen; your participation is logged and documented. Some companies require participation as a prerequisite to even apply. At the larger forums, held in massive exhibition halls, I would wander the entire venue until my feet ached in stiff, fake-leather pointed shoes that weren’t yet broken in. I saw other students – both the defeated and the composed – sitting at the back of the hall to rest, sipping company-labelled water bottles and carrying a dozen tote bags stuffed with corporate merch.

Studying the Form
When you decide to apply to a company, you begin the screening process. It starts with an application form – like a resumé, cover letter, and LinkedIn profile in one – called an Entry Sheet, or ES for short. (The word is in wasei-eigo, or “Japanese-made English”. For decades, Japan has romanticised Western companies, and adopted the language of their practices.) An ES contains an applicant’s bio, photo, self-introduction, motivations, strengths and weaknesses, accomplishments in school, and answers to the few, specific questions each company adds to the template. Each ES is time-consuming to write. They are peer-reviewed among students, who prepare by visiting online archives of each company’s frequently asked questions. After I wrote mine, I asked my dad to review them – I thought he might have some insight into what employers wanted to hear. And of course he did. He did his shūkatsu 20 years ago, and nothing has changed since then.

Test Department
After submitting our Entry Sheets, companies typically use a Synthetic Personality Inventory (SPI) to efficiently screen many students at once. The SPI is a standardised aptitude and personality test, administered by a private recruiting company, to test language, math, personality traits, and situational judgement. It’s most common among the companies that receive over ten thousand applications per shūkatsu cohort. Many students buy test-prep manuals, but I never studied for it. I loathed the belittling idea of a company judging my intelligence and personality through a series of test questions.

Cut and Dried
Only after a company approves your ES and SPI do you get invited for an interview. The day after I came back to Japan from the United States, I’d cut and dyed my naturally curly, medium-brown hair to a darker, less impertinent shade. I’d started going to two or three of those job-hunting forums a week. In my ES forms, I highlighted my tenacity and team spirit through my ten years of playing tennis, often using phrases like “consistency is key” to signal that I wasn’t a quitter. I highlighted my upbringing as a hāfu (mixed-race Japanese person), framing it as proof that I was well-versed in both English and cultural adjustment. But I was often at a loss when coming up with reasons for why I wanted to work at a company. I wasn’t a designer, a copy-writer, or an engineer, and hadn’t yet demonstrated any knack for marketing; I didn’t yet have any particular skills. I was just a student applying for a sales position.

Life Assurance
Shūkatsu is designed to be a linear, straightforward process: do as they say and the reward is a stable, meaningful, and life-affirming corporate job. Companies have a specific idea of the kind of candidates they want, and it does seem that many Japanese job seekers find it helpful to have narrow guidelines for preparation and success. I was not one of them.

Getting a corporate job was the only option I knew existed, and I was told that I had to be exceptional to do it. To fail shūkatsu meant failing the rest of my life. Ultimately, I landed six interviews: some individual, others in a group, and a workshop-style one where they asked us to think of a new vending machine idea. I did what we all did: I told lies, I fake smiled, and I played the part. It was all simulated, but I cried real tears after every rejection email.

The above is an edited version of Megumi Koiwai’s entry in the anthology Search Work: A Collective Inquiry into the Job Hunt (OR Books) edited by Rachel Meade Smith.

Vintage US job adverts curated by Elizabeth Goodspeed

(This is an abridged version of an article from the August-September 2026 issue of the Idler (#111) – out now.)

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