Australian, British, Canadian, French, New Zealand and South Korean citizens aged between 18 and 30 can apply for a working holiday visa . All other foreigners working in Japan, must apply for a work visa outside the country, for which the proper sponsorship papers from your prospective employer will be necessary. A few employers may be willing to hire you in Japan before the proper papers are sorted, but you shouldn't rely on this, and if you arrive in the country without a job make sure you have plenty of funds to live on until you find one. Working visas do not need to be obtained in your home country, so if you do get offered a job in Japan, it's possible to sort out the paperwork in South Korea, for example.

Apart from some specific Web sites , the main places to look for job adverts are Monday's edition of the Japan Times , the free weekly magazines Tokyo Classified and Tokyo Notice Board and, in the Kansai area, Kansai Time Out . You'll quickly see that the most common job available to foreigners is teaching English . The big employers are the national school chains, such as Berlitz, Shane, GEOS, ECC and NOVA. Some have recruiting drives abroad (look in your local media under "teaching opportunities" or "overseas work"), so you can try and arrange a job before arriving. However, some of the conversation schools are far from professional operations (and even the biggies get lots of complaints), so before signing any contract it's a good idea to attend a class and find out what will be expected of you. If you have a professional teaching qualification, plus experience, your chances of getting one of the better jobs will be higher, as will they if you also speak another language such as French or Italian. Susan Griffith's book Vacation Work's Teaching English Abroad is recommended as a good source of general information.

A much more limited job option for gaijin is rewriting or editing translations of Japanese for technical documents, manuals, magazines and so on, so that they make grammatical sense and read well in English. For such jobs, it will be a great help if you have at least a little Japanese. Other options include modelling, for which it will be an asset to have a professional portfolio of photographs, and bar work and hostessing, although the dangers of this type of work have been exposed by the Lucie Blackman case. Whatever work you're looking for - or if you're doing any sort of business in Japan - a smart set of clothes will give you an advantage, as will following other general rules of social etiquette .

The Web site www.skijapanguide.com contains information for those looking for a job on the ski slopes. For those with business in mind, the Kaisha Society, c/o OneWorld, 3-3-2 Higashi Azabu, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106, a support and discussion organization for foreigners working in Japan, is worth contacting. It has a monthly newsletter, publishes an annual employment survey report and hosts regular meetings and events in Tokyo and other major cities.