Japanese is a difficult language. According to the Foreign Service Institute, it takes 88 weeks to learn, or 2200 hours. In other words 25 hours of study a week for close to 18 months. But assuming you've mastered Japanese, you're going to want to make use of your new skill. One way of doing this is to get a job with Amazon. Here is a job that they recently advertised:
Japanese-Fluent Work From Home Customer Service Associate-USA
As far as the job description is concerned:
"This is our work from home Customer Service Associate position that offers support to SDS Drivers. We are offering Full Time hours only. The ideal work from home Amazonian is internet savvy and has technical aptitude when it comes to online tools and research. You will think outside the box, solve problems, answer questions, and resolve concerns presented by our Amazon customers. Our customers contact us primarily by phone & chat and we hope you can help us deliver customer obsessed results!"
You also have to be fluent in Japanese and English.
So, are you up to the job? You speak one of the world's most difficult languages, you're a problem solver, and you've got technical and internet skills.
There is then the small matter of money. Amazon write that "Except as otherwise required by law, this role pays $10.00 per hour".
Right. So they'll pay you $10 an hour unless you live in a state where the legal minimum wage is above this amount.
Yet we also discover that "In order to be considered for this position candidates MUST... live in one of the following states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming".
And how many of these states have a minimum wage of $10 or more? None. So too bad if you're a Japanese speaker in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont or Washington.
The question then is... who is prepared to work for peanuts? If you're intelligent, and fluent in Japanese and English, you could be earning double, triple, even times what Amazon are offering. In fact, who could afford to work full-term for such little money, especially if they don't have to? OK, you might want to do it for a couple of hours a day, as a hobby, but you'd need to make your real money from something else. Maybe the job is suited to rich Amazon shareholders, who speak fluent English and Japanese, who don't mind working for virtually nothing. It's a way of saying thank you to Jeff Bezos, the glorious leader of their glorious company.