On-site tools

Why we built them

What usually stalls people living and working in Japan is not the language itself, but the decisions you cannot make until you have run the numbers: how much more you would actually take home after a job change, whether your current profile clears the highly-skilled professional threshold, whether a form wants half-width or full-width characters, how a given Japanese word is pronounced.

Answers to these are scattered and easy to get wrong by hand, so we turned the four most common ones into tools that run directly in the browser.

What each tool does

Income and tax estimator: enter your gross annual income and household situation to get income tax, resident tax, social insurance contributions and your actual take-home pay, broken down line by line — useful for comparing offers or planning a move. No sign-in required.

Highly-skilled professional (HSP) point calculator: scores your education, work history, income and bonus categories against the HSP point framework, showing your total and what is still missing to reach the 70-point threshold.

Half-width to full-width converter: handles the full-width requirement common in Japanese government and banking forms, and converts back to half-width as well — handy for cleaning up text before filling in paperwork.

Japanese text-to-speech: reads Japanese text aloud for checking pronunciation, listening practice or shadowing material (requires sign-in and is subject to a usage quota).

How to use them

Everything runs in the page itself — nothing to download or install. Tax estimates produce a shareable link so you can send the result to family or an adviser, and signing in lets you revisit your past calculations from the tool page.

Frequently asked questions