Japanese for IT Engineers: Stand-ups, Reviews, and Specs

Engineering terms with their Japanese readings

Most of the field's vocabulary is katakana borrowed from English, which is good news for reading and bad news for listening. Server becomes sābā with two long vowels and no r sound, data becomes dēta, release becomes rirīsu, and merge becomes māji. If you say them with English sounds, colleagues may not catch them at meeting speed, and you may not recognise them coming back. Learn each one as a Japanese word with its own length and rhythm.

Beside every loanword there is usually a kanji word that appears in tickets, specifications and formal reports. Bagu is the chat word; fuguai is what goes in the ticket title. Tesuto is what you do; kenshō is what the report says you did. Older documents also drop the final long vowel from some loanwords, so you will meet sābā written as サーバ and yūzā written as ユーザ. They are the same words.

The daily stand-up in three parts

The morning meeting, often called asakai or the daily, follows the same three questions everywhere: what you did yesterday, what you will do today, and whether anything is blocking you. Prepare three sentences, not a story. Kinō wa for yesterday, kyō wa for today, and either burokkā wa toku ni arimasen or a specific place where you are stuck. Saying gambarimasu instead of a concrete status is the common mistake; the lead wants a task name and a state.

Progress words matter. Yotei dōri means on schedule, sukoshi okurete imasu means slightly behind, and kyō-jū ni owaru mikomi desu means you expect to finish today. If you are behind, say so in the stand-up rather than in a message the night before the deadline; a Japanese team forgives a delay it heard about early.

A lead may reply with a short follow-up such as itsu-goro owarisō desu ka, asking roughly when it will finish, or dare ka tetsudaimashō ka, offering help. Answer with a day and a task, and take the help if the blocker is outside your control.

Asking about a spec and confirming your understanding

Specification conversations in Japan run on the pattern to iu rikai de atte imasu ka, meaning is my understanding correct that. You restate what you think the spec says, in your own words, and let the other person confirm or correct. This is not a sign of weakness; the phrase ninshiki awase, aligning understanding, is something senior engineers ask for constantly. The mistake is saying wakarimashita early to end the discussion and then building the wrong thing.

Ask where a rule is written with shiyōsho no doko ni kaite arimasu ka. If it is not written anywhere, the answer will often be a shrug, and that is your cue to propose the behaviour yourself and ask for agreement, which also gets it written down.

Code review comments that are direct but polite

A good Japanese review comment names the problem plainly and softens only the instruction. Koko wa null ni naru kanōsei ga arimasu states the risk without hedging. The fix then arrives as a suggestion: shita hō ga ii kamo shiremasen, meaning it might be better to, or wakeraresō desu, meaning this looks like it could be split. Small style points are marked with komakai desu ga, minor but, and a bare shite kudasai from a junior reviewer reads as an order, so save it for a lead's tone or a clear bug.

As the author, thank the reviewer with go-shiteki arigatō gozaimasu and say what you will do. If the code is intentional, say so with itoteki ni and give the reason; a Japanese reviewer expects a reason, not a defence. The exchange below shows both sides of one pull request.

Approval usually arrives as LGTM desu or shōnin shimashita, and a merged pull request often gets a one-line māji shimashita in the thread. Reply with arigatō gozaimasu even when the review was rough; the thread is read by the whole team.

Reporting a bug and an incident

A bug report in Japanese has the same skeleton as anywhere else: what happened, how to reproduce it, what you expected, and what you got. The words are saigen tejun for reproduction steps, kitai suru dōsa for expected behaviour, and jissai no dōsa for actual behaviour. Say rōkaru de wa saigen shimasen when it only appears in one environment; that sentence saves a reviewer an hour.

An incident, shōgai, has a stricter order. The first report, daiippō, goes out fast and says only what is broken and who is affected. Cause comes later, after chōsa, investigation, and the closing report adds saihatsu bōshi, prevention of recurrence. Japanese teams judge you on the speed of the first message far more than on its completeness, so send it before you understand the cause.

Estimating and pushing back on a deadline softly

Estimates are given in days or in person-days, nin-nichi, and softened with hodo or kurai, meaning about. Mikka hodo desu is a normal answer; a bare number without a softener sounds like a promise, and promises are remembered. When the requested date is not realistic, the standard word is kibishii, tight, followed immediately by an alternative. The alternative is what makes the pushback acceptable: a later date, a smaller scope, or a question about priorities that lets the lead choose.

If you need time to think, ichido mochikaette kakunin shimasu, let me take it away and check, is a respected sentence. It signals that you take the estimate seriously rather than guessing on the spot, and it buys you a day.

A lead may answer with jā, getsuyōbi de onegai shimasu, accepting Monday, or with nantoka narimasen ka, asking whether anything can be done. To the second, repeat the scope trade rather than caving: kono kinō o hazuseba, kin'yōbi ni dekimasu, if we drop this feature, Friday is possible.

Reading a Japanese ticket

Tickets are where the kanji vocabulary lives. The field labels repeat across every tracker, so learning twenty of them turns an unreadable wall into a form you can scan. Status values are the ones you will say aloud in the stand-up, so read them with their pronunciation, not only their meaning.

A ticket written by a Japanese colleague often ends with yoroshiku onegai shimasu even when it is only a bug report, and your comment can end the same way. When you close a ticket, a one-line taiō shimashita, handled, with a link to the pull request is the expected sign-off.

Chat-tool etiquette

Team chat in Japan is more formal than most engineers expect. A direct message usually opens with otsukaresama desu, the all-purpose workplace greeting, and a request to a busy person adds o-tesuki no toki ni, when you have a moment. Mark urgency honestly: isogi de wa arimasen tells the reader they can leave it until after lunch, and shikyū means drop everything, so use it rarely. An emoji reaction counts as an acknowledgement on most teams, but a request from someone senior deserves a typed shōchi shimashita.

Presence messages are normal in Japanese chat culture. Riseki shimasu when you step away, modorimashita when you return, and honjitsu wa agarimasu when you sign off for the day. They look fussy at first and become automatic within a week.

A weekly routine for engineering Japanese

• Say your stand-up aloud before the meeting, every day, using the real ticket names; three sentences take under a minute.
• Write one review comment in Japanese per day, even on a colleague's pull request you would otherwise approve silently, and use one softening form each time.
• Read one closed ticket end to end each week and speak its status history: michakushu, taiō-chū, rebyū-machi, kanryō.
• Rehearse an incident first report for a system you own, so the words come out in order when the real alert fires.
• Practise one deadline conversation a week in which you offer a scope trade instead of a yes.
• Keep a list of loanwords you mispronounced in meetings and drill their long vowels aloud.