Same Title, Two Levels Apart: Foreign vs Japanese Firms

Director equals bucho, Manager equals kacho. That is how résumés get translated in Tokyo, and most people assume the translation holds. Japan's National Personnel Authority defines a bucho as the head of a department with two or more sections or at least 20 people. Its kacho starts at ten. A Director with three reports at a foreign company's Japan office clears neither line. On paper a bucho, by headcount below a kacho: two levels apart. That is a worked example against the official headcount lines, not a statistic about how far titles drift on average.

What is a Japanese company's title based on?

Two things at once: the size of the unit, and the person's qualification grade.

Start with size. The National Personnel Authority surveys private-sector pay every year to benchmark civil servants, so it has to say what a bucho and a kacho are. In its 2026 survey, an administrative bucho (department head) is "the head of a department with two or more sections or 20 or more members." A kacho (section chief) is "the head of a section with two or more subsections or 10 or more members." The labor ministry's Basic Survey on Wage Structure uses the same thresholds in its instructions to respondents (I checked the 2019 edition), and adds that deputy department heads and deputy section chiefs do not count.

So in Japan's own statistics a kacho is first of all the head of about ten people, and a bucho runs twenty or more with sections underneath. An interviewer who grew up in a Japanese company pictures that scale when reading either word.

Then the grade. The Authority's definition has a second clause: specialists whose qualification grade is recognized as equivalent to a bucho or kacho are included. These are the people Japanese companies call tanto-bucho or tanto-kacho. They have no reports. Their grade reached that level, so they are paid at it. I explained where this track comes from in Manager and Specialist Tracks in Japan Need One Grade Scale.

A "bucho" on a Japanese résumé may therefore run more than twenty people, or may work alone. Title and grade are different things, and Japanese companies often print both on one business card. That is the subject of Grades Are Not Titles.

One more number. In 2023 the SANNO Institute of Management surveyed 809 kacho with at least one report at listed companies with 300 or more employees. Only 5.1% did no player work at all. Nearly every Japanese kacho manages people and carries an individual workload at the same time.

What is a foreign subsidiary's title based on?

The rung on a global ladder. How many people sit in the Tokyo office has little to do with it.

Most companies keep their ladders private. GitLab publishes its handbook, so it makes a usable example. There, a Manager leads a team with roughly four to ten direct reports and typically reports to a Senior Manager or Director. Directors are "typically managers of managers." Senior Director and VP come above. On a ladder like this, Director means there is a layer of managers underneath.

Bring that ladder into a Japan subsidiary and it can miss in two directions.

In the first, the title is bigger than the job. Imagine a subsidiary of twenty or thirty people where the head of sales is a Director with three reports and no managers in between. By GitLab's definition that is a Manager. By the Authority's definition it does not reach kacho. Why the bigger title? Probably customers. If the person across the table is a bucho, a card that says Manager makes the meeting harder. That is my guess. I have no data for it.

The second runs the other way. Picture a Senior Manager at a large foreign company's Japan arm who has a team of eight, owns a budget and reports straight to a Director overseas. A Japanese interviewer sees "Manager" and reads kacho, sometimes kakaricho, the rank below. Yet this person's authority may be no smaller than a Japanese kacho's.

Then there are Product Managers and Account Managers. Here Manager means owning a product or a set of accounts. There may be no reports at all.

A Director with three reports falls short of kacho on Japan's official yardstick

Minimum number of unit members in the official definition of each title (people); the alternative condition is two or more sections or subsections. National Personnel Authority, 2026 Survey of Private-Sector Pay by Job Type; MHLW, Basic Survey on Wage Structure instructions (2019 edition, headcount includes the head). The last row is a hypothetical

• Bucho, department head20+ members, or 2+ sections
  20
• Kacho, section chief10+ members, or 2+ subsections
  10
• Hypothetical: Director, foreign subsidiaryself plus 3 direct reports, no layer below
  4

Translated, a bucho. Measured by headcount, below a kacho.

How do employers convert a title?

They set the title aside and ask about people, money and reporting line.

People, two layers deep. How many direct reports, and does anyone report to them? Managing managers and managing individual contributors are different jobs.

Money: how large the budget is, and how much the person can approve alone. More people does not mean more money. A kacho with a dozen staff may have a small approval limit. The head of a small team at a foreign company may hold real discretion over budget and pricing.

Reporting line: is the boss the president of the Japan entity or a VP abroad, and how many layers is it to the global CEO? Two Directors can differ a lot here. One reports to the head of Asia Pacific. The other reports to a second Director inside the Japan office.

These questions size the seat. What grade the person has reached is a separate question, and the interviewer will go on to ask which parts of that scope were the candidate's own work and which came with the chair. I wrote about that step in "It was all me": finding what a candidate really did.

So nobody takes the title on a résumé at face value. Interviewers from Japanese companies discount a foreign-company Director. Interviewers from foreign companies put a question mark on a Japanese "bucho" and check whether it is a tanto title. How big the discount is depends on the answers.

What headcount cannot measure

The yardstick has a blind spot. It was built for large organizations. The Authority's survey covers establishments with 50 or more employees at companies with 100 or more. Holding it against a twenty-person subsidiary is already a stretch.

A Director on a small foreign team may be the one person who negotiates the Japan budget with headquarters. A bucho with twenty people may wait for approval from above on every decision. Count heads only and the first looks small and the second looks big.

I use headcount as a first pass and no more. It catches the two-level gaps. It tells you nothing about the small-team Director who may be the only person in Tokyo that headquarters listens to on budget. That only comes out when someone asks about money and who signs off.

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