Hello, Yoshimasa here.
The world is still in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Japan still has not gotten it under grips. The yearlong battle with the coronavirus has led to enormous changes in Japan’s way of doing business.
Some of the biggest are:
- A shift away from businesses built on in-person sales
- A shift to business formats with fewer fixed assets, like offices
- Increased speed of decision making within organizations
The pandemic has put restrictions on all kinds of in-person contact, including sales and customer service, so companies shifted to video conferencing for customer contact in order to achieve even the slightest sales stability. However, the shift has not been particularly successful at increasing sales, so more and more companies turned to enhanced web marketing for more efficient non-personal business.
Specifically, they began trying to increase the quality, or accuracy, of corporate website inquiries to make it easier for orders to reach salespeople. Many companies think that more attractive sites could lead to more customer interaction, resulting in more customer inquiries with a higher probability of orders. This means that more and more major corporations have decided to rebuild or revise their websites.
The upshot of all this is that PHP, which was previously Japan’s second most in-demand programming language, has now taken first place.
| Language | Oct 2020 | April 2021 | Volume compared to 2018 (%) | Change in Number | Change in Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PHP | 32173 | 4307 | 134% | 10897 | ↑ |
| Java | 46538 | 40691 | 87% | -5847 | – |
| C | 24605 | 35934 | 146% | 11329 | – |
| C# | 21005 | 32107 | 153% | 11102 | – |
| Javascript | 18135 | 30404 | 168% | 12269 | – |
| Python | 16993 | 37537 | 162% | 10544 | ↑ |
| C++ | 17097 | 23009 | 135% | 5912 | ↓ |
| Ruby | 11395 | 17220 | 151% | 5825 | – |
| Objective-C | 5456 | 4988 | 174% | 3711 | – |
| HTML 5 | 4988 | 8699 | 174% | 3711 | – |
| HTML 5 | 2442 | 3144 | 129% | 702 | – |
(Based on April 2021 Data from Indeed Japan)
Source: Based on April 2021 Data from Indeed Japan
PHP is used for 79% of the world’s websites, as shown in the figure below, and is required to customize WordPress, the largest CMS by market share, so it is an essential language for website remodeling.
(Source: W3 techs)
This increase in Japan’s PHP demand represents a major opportunity for PHP programmers looking to work here. Human Resocia, which has one of Japan’s best track records as a dispatch company for engineers from overseas, has been focusing on training PHP programmers for the past decade.
It has released free PHP educational materials for engineers and conducts more than 50 seminars a year. It also lists a lots of PHP projects looking for engineers, so anyone interested in the field would do well to take a look at the page below and apply.
Now, let us get back to PHP itself. I mentioned that demand for PHP is increasing in Japan, and now let’s look at what kind of frameworks are popular. The following graph compares Google Trends search numbers for the major PHP frameworks used in Japan. In 2015, CakePHP was the most popular in Japan, but Laravel has overtaken it to become the country’s number one.
These framework search numbers correlate to the number of people looking each one up, indicating the number of those just learning it. Personally, I believe that work requirements are the biggest reason people start learning a new framework, so the implication is that this spike correlates to more people needing Laravel for work. I highly recommend anyone thinking about working with PHP in Japan also check out Laravel.
And with that, let’s call it a day.
