Scheduling a Remote Interview With a Chef in Japan

A cook in Japan is free to talk in two windows: the afternoon break between lunch and dinner service, roughly 14:00 to 16:30 Japan time, and after close, from about 22:00 or 23:00 Japan time. Many independent restaurants also close one weekday, commonly Monday or Tuesday. Work out your call time from those windows, not from a generic "best time to call Japan" chart: your clocks move twice a year in most countries, Japan's never do, so state both the Japan time and your local time, in writing, every time.

1. The two windows when a working cook is actually free

Most scheduling advice for calling Japan starts from the clock. Start from the kitchen instead. A cook in a Japanese restaurant, in Japan or abroad, typically works a lunch service and a dinner service with a break in the middle, and finishes late. The windows that actually work, in order of how easy they are to get:

Ask the candidate directly for two or three windows that suit them, rather than assuming from this table. If the candidate cannot talk before 23:00 Japan time on any working day, treat the day off as the only slot and plan the process around it rather than pushing for a shorter call at a worse hour.

2. The durable rule: your clock moves, Japan's does not

Japan has a single time zone, Japan Standard Time (JST), nine hours ahead of UTC, set by a standard time order dating to 1886. Japan does not observe daylight saving time; no summer time law is currently in force. This one fact does most of the work: the gap between your restaurant and Japan changes only when your own clocks change, twice a year in most Northern Hemisphere countries and, in the Southern Hemisphere, on the opposite schedule. Japan's side of the gap never moves.

Rather than checking a list of clock-change dates that goes stale every year, remember the rule and check your own country's current daylight saving dates when you need them; a search for "[your country] clock change [year]" on your own government's site is reliable and always current. The one situation worth a manual check every time: the one to two week window each spring and autumn when some countries have changed their clocks and others have not yet. If you are coordinating a panel across, say, the UK, the US and Japan in that window, confirm every participant's current gap separately rather than trusting a single shared time.

3. Time gap table by city

Hours by which Japan is ahead of each city, in the city's own winter (standard) and summer (daylight saving) time. Use this for a first estimate, then confirm the exact date against your own country's current clock-change rule if you are booking within a week or two of a change.

Read this together with section 1: for a US or Canadian employer, your evening is usually Japan's next morning, which lands inside the candidate's day-off window or their early slot before lunch service. For most of Europe, the overlap with the candidate's after-close window is thin; an early morning call from London or Paris, or the candidate's day off, is often the only realistic option.

4. Dates to avoid, and why the list is short on purpose

Two periods are worth avoiding on principle rather than by checking a specific date each year: the cluster of public holidays in late April and early May (commonly called Golden Week) and the New Year period in late December and early January. Restaurants in Japan are often at their busiest around holidays, so a cook may be less free then, not more, even though the calendar shows a public holiday.

We are deliberately not listing individual 2026 to 2027 holiday dates here, because a dated list like that is wrong within a year and this page would need re-checking every spring to stay accurate. Japan's Cabinet Office publishes the current year's national holidays; check its page for the exact dates before booking near either period. Our recruiting calendar for Japan covers when chefs tend to change jobs across the year, which matters more for planning a hiring timeline than the exact holiday dates do.

5. An invitation that cannot be misread

Put both times, both dates and both weekdays in the invitation, in 24 hour format, with the Japan time first for the candidate:

• Always write the date on both sides. For the Americas, the Japan date is usually the next day. This single habit prevents most no-shows.
• Send the invitation from a calendar app with time zones set, and also write the times in the body text in case the candidate's app converts it wrongly.
• Confirm the day before by the channel the candidate actually uses. Many people in Japan use LINE for messages; ask which they prefer.
• Name a backup. Give a phone number or messaging contact in case the video link fails.

6. Interpreter, recording consent and the pre-call brief

Three practical items that sit around the interview itself rather than in it:

• Book the interpreter against the window, not the other way round. If the candidate's only free slot is 23:00 Japan time, confirm your interpreter can work that hour before you send the invitation. A bilingual staff member with kitchen experience often works better than a general interpreter for technical vocabulary; either way, brief them on the slot as soon as it is fixed.
• Ask about recording before you schedule, not on the call. If you want to record, say so in the invitation, name who will see the recording and when it will be deleted, and get a clear yes rather than assuming silence means agreement.
• Send a short pre-call brief in Japanese once the time is confirmed: who will attend, roughly how long it will take, and what you will ask them to show if anything (see the invitation template above for a working example). A candidate who is not guessing performs better, and a brief sent in Japanese signals that you have thought about their side of the call, not only your own.

Keep the call itself to 30 to 45 minutes regardless of which window you use; a cook who has just finished a full day, or who is giving up part of a rare day off, is doing you a favour by being on the call at all.

General information. Time differences shown are standard offsets as of September 2026; daylight saving rules and dates can change, so confirm against an official source when scheduling close to a clock change.