Inside HENNGE’s GIP: Finding My Own Tokyo
Prologue
Kyoto surprised me with a heavy afternoon downpour, and I just happened not to take my umbrella before leaving the hotel. Sitting on the threshold of Nanzen-ji, trapped under the wide eaves, I decided it might be a good time to begin writing.
I heard about Japan Dev during a visit to the AWS Summit in 2024, where I learned about HENNGE’s GIP program, and finally made an effort to apply at the end of 2024. As a Haruki Murakami fan, I have a rose-tinted view of Tokyo, mostly shaped by the imagery of the 1970s — a concrete jungle, neon lights and bubble-economy glitter. Having this in mind, I knocked on HENNGE’s door. After multiple interviews and screens, along with my excitement, the door creaked open.
What is Tokyo to me? A surreal place in the books by Haruki Murakami? The retro neon of Ginza in the late Showa era? The setting of countless anime scenes? Or something else entirely? I realised it wasn’t my first time in Japan — I’d visited as a child, but why did I have such a rose-tinted view of it? Perhaps the answer is that Tokyo holds different meanings for people at different stages of their lives.
Preparation wasn’t too difficult; most materials were prepared by the onboarding team. The visa was out, and I was ready to depart.
Arrival
“I was thirty-seven then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to the Hamburg airport.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Always loved that sentence from the start of the book.
As for me, I was twenty-two then, peaking out the window as the A350 landed at the Narita airport on a Tuesday morning.
Tokyo’s first impression felt familiar, like any major Asian city. Yet the busy people who hurried past me speaking, and the store signs, reminded me where I was. I still have a lot to explore about this city in the days to come.
Tips: Buy an eSIM before you depart. I recommend Airalo.
During my first week in Tokyo, I visited most tourist spots and decided to visit HENNGE on Sunday. My first time at Shibuya Station was overwhelming; the crowds were immense, and everyone moved hurriedly yet in an orderly manner. I walked to a glass wall and saw the Shibuya Crossing directly in front of me. It was smaller than I expected, but the number of people crossing was impressive.
It was getting late. From the top of the hill, I could see the neon signs
coming on as the dark-suited masses of salarymen crossed the
intersection like instinct-blinded salmon.
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
HENNGE
I was almost late to my first day, feeling too confident in my road memorisation skills. I missed a turn point near Meiji Jingu, which I had to ride 10 minutes more to make a U-turn. Luckily, I was eventually on time.
We had a welcome session at the 11th floor, sitting beside a few other new joiners, under the soft, white office lights. Everyone seemed a bit nervous, but the welcoming atmosphere somewhat eased our nervousness, and what's left is excitement.
The first day was packed with meetings. After the photo, the first task was setting up the laptop and work phone. We then attended a welcome session with the rest of the company at level 2, followed by a CPRD department meeting where we met our mentors. Most of them were also former HENNGE interns, and we had our first welcome lunch with HR and the team lead. By then, I had been doing self-introductions 4–5 times and was told there would be 10+ times more in the upcoming weeks — it turned out to be true!
We were a bit tired after all the meetings. Back in Sydney, regular working hours end at around 5:30 pm, whereas at HENNGE, they are 7:00 pm for interns, as we start the day later at 10:00 am. However, one of the highlights of the first day was taking in the city views, both day and night, from level 11.
It reminded me that I officially had a glimpse of a life as a “salaryman”.
Assignment
We got started with assignment 1 quickly on the second day, where we were divided into Python and Go teams and underwent a series of workshops. We were each assigned a mentor and have daily standup meetings.
As for me, I have experience with most tech stacks. However, the involvement in code reviews and the need to code everything from scratch, without relying on video tutorials or generative AI, made me identify the gaps in my knowledge. The learning curves were initially steep for OIDC, DynamoDB single-table schema design, AWS local stack, and relevant asynchronous I/O (aio) libraries. That’s where I learnt how to read documentation and view library source code to understand what’s happening underneath.
Another important quality I learnt is not to be afraid to run the code and get an error, even if you write code you don’t know if is correct, run it so you know where the problem is (which makes a robust local dev environment important). With the never-ending pull requests, code reviews, and standups, we learned the best coding practices and corrected many issues and our bad coding habits.
The first two weeks were pretty intense — I even ended up with a mouth ulcer. Yet I would say it was both painful and joyful.
A fun thing for the mentors is to break our app in the final demo, so we also spent a lot of time on the security of the code to prevent various types of attacks. However, even though I thought it was robust, I had forgotten to introduce a limit on displaying posts or have a paging feature, and paid the price of letting a spamming attack take effect.
Nevertheless, all the interns did well in the first assignment, and I learnt a lot and enjoyed it.
Although most of the time, after work, we were too tired to go anywhere else (it was also late), many activities within the company fulfilled our entertainment needs during the week.
Perks
GIP lunch
The most unique perk for interns would be the GIP lunch, where colleagues can invite interns to lunch around Shibuya 2–3 times a week. This is the primary source I use to experience different Japanese food and find the best restaurants around Shibuya.
> tip: Use Tabelog as a substitute for Google Maps when finding a good restaurant.
So by the end of the internship, I have (almost) experienced enough good restaurants in Shibuya that I can make suggestions: とんかつ 和幸, Torikatsu Chicken, Cafe Legato, Spice Garden, JB’s TOKYO, Dogenzaka Mammoth, 牛カツ京都勝牛. As you might have noticed, I’m a big fan of katsu.
My food list: https://maps.app.goo.gl/rsMCrvY5tWFUCDwm9
GIP lunch is a thoughtful policy by the people’s team. Not only do interns have GIP lunch, but newly joined full-time employees also have their welcome lunch. Every day, we often see people gathering downstairs waiting for their lunch buddies. Some of them might be your lunch buddy for next week. In this way, new joiners can meet different people from within or outside the department, despite being a small company; this builds wide connections among employees.
Bukatsu
> Tip: Sign up for bukatsu early and subscribe to any notifications, or you might not be able to join as spots run out!
— Which means clubs. In the Slack channel, there are many active Bukatsu. The most active ones would be board game night and sweets-bu. The clubs organise activities periodically and are reimbursed by the company. Most people participating in Board Game Night are English speakers. A lot comes from the CPRD team. A thing I concluded is that it takes most of the time from eating and explaining the rules, as there’s always a game that someone hasn’t played before. Yet the night was fun every minute, and we always had a great time.
> Fun fact: I heard a previous intern started a maid cafe bu, and Ogurasan (our CEO) joined them once. Wild.
Besides board game night, my favourite bukatsu is Nihonshu bu, where people bring food and sake. Participants are often a mix of Japanese and Foreign employees, and it’s a very sociable event. As for me, I just drink.
Tip: ride LUUP if possible, it’s a great way to replace walking. However be careful and obey the traffic rules, I once nearly rear-ended into a van while waiting for a red light at Shibuya crossing.
Team Intro
Knowing what each department does in the company is very important and often overlooked in large companies. Team talks in HENNGE are a way for all interested employees to learn about our products and the responsibilities of each team, including development, sales, and UI design. We get to know their work and understand their responsibilities in this business, and how it affects us, and appreciate their efforts.
MTS
The Monthly Tech sharing was something that I looked forward to the most; interns all managed to find some time to prepare for a technical topic they liked to share, despite their busy assignments.
Referral
One thing that surprised me is that the referral program towards full-time employees offers high bonuses to referrers. More interestingly, it also includes a $100 dinner budget for approaching potential candidates, which demonstrates the thoughtfulness behind the talent acquisition process.
CEO session
Interesting fact: Ogura-san wears a kimono every day, and it has been decades since.
On the third day of the internship, we were scheduled for a session on the company's philosophy and values. I expected an ordinary, bland speech about the values listed on the company website. Yet, it did not turn out that way.
It was a fruitful learning experience; it was less of a company value talk and more of telling stories of the company and how the founders conquered challenges.
Time flies back to 30 years ago, when Shibuya was Japan’s Silicon Valley, and Akihabara was an electronics street that nourished IT companies, not the tourist-filled place it is today. Ogura-san founded the company in 1997, while he was still a student at the university, working as a typist in a research lab. He spotted the opportunities of the time and founded HDE (formerly known as) as a student-run company.
HENNGE faced three major crises. The first was a cash-flow pitfall in its earliest days, which gave the student founders their very first entrepreneurial lesson. The second was during the dot-com bubble, when they had to make the first layoff and say farewell to employees who were their friends and schoolmates. The third was the 2008 financial crisis, when a false sense of security led them once more into hardship. Then came the Great East Japan Earthquake. From that disaster, they realised that a person lives only once, and they resolved to spend that one life doing something meaningful. All the journey they have taken, the lessons they have learned, and their ability to embrace change and continually adapt have combined to shape today’s HENNGE.
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Ogura-san plays a big part in this, promoting a flat office structure and fully supporting the company culture. He changed HENNGE into an English-primary company — a bold, forward-looking move. As for other founding employees, whether they stayed or left, they went on to become successful leaders— one became the head of McKinsey Japan.
After this session, the company’s image became richer for me. The story he told provided a glimpse into the journey of HENNGE and the broader history of the Japanese IT industry. For me, on the eve of graduating from university, this talk was a rare gift: an entrepreneurial story and a history lesson.
Outside of the internship
In Tokyo
Every weekend, we interns went exploring. On the first weekend, we made a loop around the city, visiting the Imperial Palace, Tokyo Skytree, and Asakusa, where I drew an omikuji and, luckily, got a good fortune. The next day, we enjoyed the nighttime view of Roppongi and Tokyo Tower, with the lights of Minato surrounding the tower, making it look even brighter.
In the second week, we visited the Nezu Museum, walked all the way to Nakameguro to browse bookstores, and finished the day with an unagi rice dinner in Ginza.
By the third week, we had basically covered central Tokyo, so we started to look further afield.
Over a GIP lunch, someone mentioned that Hakone is the model for the setting of Neon Genesis Evangelion, so of course, we had to go. We were lucky enough to see Mount Fuji clearly from Lake Ashi; I didn’t know then that it would be the first and only time I’d see it completely unobstructed that month. As an Eva fan, I think that by the end of the internship, I might have managed to turn someone else into a fan, too.
Kamakura and the sea
After Hakone, we went to Kamakura. For this year’s June rainy season, we were relatively lucky — every time the forecast said it would rain, it somehow didn’t. Hearing that it would finally rain the following week, we decided to visit Kamakura a bit earlier. The moment we saw the ocean from a temple on the hillside, we were exhilarated: this was exactly what we had come for.
Walking along the beach, the sea wind was fierce, and the waves were crashing in. On the long walk from Kamakura High School to Enoshima, as the sky darkened and our legs grew tired, somehow my heart felt very calm.
Nikko
The last place we travelled far to was Nikko, a destination that’s a bit of a challenge to reach but probably the most rewarding. Since I’m more interested in history, I chose to stay and visit Tokugawa Ieyasu’s mausoleum at Nikko Toshogu Shrine, while the other interns went on a nature-focused route to see waterfalls and forests.
Kansai and beyond
After the internship ended, I embarked on a seven-day solo trip around the Kansai region. The most unforgettable memory was the Gion Matsuri in Kyoto — that was when I started this blog. I suppose Batch 3 was fortunate to overlap with Gion Matsuri; perhaps Batch 4 will be fortunate enough to catch Kanda Matsuri.
When I returned to Tokyo, I went to two hanabi festivals and visited the University of Tokyo. As a Haruki Murakami fan, I walked the route mentioned in one of his novels, which happened to be near where I lived and quickly became my favourite citywalk path. I watched kabuki and Noh, and experienced the Awa Odori Parade on the Kagurazaka festival as the final event of my summer in Japan.
There were many more stories that I can’t fit into a single post: the hip backstreets of Shimokitazawa, the coastline and hot springs of Izu, Yokohama’s harbour and night view… full of memories in two months.
Conclusion
Compared to the noise, crowds, and neon of Shibuya and Shinjuku, I prefer the streets and architecture of Omotesando, Aoyama, Roppongi, and Azabudai in Minato. I also liked the wide lawns around the Imperial Palace and Yoyogi Park, as well as the campuses of Waseda University and the University of Tokyo.
Ginza, Akihabara, and Asakusa can feel a bit too commercial. I like the view at Odaiba more. In the evening breeze, the glittering Tokyo skyline on the opposite shore fills every corner of your vision. Shimokitazawa and Nakameguro are also wonderful places for a slow walk, full of an easy, artsy atmosphere.
Out of the transports, I like the view from the JR lines. Yet cycling has the most fun — whether on the main roads or through tiny backstreets — passing delivery trucks, people carrying groceries, out shopping, heading to school, or on their way to work.
From this summer, I will remember ducking into 7-Eleven to cool down from the heat; riding a LUUP scooter in the evening breeze, leaving Shibuya, passing through Harajuku and Meiji Jingu at night.
I hope this isn’t the end — and I don’t think it is. Someday in the future, we will cross paths again. As I was getting ready to leave, I reflected on everything that had happened over the past two months. I gained so much that part of me wished I could forget it all and experience it again from the beginning — and relive all of this excitement and this journey.
HENNGE’s GIP program is a legacy that keeps looping forward. Those who return become mentors. Those who move on continue to excel and take with them the memories and skills they gained here.
Did I find Haruki Murakami’s Tokyo? Probably not. The 1970s and 1980s are now too distant. Today’s Tokyo has less of the Showa and bubble economy feel, and perhaps a bit less of the surreal atmosphere in his books — just like the gap between real-life and anime. It’s like the saying in the book “Kinkaku-ji”: you imagine the Golden Pavilion to be breathtaking, but when you finally see it, it’s “just alright”; yet after you leave, the image of it in your memory becomes more and more attractive.
I don’t need to find someone else’s Tokyo, because every step I take here is already creating my own story.
After my retum to Yasuoka, the Golden Temple, which had disappointed me so greatly at first sight, began to revivify its beauty within me day after day, until in the end it became a more beautiful Golden Temple than it had been before I saw it. I could not say wherein this beauty lay. It seemed that what had been nurtured in my dreams had become real and could now, in tum, serve as an impulse for further dreams
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Tips
If you’re staying at Sakura House, the Shibuya building and the Sendagaya one are both great choices — Shibuya is about an 8-minute walk from the office, while Sendagaya is closer to many other places by train and still within walking distance of work
Learn some basic Japanese before coming; it’s a great chance to level up your speaking skills, and having fundamentals really helps — or at least have a small travel Japanese phrasebook.
Pimsleur is a good option for practising Japanese listening and speaking on your commute or walks.
Check out OK Supermarket for very affordable groceries and ready-made meals.
Get a coin purse — Japan still uses a lot of coins, and they add up quickly in your pockets.
If you’re staying at a place like Sakura House, recommend to pay rent in cash instead of by card (currency conversion and fees).
Try to see both Noh and Kabuki at least once while you’re in Japan; they’re completely different styles of traditional theatre.
Bookoff is one of the best places to buy second-hand manga, figures, and vinyl records — the branch in Ikebukuro is especially good.
If you’re a Murakami fan, look up one of the “Trail of Murakami” walking routes.
For a classic weekend trip, Hakone is perfect — consider getting the Hakone Freepass.
Depending on where you’re from, you may need a plug adapter; it’s easier to sort this out before you arrive in Japan.
The (wellbeing?) room on HENNGE’s 2nd floor is a good spot for a short power nap.
To avoid the crowds at Shibuya Crossing (especially on rainy days), cut through Shibuya Mark City and use the walkways inside.
For haircuts, use the Hot Pepper Beauty (ホットペッパービューティー) app to find salons, check reviews, and book discounted appointments.
Jack, from China(studying in Australia), interned with the HENNGE Global Internship Program from June 2 to July 11 2025.
