Vantaggi
Free Lunch : This is really something you can cherish about Rakuten. It has got one of the best lunch options you can have. There is a variety of lunch optinos like Chinese, Indian, Pasta and almost all types of Japanese food and all this is free. They have dinner also for a very less price (like around 300-400 yen) which is also pretty decent. And you can buy drinks in Rakuten for half prices than convenient store prices. Work : If you are luck to get into some department like Smart Device or Open Service Platform or Big Data then you might have good work experience and good managers also. But you always need to have good connection with managers to get good evaluation.
Svantaggi
Personal Growth : It completely depends on the department you work for in Rakuten. If you are working in some kind of big service then you can expect little bit better working environment and always opt for the department with more foreigners if you want good work-life balance. Not very technically strong work so for any kind of personal growth you have to strive hard and force the management to use new stuff (which is very difficult to convince). And expect very less growth positino wise also because if there is an opening for Manager position it will always be a Japanese person given more preference. Compensation growth : This is the worst part about Rakuten. The salary increments are really really really very slow. So most of the people (specially non-japanese) leave the company within 2 years. Becuase specifically for technical background people there are many high compensation paying jobs available in Tokyo(atleast compared to Rakuten). Working Environment : If you are a non-japanese person, please try your best to get into departments which has got more foreigners. Your life will be much less miserable. And all that misconception about (Rakuten is Englishnized) is complete myth. There are very less departments which actually use English as official language. New Service Departments : If you want to get any kind of good evaluation and increments don't even think of going to new service department. These are the small departments in Rakuten with a user base of less than some thousands. You will be stuck in these departments with no growth at all.