Are there Japan based-traders to trade USA stocks? I wonder how the life is like. Do you stay up all the nights? Thanks.
A side question. If one doesn't know Japanese and only speaks English, can he live a daily live in Japan? Like buying groceries, communicating with people, and so on. Does majority of the Japanese know English?
I'm currently in japan. Mostly I use futures, and the liquidity is fine for what I do even in US night time. It's easy to stay up for the open if you are just taking positions and holding them for a while. If you want to trade intraday, your main problem would be that everything depends on public transit, and the system shuts down between midnight and 6am. All the activity after midnight is concentrated in a tiny number of places. In Tokyo you would probably want to live within walking distance of Shinjuku, shibuya, or roppongi. In Osaka you'd want umeda or namba. Whether you need Japanese depends on what kind of people you want to hang out with. If you like it enough to stay long term, you'll probably want to learn some of the language.
A small minority knows passable English. You will run into problems doing basic stuff using English, never mind the more complicated stuff. However, you don't need English to buy groceries as nothing needs to be said. Restaurants are a problem though because you can't read the menus and if there are no pictures of the dishes, you have no idea what you're getting.
Retired musician turned Forex trader settles in rural Japan.... http://www.hgtv.com/shows/house-hunters-international/episodes/drumming-up-a-life-in-japan