Getting ready
I spent a few days over the past few months getting the website set up, but it’s time to launch the blog officially. I’m on my way to Tokyo now to start a new chapter of my life and I plan on making the blog the primary focus of my time while I’m there. This trip was actually the impetus of the blog, partly to document my projects and adventures, and partly a way to stay connected with my friends and family remotely.
Why Japan?
I’ve traveled a lot ever since I was young, but over time I’ve found certain aspects of travel more appealing than others. Tourist attractions can be nice, but they are often so far removed from the daily life of people who actually live in those places that a trip which only consists of classic tourist activities feels incomplete. In an ideal world, I’d really want to live the life of someone in that city, understand what makes it socially and culturally different than where I live, and maybe take away something new about what kind of place I’d like to live in.
It’s always fun visiting new places and imagining what living there would be like. In the moment I’m often quite enamored, but after returning home and having more time to reflect, I generally conclude that life in San Francisco is pretty hard to beat. I’ve always had a feeling that I’d really like Japan (okay yeah, I was a bit of an otaku when I was a kid), but I only got the chance to test that theory when I visited at the end of 2022, right when borders opened up post-COVID pandemic. It was even better than my imagination. The food was incredible - I don’t think I walked out of a single restaurant unsatisfied. It didn’t matter what I was eating - sushi, tonkatsu, ramen, gyudon, soba; it didn’t matter where I was - smack dab in the middle of the city, the most touristy location possible, the middle of nowhere countryside, a vending machine, a subway station; it didn’t matter what price point - a $100 steak barbeque, a $2 trip to the convenience store, every bite blew my mind and left me craving for more. The transit system had some aspects that seemed like it hadn’t gotten a technological upgrade in a while, but it was clear that when it was built a few decades ago, it was absolutely state of the art, and still knocks every US public transit system out of the park. Sure, maybe you can’t use Apple Pay, and sometimes you still get little paper tickets and have to reload your card with cash, but the trains run frequently, on time, and go anywhere. The architecture and nature were stunning, even the tourist attractions felt like they were a true representation of Japanese culture.
But aside from the things everyone loves about Japan, what really inspired me to want to live there is the social culture, which I think is typically the thing that turns most Americans off to Japan. It’s amazing how respectful and mindful everyone is about people around them, always standing to one side on the escalator to make sure there is a path for people who want to walk up it instead. Being quiet on the subway may feel socially stifling, however after countless BART commutes where people are blasting tunes that I don’t necessarily want to be listening to at that time of day directly in my ear or hotboxing the car, I’ll absolutely take no talking on the subway any day. (BART is so screechy that it’s not like I could have a reasonable conversation on it anyways.) I loved how despite there being no public trashcans anywhere, there was also no trash, and for such a densely populated city, it’s pretty difficult to imagine. Feeling so much social responsibility is going to be very different from life in America, and there’s a chance that I won’t be able to stand it after a while, but I have to see it and experience it for myself to really know. To put it succinctly, if you’ve ever thought to yourself, “this is why we can’t have nice things” (one extreme example for fellow San Franciscans is toothpaste behind locked cabinets at Safeway), Japan has nice things because it has considerate and thoughtful people, and well, isn’t that nice?
The biggest concern in my mind is dealing with government bureaucracy and feeling like simple tasks are made extra difficult because I’m a foreigner. Perhaps this is just a coping mechanism, but I am a foreigner and Japan was nice enough to let me in, things are often frustrating in the moment but it does make sense that not speaking and being Japanese would make my life harder in Japan. It’s going to be hard (probably impossible) to fully integrate into Japanese society, but my plan is to at least do intensive Japanese study while I’m there in the hopes that it unlocks some additional experiences. I don’t expect to fully integrate into Japanese society, but I don’t think that’s necessary to be happy living somewhere. Immigrants to America probably never fully integrate into every community around them, but they form their own communities and still have strong individual friendships across communities, so I think it’ll be important to stay humble through this experience and not expect nice things to just happen to me, but to remind myself that I really have to earn the trust of people around me.
Plan for Japan
Luckily, I’m not going on this journey alone - a really good friend of mine has been living in Tokyo for a few years now and has loved it and really gave me the confidence to take the leap. I’m also going with my partner, Miles, who I’m sure you’ll see featured in many future photos and blog posts.
Miles and I have signed up for Japanese language school at two different schools - I’ll likely make a blog post going into more detail later. The schedule is Monday to Friday (5 days a week), 3-4 hours a day, plus homework. I’m hoping to get pretty good at Japanese, and the daily class cadence while being immersed in the country seems like the recipe for success, but it is also known as one of the world’s hardest languages, so…
As a US citizen, you can visit Japan for up to 3 months on a tourist visa every 12 months (you don’t need to apply for it separately, the privilege just comes with your passport). However, our plan is to stay for at least a year on a student visa, which is graciously provided by the language school. If you’ve got some money to spare, I do think this is the easiest way to immigrate to Japan, at least for 1-2 years. My program is technically 2 years long, but that seemed a bit too long to be out of my career so the current plan is to just finish after a year (I don’t plan on working, but might pick up some odd jobs here and there - you can work up to 28 hours a week on a student visa with special permission, which seems pretty easy to obtain).
Plan for the blog
As I mentioned earlier, this blog is going to be my top priority starting now. I want to post every day, even if it’s a small post with a few words and a single photo. I’ll aim for 1 long post or technical website improvement per week. It’ll probably evolve a lot through the year, but I really hope I keep it up!