Kate

Nationality: UK

Hometown: Manchester, England

Time in Japan: 18 years

What brought you to Japan originally? And how long did you originally intend to stay?

I was “underemployed” at home, working part-time jobs in the local college and in a mail-order distribution center. I’d been toying with the idea of going to teach in Japan for a couple of years and had applied for the JET program while at university, but I got turned down for that. Eventually I found a job with an eikaiwa that was willing to sponsor my visa, in a city called Fukuoka, which I’d never heard of, and I bought a one-way ticket, expecting to stay for two years.

AC: Sounds familiar. This was a common storyline for many foreigners when I came to Japan in the early ‘90s. Not so anymore.

How long did you end up living in Japan?

Eighteen years. By the end of my first year’s contract I had made several friends with much better jobs than mine and I decided to hold on until a job came up at one of their companies and then stick it out for another year with a better company. My next company was a pretty good one, I enjoyed it and got promoted a couple of times, I ended up staying there for 8 years.

While working there I applied for university work and was turned down because my eikaiwa experience wasn’t what they were looking for, so I moved to another eikaiwa that did more test-based courses. I also went back to university online to get an MA in English, after which I finally got a full-time university post.

AC: Online degrees, or distance-learning courses, really saved a lot of people’s bacon in the late ‘90s and early Noughties. I can easily name a dozen friends who got their MAs this way, many of whom now have proper careers, teaching at universities here. Had that not been an option, I wonder where they would all be today.

What did you do for work while you were there?

Pretty much all the possible variations on teaching English as a foreign language: kids, seniors, university, kindergarten, public schools, one-to-one tutoring for JHS and HS students . . . 

What were the positive/negative aspects of your time in Japan?

Fukuoka was a fantastic place to live, I’m almost certain I wouldn’t have stayed as long if my initial posting had been to Tōkyō or out in the wilderness. I made great friends and enjoyed a good salary for not much professional stress.

However, being in the expat community in Japan meant mixing with many people who were very similar to me: white, English-speaking, highly-educated (in the Humanities), reasonably affluent, somewhat liberal 30-to-50-year-olds. Had I stayed in the UK for those eighteen years, I would have worked and mixed with a much more varied group of peers and I feel I may have missed out because of that. The visa requirements in Japan, coupled with Japanese prejudice against candidates who do not conform to their preferred image of foreign professionals mean that diversity is severely lacking.

A.C. This is one of the comments that really caused me to pause and think. Was it the same for me? At Kate’s farewell party, it’s true that most of the people there were other white Westerners doing pretty much the same thing she had been doing. I knew them or at least knew of them, but wasn’t really close to most. The people I am close to are for the most part outside of the system—and that may be one reason my career is sputtering today. I have failed to network with those people. But then, I never came to Japan to hang out all the time with people who looked and spoke like me. 

Kate’s other point—Japanese prejudice against candidates who do not conform to their preferred image of foreign professionals—is worth repeating. The Japanese certainly do have a weakness for appearances, and people, including foreigners, can get locked into types merely because of how they look. An easy way, a friend once told me with disgust, to get hired by a Japanese university is to be a “professional Englishman”, that is to pretend to be the type of “English gentleman” that conforms to their fantasies about what they look and act like. Professors of English Literature here just gobble that shite up. I think the prejudice is another reason why so many foreign “professors” have a certain look: slim, nerdy, bald or balding, diffident to the point of being ineffectual. Japanese universities just can’t seem to get enough of these malleable gaijin.

How long had you been thinking of leaving Japan before you actually left?

Vaguely for about three years, seriously for eighteen months.

What motivated the move? Was it difficult for you to say good-bye?

Having decided that I wasn’t going to retire and live in Japan permanently, it was an easy decision to pick a date to work towards. I wanted to complete my contract and finish the school year without leaving any loose ends, and also plan ahead to close down my rented apartment and make sure everything was fully paid-up before I left.

Also, my parents are getting old and I wanted to be closer to them. Watching some of my friends and colleagues deal with family emergencies on the other side of the world, I came to the conclusion that it was time for me to make the decision and get on with planning my departure. The alternative was that eventually one of my parents would succumb to poor health and I would, in all likelihood, drop everything and go home. I didn’t want to leave under such circumstances, so I picked a finishing date and started to make concrete plans.

A big part of deciding to leave was the employment situation. All the universities want up-to-date CVs with recent peer-reviewed publications, advanced degrees, and several years’ experience. Yet, they were all offering limited-term contracts that would not be made permanent. Looking ahead, I worked out that that meant 8 years’ experience, 2 graduate degrees, and 6 published papers may or may not get me another entry-level lecturing post on the same 4-million-yen salary, at a university further away. And after that, 12 years’ experience and 9 papers, for yet another entry-level position. I decided I was not going to play that game, go home and get a real job that I could do for as long as I liked.

AC: I came to a similar conclusion myself. It’s just not worth it, especially after you’ve hit fifty and have kids.

It was hard to say goodbye to friends, but leaving my job was easy, and being back in my hometown is wonderful.

Did you return to your hometown or did you move somewhere else?

Hometown, I wanted to be close to my aging parents.

People often talk of “reverse culture shock”. How has the adjustment been for you?

No problem. I planned to return to the UK and I did it on my own terms. I had over a year to prepare for my return and it all went smoothly.

A.C. I have great respect for what Kate was able to do. Exceptionally well thought-out.

Do you miss your life in Japan? If yes, what do you miss? If no, why not?

I miss my friends. I miss some of my favorite hangouts, and I miss some of the shops. I miss being able to cycle everywhere and I miss having a full-time salary with 4 months’ holiday every year. I miss some of the restaurants because Japanese food is not big in Manchester, and I miss the reliable public transport.

I miss having a big, hot bath in the changing room at the gym.

However, I don’t miss teaching English, and I don’t miss being a foreigner in a place where it’s OK to point, comment loudly (because foreigners can’t understand anyway), and openly discriminate in the workplace.

AC: In an annual letter home to family and friends, I made a similar observation: I’m tired of being a gaijin. After two decades, it has gotten old.

What do you like about where you are living now?

The climate is great. Britain has a reputation for being cold, and it is certainly colder than Asia and much of Europe, but humidity is low, insects don’t survive the winter, “air-conditioning” means “opening the window”, and you can walk (or run!) for miles during the day without passing out from heat exhaustion.

I don’t have to shop at Costco because the supermarkets have everything I’m looking for, but in more reasonably-sized packs.

I don’t have to buy clothes online, I can go to any high street or mall and buy clothes for a last-minute interview/party/run. I can buy shoes!

I live in a brick house with insulated walls, double-glazing and central heating. The temperature inside is not the same as the temperature outside. I rarely hear my neighbors.

Where do you go from here?

Staying in the Manchester area, looking for an interesting job that is completely unrelated to teaching, hoping to buy a house in the not-too-distant future. My wanderlust has departed, I’m not interested in living abroad again.

AC: So much of what Kate shared really hit home, especially in light of how things would turn out for me at the university where I had been teaching full-time.

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Dan

Nationality: USA

Hometown: San Francisco

Time in Japan: 20 months

What brought you to Japan originally? And how long did you originally intend to stay?

By the time I was finishing up my journalism degree at university, I was tired of living in the U.S. and wanted to get back to Asia. I had lived in Singapore in the late ‘70s with my parents and sister. I ended up securing a job with my father’s company (see question 3 below) through a friend of his at the same company who worked in the company’s Tōkyō office. If my dad’s friend had been in Seoul or Kuala Lumpur, I’d have taken a job there, if you see what I’m saying. But I ended up in Tōkyō, and originally I had no idea how long I’d end up staying.

How long did you end up living in Japan?

Twenty months, February 1987 to October 1988

What did you do for work while you were there?

I worked for Electronic Data Systems (EDS), a company founded and run at the time by Ross Perot.

What were the positive/negative aspects of your time in Japan?

The Positive:

Too many to count, really. The food, the culture, living on my own for the first time and the personal independence I had, how the Japanese mix the ancient and the new (For example, I lived in Tōkyō next to Yushima Tenman-gū, one of the oldest temples in the city, and it had the latest soft drink machines on the temple grounds from which I bought a Dr Pepper on my way to work every weekday morning), Ueno Park, Yoshinoya, learning to read katakana and hiragana, beer vending machines, eating whale sashimi, acquiring a life-long love of nattō, drinking regularly after work at Jail House, which was right across Roppongi Dōri from my job, taking the Chiyoda Line from Yushima to Omotesandō Station then walking to work from there (especially in warm weather), swallowing live goldfish a couple of times to get into a Roppongi nightclub called Cleo Palazzi for free (it doesn’t exist anymore, but it blew the Japanese doorman’s mind that I would do this), Ameya-Yokochō in Ueno (still one of my most beloved places in Tōkyō and on Earth), I should stop here with the positives.

The Negative:

I felt at times very isolated and not of much interest to the Japanese. I am a natural loner who prefers to do things by myself and I know how to have fun by myself, but I would like to have been able to have closer contact and friendships with Japanese my own age. I was 23 when I moved to Tōkyō and turned 24 while I lived there. Also, I had little luck dating women (foreign or Japanese) for the first 13 months I lived in Japan. I’ve never been much of a ladies’ man, but I did eventually start dating a wonderful Canadian girl in March, 1988. We dated until the end of October when I moved back to America. There were far fewer foreigners in Tōkyō in the late ‘80s than there are today, therefore the Japanese weren’t as used to seeing them and dealing with them in restaurants and retail shops, etc. I was never hassled by the Tōkyō police, but I would sometimes get very slow or sloppy service in the little restaurants I liked to frequent because I was a foreigner. I’m sure you’ve heard worse stories about how foreigners are treated, so I don’t want to be a drama queen about my own experience.

How long had you been thinking of leaving Japan before you actually left?

I decided to quit my job with EDS in mid-September 1988 and decided about two weeks later to move back to the U.S. to apply to the photography school at Yale University. I almost got into Yale, but not quite.

What motivated the move? Was it difficult for you to say good-bye?

I was running out of money after quitting my job, and, honestly, I was tired of living in Tōkyō and wanted to live in the U.S. again. All these years later, I realize I should have stayed longer in Tōkyō, that leaving was the impatient mistake of a young, inexperienced man. I should have stayed and gotten a job teaching English. But if I had stayed I probably never would have met my wife, so it is one of life’s tradeoffs.

Ain’t that the truth. Whenever I am rueing the life choices I made in the past, I have to ask myself if I’d really be better off today had I chosen differently and not ended up with my wife and two sons.

Ironically, I quit my job (which at the time was paying me about US$40,000 annually) because I was tired of working for an American company and disliked the way it did things. My American (and one Australian) bosses didn’t do very smart business with the Japanese. They were cowboys who didn’t work with the Japanese so much as try to tell them how things should be done. And none of my bosses spoke Japanese, save for one junior executive who was very white and uptight. Seriously, the guy was snowy blonde with pale skin and blue eyes who looked like a college-aged poster boy for the SS or Hitler Youth. Our Japanese business partners didn’t respond well to him.

Also, and this is rather petty, a month before I quit, my company changed its paycheck schedule from paying employees twice a month to once a month, and withholding a certain amount from paychecks every month so employees could have a ‘bonus’ at year’s end. This was to bring our company in closer compliance with Japanese business practices at the time. I didn’t like this, as it meant I’d be paid less, and less often, every month. I spent rather freely in those days, on food, drink, nightclubs, and music CDs, and I didn’t want to have to curtail my ways because of a company payroll change.

And, no, it wasn’t difficult to say goodbye because I’d already left my company a month and a half before leaving Japan, and I really didn’t have any friends except for my Canadian girlfriend. We said goodbye at Narita before my flight out. I saw her once in Toronto and once in San Francisco after that, but I’ve not seen her again since 1990.

Did you return to your hometown or did you move somewhere else?

I didn’t return to my hometown, as I never really had one until I moved to San Francisco in 1989. After Tōkyō, I moved in with my parents, who were living in Potomac, Maryland just outside the Washington, D.C. beltway.

People often talk of “reverse culture shock”. How has the adjustment been for you?

The adjustment was almost 29 years ago, but I still miss Japan and Tōkyō terribly. I’ve been back to Tōkyō four times since, in 2008, 2012, 2013, and 2015, and those trips were joyous excursions for me. My wife came with me in 2008 and 2015. She’d let me move back to Tōkyō for six months or a year, but I think I’m too old to become an entry-level English teacher, and my photography career hasn’t taken off yet, so I don’t think I could rely on that for income if I moved back to Japan. Maybe I should start playing the California state lottery, try to win a wad of cash I could use to live in Tōkyō. Or Ōsaka. I’m a big city boy and always have been.

As for culture shock, I still love small apartments and cramped work spaces, and to this day I very rarely ever tip in restaurants here in the U.S. These are things about me that formed when I lived in Japan and are part of me now, for better or worse.

Do you miss your life in Japan? If yes, what do you miss? If no, why not?

Japan got into my blood, it’s hardwired into my DNA now. I miss being alone in a crowd the way I often was in Japan, if that makes any sense. I miss Japanese courtesy, and customer service, and the cultural mythologies they put in their video arcade games. I miss drinking a cold can of beer on the street right in front of the Tōkyō cops in Shibuya. I miss gatchapon machines. I miss streets closed off on Sundays so people and families can safely sit at outdoor tables in the street in the sun while shopping. I miss the hawkers in Ameya-Yokochō. I miss Shinobazu Pond in Ueno Park. This list could go on.

Americans mostly don’t know how to live the vibrant urban life I had in Tōkyō.

What do you like about where you are living now?

My wife is here. She grew up in the town we live in, which literally shares a city and county line with San Francisco. We’re eight miles from downtown. And in San Francisco I have frequent access to Japanese food, Japanese grocery stores and bookstores, and the pop culture things I find interesting. And Japanese language instruction if I can ever get my ass in gear to go enroll in some beginner’s classes.

Where do you go from here?

At this point in time, as I type this, other than staying with my beloved wife I honestly don’t know. My life is in true flux right now.

Dan Ryan is a photojournalist who publishes photos and stories of Japan and California on his website www.brisbanegraphicartsmuseum.com and on Flickr at www.flickr.com/photos/brisbanedanryan. You can follow Dan on Twitter at @ThatDanRyan

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