What dumb mistakes you made and regret after just moving to Japan?

I regret two main things:

-Not knowing about Daiso and spending way more money on other stores when I needed to save money.

-Getting myself into a 4 year contract with SoftBank because thought the free phone was cool and cheap monthly charges. Never used the phone and monthly charges were not cheap. I hate you SoftBank.

32 comments
  1. To be fair, until a few years ago you had little choice but to enter into shitty overpriced contracts for your phone. It’s much better now.

  2. I didn’t know my shower/bath unit walls were ferromagnetic. Wasted money on bath organizer stands and crappy suction based option when the whole time I could just stick magnetic hooks and shelves anywhere I wanted.

    Edit: I guess it wasn’t a “dumb mistake”, but definitely something I wish I knew.

  3. Sprayed hair spray thinking it was deodorant

    Didn’t clean the kitchen sink trap for months on end, in fact didn’t even know of its existence until it became obvious

    Always declining or saying no I don’t have a point card for X. Seriously I waited too long to start using/collecting point cards, and now that I use them regularly, getting small perks each time I shop keeps the experience somewhat positive rather than a chore.

  4. I first came in as a student, and I didn’t know I had to apply for a pension exemption for the *previous* financial year, because I landed in March, and only put in my application for the current financial year in April.

    Never knew about my pension records, until I started working many years later, and discovered I have one unpaid “blemish” on my pension record from way back from the month that I first arrived. By the time I discovered it, too many years had passed and the pension office said that it could no longer be fixed.

    To the best of my knowledge, it doesn’t, and won’t affect anything at all. =( No real regrets, just annoyed whenever I see it…

  5. Language

    Not knowing a word of Japanese before getting here.

    Not studying hard enough when I got here.

    Being too shy to try and speak Japanese.

    Relationships

    Not playing around enough. I was young, shy and felt like I had to have only proper relationships. What a bloody idiot.

    Relying on friends to do so much for me because I couldn’t speak Japanese.

    Travel

    Not seeing more of the country before life became too busy. Just jump on a train or plane and go and check out a temple or park.

    Money

    Not applying for a JAL or ANA credit card immediately. If you use them to buy everything, you can rack up the miles.

    Not using point sites to rack up points to exchange for miles or money.

    Wasting so much money on textbooks that I ever used.(links back to not studying properly)

  6. Not knowing about iDeCo until close to the end of my 2nd year in Japan. Missed out on a good two years of contributions there!

  7. I bought a kei car right away (Wagon R turbo). Big mistake. I knew they’d be slow but not THAT slow. I had to pray it could clear a hill. Sold it as soon as I found the car I really wanted. No more kei cars for me.

  8. I don’t think it’s a thing as much now that phone plans have gotten cheaper, but getting an IP phone SIM contract (i.e. not a 通話付き SIM)

    Whenever I wanted to dial a 0120 number I had to go to a payphone!

  9. Not knowing UR, wasted close to 500K in moving fees, reikin bullshit, renewal money bullshit, guarantor money bullshit.

  10. Gyomu Super, Niku no Hanamasa, Kanesue. I dropped way too much money at Aeon, ItoYokado, and Seiyu before figuring that out.

    Also evening sales on meat and bentos.

  11. 1. Buying too much stuff from Daiso and other 100 yen shops. Most of the stuff turned out to be rubbish which is struggled to throw away later.

    2. Buying an iPhone from an operator. It’s significantly cheaper to buy it at the Apple Store.

    3. Not buying curtains and not closing them in the evening. Too many questions from neighbours…

    4. Not buying a commuter’s pass and wasting money on the train back and forth to work.

    5. Trying too hard to follow “the Japanese rules”, which turned out to be arbitrary whines from whoever felt like teaching foreigner the right thing.

  12. I regret one main thing: meeting my first girlfriend!

    I fell victim to what my wife and I call, “Oriental magic”!

  13. Applied for a bunch of credit cards, lol. As a result, right now I can’t even apply for a debit card.

    I’m a PhD student though so that don’t bother me much because I don’t have a lot of money to use anyway, lol. But sometimes it is annoying.

  14. – took a job teaching young kids instead of adults cos it was more money and a visa. Had a nice schedule with a few little eikaiwas set up and tossed it in the bin.

    – went to an interview without a tie and didn’t stand up when doing my self introduction. It looked very western so I thought I’d be ok going more casual.

    – hung on for dear life to my girlfriend even though we were treating each other like shit. I started to really enjoy Japan after we finally broke up.

    – for a month I was pounding the happoshu not knowing it wasn’t real beer, had so many horrendous hangovers. I lived in Korea where the beer used to give you really bad hangovers, so I just thought that was what beer was like in Asia.

    – I had a flip phone and pocket WiFi at first. The pocket WiFi would always run out after two weeks and I’d be throttled for the rest of the month. To be fair, ten years ago that might not have been a bad option?

    – learned how to get food at Matsuya (before they had English machines) so I had lunch there every other day for like a year. Took me a year to start to eat ramen and so on.

  15. -Took me a long time to figure out where to buy every random thing you need in life. But I’m not sure how I could have learned faster.

    -I wish I had found a place where I could keep my dog right away and had brought him over asap.

    -I wish I had been more strict with my son about speaking English from the beginning.

  16. Staying at certain companies longer than I should have. Those places were cesspools of bad management and no benefits.

    Allowing myself to get stuck in that intermediate plateau for years. Finally trying to climb my way out of it.

    Got stuck paying a lot of money per month for docmo until I finally found a cheaper option. It’s like night and day.

  17. GTN Mobile plan. Absolute rort. Terrible company. Terrible phone plan.

    Had no choice but to get it though, otherwise I would’ve been denied my apartment application… needed a phone number.

    “10GB Download 5G!” They say. I’m lucky to get 5G. I dare open Instagram and scroll down on mobile data, and I get a text saying they’ve throttled me to EDGE speeds for the rest of the month. Also the plan doesn’t support MNP so I’m stuck fast.

    Also whoever said the ferromagnetic bathroom thing… yeah, I wasted a heap of money on tension racks and stuff to hold things when I could’ve put magnetic shelves everywhere. Would’ve been much better.

  18. I’m with you on Diaso. And Gyomu Super too for food. But for me the real regret is not knowing about 2nd Street and Hard Off for appliances and clothes. I just bought a used breadmaker in near perfect condition for a fraction for retail. And I’m still making the mistake of buying clothes at Uniqlo then going to 2nd Street and finding better/cheaper things.

  19. I didn’t realize my air conditioner was also a heater. I came to Japan at the end of November. I lived breathed and slept kotatsu those first 3 months

  20. Moved to Japan in peak summer, wore a dress with no tights to my first enkai and didn’t realise I was being judged for having bare feet.

    Wore a long black pencil skirt to my first day working at a JHS and was told the boys wouldn’t talk to me because I looked too sexy (I really didn’t, I was wearing office wear that would’ve been considered very conservative in the UK!!)

    Wore a smart but loose-fitting dress to work (thought I’d got round the pencil skirt issue) but it had ONE LACY SHOULDER CAP and that was apparently too おしゃれ

    Wore a white patterned shirt and got told in the middle of the whole office that everyone could see my “shape” (ughghghgh) and that I needed to dress less conventionally-Western (this was my worst one, I still can’t believe my supervisor did this in front of everyone who were giggling, including him).

    Are you seeing a pattern here? 😆 I did not consider my dress sense to be even remotely racy until I got to Japan. I honestly thought what I was wearing would conform to Japanese standards, but because I wasn’t wearing a tracksuit or a dress with about as much fit as a binbag, my good intentions were unfortunately misconceived.

  21. I regret getting a bunch of crap Daiso stuff when I could have bought better stuff at Trial or Lumiere for less or bought better quality stuff elsewhere.

  22. This one was a colleague, not me, but: c. 2008 one of the new JET participants bought a first/second gen iPhone outright in the States before coming to Japan.

    Sure enough, this was like a month before carriers downgraded the iPhone to their “free” category because of its poor sales at the time, so that was about $800 gone.

    For me, probably the big one was not looking more into house maintenance beforehand (ie I didn’t even know my house had a kerosene tank out back until I suddenly didn’t have hot water one day), and not having at least some basic Japanese skills

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