This is gonna be long, but I really want information and want to make this happne.
I’m a 23yo guy working a dead-end $15/hr factory job, still living with his parents. The only thing I have going for me is that I graduated high school and I have a car. So how does a guy like me even begin living in Japan?
Things I’ve looked into-
Military. I have a family of vets, so this seemed reasonable, but for the most part I’ve been told you can only ASK for them to sation you In Japan. There is NO garuntee. I know the military is a great way to pay for college and build up experience in a career, but im not willing to gamble my location.
EF Education. This is a program that sends a student to Japan to learn the language and culture. Seems ideal for me, other than the $25,000 for 11 months. It’s just so far out of my price range, and it isn’t for a college or anything so I’m gaining not much other than a lively experience. I want to be able to live in Japan WHILE attending a college, which brings on the next one.
College Abroad Programs. These confuse me the most. I know very little about college in general. From what I know, If I find a particpating school, I can apply to study abroad in a particpating Japanese school. This raises a ton of questions from me. I don’t even know what the hell I wanna go to college for. Engineering? Can I actually handle math? There are so many jobs out there I’m not even aware of, I feel like I have to just GUESS at what I want to do. I’m straying a bit off topic. I live in Ohio, and the closest thing to me is a 2 year community college that doesn’t offer any abroad programs. I really scared most big colleges won’t accept me due to an incredibly low G.P.A. (Constant nasuea in a classroom made it extremley hard to focus) I want nothing more than to attend a college in japan while living on my own, but it just feels like a fantasy.
Winging it and just moving there on my own. A terrible, but entirley possible option. I have a visa. Let’s say a buy a plane ticket and arrive dead center in Tokyo. Well… now what? No car, no place to stay, can HARDLY speak japanese, and most importantly NO JOB. How do people orchstrate such a massive move? Before moving I would cleary need,
\-A large sum of emergency funds
\-To speak the language
\-An apartment to stay at
\-Some way to get around
\-An employer that has work ready for me as soon as I get there
I dont mind not doing college if I can have work ready for me. I did sushi for 3 years and was a cook for 6 months, culinary work is fun, but I can’t just move to japan and start calling up different resturaunts for a job, right?
So that’s about all there is to this post. My dream goal is to live in Japan for 2-5 years, maybe even longer. This conflicts with me wanting to do college in Japan because I heard degrees in Japanese schools don’t carry over well into other countries. So what do you guys think I should do? I’m not in a hurry to get there, but I’m getting anxious. My co-worker gave me a fortune cookie yesterday. It read “Old dreams never die; they just get filed away.” It’s the reason i’m here making this post. I don’t wanna give up.
4 comments
You might wanna delete this before people flame you. But I will try to give you an answer even if your questions have been asked a million times. There is a lot of information that you can google that will give you all the answers you need. You really didn’t need to write all of that since it makes you a target for ridicule on any of the Japan related subreddits, just something to look out for in the future. Anyways…
If you have money: language school.
If you have money and good grades: university doing English taught classes (limited degrees)
If you have money and good grades AND you are fluent in Japanese: Japanese University
If you have a degree, no money but can find a couple references: Assistant Language Teacher (JET, Interac, AEON, ECC, etc)
>I have a visa.
You have a visa? Already? For what?
General advice; Figure out what career you want to have. Then pursue the best possible education you can to enable that career. *THEN* see if you can guide your career towards Japan. Don’t sabotage your future by trying to speedrun the ‘in Japan’ portion.
>I did sushi for 3 years and was a cook for 6 months, culinary work is fun
A culinary visa would require that you have around 10 years of experience working in restaurants with influence on the menus. The restaurants have to specialize in a type of cuisine that the area you’re living in is famous for. You will not get a visa to prepare Japanese food in Japan.
>most importantly NO JOB
Before granting you a status of residence (eg, permission to live in Japan) Immigration requires that you have some sort of tie to Japan. Usually this is either family (parents, grandparents, spouse) or a domestic employer. So if you don’t already have family living in Japan to sponsor your visa you’d need to get the job *BEFORE* getting the paperwork that allows you to come here.
Hello there! If you’re not in a hurry to get over there, then I would just suggest taking it slow and start planning now. As someone who has had the chance to live in Japan in my early 20s but didn’t move here until I was in my early 30s, I’m kind of glad I made that decision.
Just my thoughts, but if I were you, I’d look into getting a 4-year degree in the states first and start studying the language. Alternatively, you did mention the military. If I’m not mistaken, I think you can do up to four years in the military as well? Get your education paid for with the /chance/ of being able to be stationed in Japan. And, if you don’t, after that four years you may have enough saved up to be able to comfortably transition over there.
Either way, it will take some time and as appealing as it sounds to fast forward to the good stuff in life, time will fly by regardless.
This is just from my own experience of course. And the expectations we craft in our minds are always really different from reality… At least for me, that’s for sure. Also, the fortune cookie thing resonates for me because I’m always looking for signs, but don’t get too lost in those thoughts!
I don’t mean to be condescending in this post, so I apologize if my tone comes off that way. And best of luck with whatever path you decide to take!
> My co-worker gave me a fortune cookie yesterday. It read “Old dreams never die; they just get filed away.” It’s the reason i’m here making this post. I don’t wanna give up.
This is actually a good piece of advice, but not in the way you’re taking it. The important thing is this: Japan isn’t going anywhere. You don’t have to move there now. You can move there in 20 years if necessary, it’ll still be much the same.
I say this because there is no way you can move to Japan in the near future with any reasonable expectation of long-term success. What you need is to sort out your life in America, get yourself a good career path with good prospects, and then consider taking that life to Japan if possible. You currently have no marketable skills, not enough money to study abroad, you are ineligible for a work visa, and you don’t know what you want to do with your life apart from move to Japan.
You claim to have a lifelong desire and dream to move to Japan, but you don’t seem to have done the basic research to know what you need in order to get a work visa. You can’t seriously expect to work as a foreigner on a work visa in a sushi restaurant.
What you need to do is straightforward:
1. Get a bachelors degree in America. Do it in a field that has job opportunities in Japan.
2. Learn Japanese – to conversational level if you go into programming or English teaching, to high level fluency for almost everything else.
3. Get a few years of work experience in America.
4. Apply for jobs in Japan, and get one.
*Then* you can move to Japan.
Every other option is either not available to you because you are ineligible, or because you don’t have enough money.