Hello,
I am considering applying for the JET program for next year. I have two cats where I live now and I was concerned about what I would do about them if I were to participate (ideally i’d like to bring them but it might not be worth stressing them and going through the process if I don’t end up staying with the program/in Japan for more than a year).
I was wondering if anyone by chance has taken their pets with them when they’ve gone to do JET.
To my understanding, coming to Japan with pets is a bit of a more difficult process because of it being a rabies free country.
18 comments
If you are only going for a year I think it would be in the cats best interest to perhaps stay with a friend or family, air travel is very stressful and potentially harmful for them and Japanese apartments tend to be pretty small.
Nah, don’t put them through that. International travel is awful for animals. You care about cats far more than they do you, sad truth – they’ll be fine.
People have brought pets, although it is highly discouraged. The official answer from JET is that you’re not allowed, just because of how much extra stress it is.
Depending on your country, your pet might require a long quarantine once they enter Japan. Leading up to coming over, you will need to prepare many documents from your vet, as well as extra immunizations (it’s expensive).
Then you will require pet-friendly housing, which will likely be different from what your CO offers you. You might end up on your own trying to find that – and, depending on your placement and Japanese level, that could be a whole other nightmare.
If you’re only planning on staying a year or two, it would be in your (and your animals’) best interest to find a suitable sitter for that period (family or good friends). If you end up deciding you’re going to make Japan home, you can bring them over at that time.
There’s a guy on YouTube who successfully brought his two dogs and we are hoping to bring our two cats if I am selected this year. We’ve already started the process with their vet for a July departure. We plan to stay for at least 3 years though and we don’t have anyone who would watch them while we are gone. Also they are VERY attached to me so I think it would be stressful for them to be apart from me. My husband will bring them over when he comes with our 2 year old two weeks after me. I don’t think it would be easy to bring them for orientation. Also it is expensive just to warn you and a long process depending on where you are bring them from since Japan is a rabies free country.
I agree with the other commenters who say the air travel will be hard, and also add that so many hours in the belly of a plane is the least of what they’ll go through. Once they arrive in Japan they’ll have to be quarantined for about a month at the airport before they can be released to you. It’s also going to be very expensive for you to bring them over, and if any of the documents have anything missing you won’t be able to bring them.
A friend of mine brought over her cat but she waited about six months, and she’s been there for almost four years now so it was worth it to her to bring him over. If you’re just gonna be there for a year I wouldn’t do it.
This was my mindset when I began thinking of applying in 2020. I was asking my cat’s vet, researching a ton, watching videos, getting encouragement, etc. Ultimately, I decided that I’d come first and bring her with me after a few months.
I’ve been here since August now, and let me just say, I am *so* glad I left my cat with my family. If you have that option, I highly suggest just going with that. My cat is perfectly happy without me, has adjusted just fine to her new house and home, and I’m out here in Japan, traveling all around without worrying about going back home to a cat ASAP.
*I* might get lonely without my cat sometimes, but my family sends me plenty of pictures and videos. I live a completely different life here in Japan than I did in America, and sadly my cat didn’t fit into it. But that’s the experience!
Seeing that you’re only talking about a span of one year upon reading your post, don’t do it.
I brought my senior dog to Japan when my husband and I moved here on JET almost 6 years ago. I ended up finding my own pet friendly housing with permission from my CO.
For 6 months before, we trained him to the sounds, smells, and sights of an airport. We recreated the feeling of being in a plane as best we could so it wouldn’t be a new experience for him. He slept peacefully in his crate in cabin the entire 11 hour flight.
It took us 20 minutes to get through immigration at KIX and then we took the train home.
For us it was worth it because we knew we would be staying here post JET and rehoming wasn’t an option due to his special needs.
It’s expensive if you’re coming from a non-designated region, there’s no guarantee that there will be pet friendly housing for you, it’s not a guarantee that your new life will be amenable to a pet, and it can be very stressful for your pet if they aren’t prepared.
For the short term (1-3 years) I strongly suggest against bringing your pet.
If you cannot be bothered spending the 20 seconds to google “Bringing pets to Japan Jet Programme” than you couldn’t be arsed going through all the paperwork required.
That aside, it’s also an incredibly stressful thing to put your pet through, and it’s something you cannot do when you first come to JApan with the rest of the ALTs.
Unless you are 100% planning on staying, ***don’t do it.***
I’ve lived in Japan for a long time, and I have two cats now, but if I tried to have them my first few years in Japan it would have been a giant disaster.
To begin with you have to get them over here which is quite tedious but you could probably figure it out. That’s the end of the good news. The next thing is that you’ll need to rent an apartment that allows pets, but that means you’ll probably have to do apartment hunting on your own. Your contracting organization is certainly not going to waste time with this, and should your contracting organization have an apartment that they rent you for cheap, it probably doesn’t allow pets. If you don’t speak japanese, good luck finding an apartment that you can live in. But even if you can find an apartment that allows pets, it still sucks, because you’re going to have to pay a lot more for it. In my observation the apartments that allow for pets are typically two person apartments, so you might pay 30% or 50% more in rent, and that’s a big deal because you’re not getting paid a lot to begin with. Of course there are not very many pet friendly apartments, so the locations that you can live in will probably be inconvenient. Then you might need to get a car, so you can easily get your cats to and from the vet. Or perhaps you could take a taxi for that, for the bus, but you would have to check on the policies that they have involving transport with pets. Since your living location might not be convenient, you might take significantly longer to get to and from your job.
And then you have the challenges that show up if you want to travel within the country. Who’s going to take care of your cats? You can’t just leave them there for several days home alone. So then you’re going to have to look into pet boarding or finding a pet sitter, but good luck with finding a pet sitter in the countryside. And pet boarding might be a long ways away, especially if you live somewhere rural. Of course you could be lucky and find some friends who will take care of the cats while you’re away, but the friends you are likely to make quickly are other ALTs, and most of them are going to want to travel on the same exact vacations that you’re going to travel on.
Oh, and should you be crazy enough to rent an apartment that has tatami, the cats are going to destroy the tatami.
If you decide to stay in Japan for many years, and you’re in a medium or large city, and your Japanese skills are really good, and you have a lot of cash lying around, then you might consider bringing your cats over. It’s a much better idea to plan on them staying in your home country for the year, and should the stars magically align, then you could revisit the matter.
Also, please pay the cat tax.
I would seriously just leave them when you come here.
I’m not sure whether you’ve lived in Japan before, but it’s kind of rare to have a larger living space. The majority of living arrangements here are small (google leopalace for some reference). This isn’t to say that everyone ends up with places this tiny – but even if you weren’t facing a million other challenges in bringing them here, I doubt they could be happy with so little space.
It’s a huge hassle, a lot of paperwork, most places don’t allow pets of any kind anyway, and at the end of the day it’s not a great thing to put your animals through. This isn’t a permanent move – even if it becomes that later, it sounds like it isn’t now. There’s no reason to put yourself or your animals through this.
I also don’t know if you’ve ever lived alone before, or lived in another county, but there’s a high likelihood that you’ll face a lot of personal challenges in moving to another county. There’s no reason to add more stress to yourself. There’s a huge emphasis on mental health in moving abroad, and I am of the opinion that it would be incredibly unwise to add more to that strain. This would be an extremely stressful and unfun process on top of everything else.
If you love your animals, do not put them through massive travel trauma just so you can be with them for one year. They will be much happier being rehomed to someone in your area. Don’t be selfish.
Terrible idea, and you’ll have to find your own pet-friendly housing, so you’ll be bumping heads with the programme right from the start.
I had a neighbor JET who brought her cat with her to her placement, but she had to arrange it all with the BOE before even arriving in Japan. Extremely lucky and very time consuming process from what I heard.
So basically don’t count on it.
Also (not OP but) anyone reading this and considering bringing their dog with them… no. Just no.
Thé GIH ( rule book for JETs ) specifically states JETs cannot bring their pets with them on JET. If a BOE is super super kind then maybe they will allow this, but most likely they won’t.
CLAIRs main reasoning for this is that everyone is picked up from the airport at the same time and they can’t arrange extra stuff for the one JET with pets. Plus you’d be in a Tokyo Hotel for a couple days after ( where you gonna put your pet?) maybe if you came with a spouse you could get away with it but not sure.
A friend of mine got into a fight with her BOE and CLAIR because they wouldn’t let her bring her cats, and she was eventually forced to withdraw like a week before departure and had to pay for flights etc.
In my case as a CIR without designated housing, i made sure to move into a place that allowed pets. saved up enough money for the pet deposit/ pet relocation stuff and when i went home for christmas 3 months later, I picked up my cat from my parents home and brought her to Japan. Now she’s chilling at the bottom of my feet as I write this, and my job absolutely does not care. I wouldn’t recommend doing anything else.
Your gonna be locking your pet in a small apartment for 10-12 hours a day and most likely be traveling during the weekends as well. I left my cat with my parents and it was the right call. I know it ain’t fun to think about, but it’s the right call.
Hey I asked this question several months back. [Here’s a link to the post](https://www.reddit.com/r/JETProgramme/comments/vm1kyw/doing_jet_with_pets/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf) in case you wanted to read what others told me.
Full disclosure that I’m not a JET and decided not to apply because of my pets but it wasn’t for the reason these posts are mentioning. I did more research and reached out to some JET friends of mine who reached out to their JET group chats and I mostly got the same answers: “Every situation is different” (no surprise to hear that) and “It will be more difficult, maybe impossible, and you’d have probably need to get a mid-sized to major city placement”. I had no problems doing that if it came down to it…
But then I looked at the cost to get the cats there. JET requires you fly from your home country on their flight with no animals, and then stay in their hotel until after orientation. No exceptions. No flying to Japan early and meeting them at the hotel. No booking your own flight with your animals and them comping you. You *have* to make the flight from your home country to orientation without your animals and they must take a separate trip. Plus, I have two cats as well, meaning I cannot take them both on the plane as my carry-on. Either both would have to be checked in as cargo, or an extra person would have to fly with me and take the second cat as carry-on (you can fly solo but buy the extra ticket, but if the plane is overbooked they will cancel your second ticket and give it to someone else then you’re screwed because you can’t take two animals as carry-on on one ticket).
No matter how I shook it, due to this it would be an insane hassle and several thousand dollars when I’d already be flipping my life upside down *and* taking a huge pay cut due to the yen being so low against the US dollar.
JET is a great program but unfortunately it follows the stereotypical Japanese set-up of very strict guidelines that are a massive headache to deviate from. It frustrates me to no end but at the end of the day it is what it is. As long as they keep filling their slots I suppose everything is working out so complaining would just be sour grapes from me lol.
Feel welcome to DM if you want to know more about what research I did into how I would’ve gotten my cats to Japan if I did JET, if you’d like to see my calculations I’m more than happy to share.
I looked extensively into bringing my cat to Japan both with the JET program as well as other ALT options and I won’t repeat everything that others have probably already told you about money and time but do consider that if the slightest detail in paperwork is wrong or some sort of form was not filled out in time, your pet will be locked up in a facility that is most likely going to be very far from your placement and your pet will be kept in a small metal cage until the paperwork is sorted out. I’ve read stories of pets being locked up for months on end as owners struggled to coordinate between their home countries and Japan for the correct paperwork or information necessary to release the pet. This sort of experience would be incredibly traumatizing for a pet so I ultimately I decided I would leave my precious boy with my family instead of potentially putting him through all of that. Clearly, through posts I have read, some people are able to do it successfully but it seems like a lot of it comes down to luck and I’m willing to bet on luck for myself but it would feel selfish to do it for my little guy. I hope you are able to make a decision that works best for you and your critters 🙂
Two cats will cost roughly $10,000 to bring to Japan. Then you’ll have to pay roughly $10,000 again go bring them back.
Jet take home pay after taxes is about $20,000 for first years?
It is not financially viable.