To preface, I was born in Tokyo and moved to the US at the age of 10 since my father found a very high paying job after working international sales in Japan. From that point on, I’ve lived my life in the US, completely dropping Japanese by finishing school and working here for a few years now. Life state side is okay, but when I’m back in Japan, I actually feel at home. It doesn’t help that my parents also moved back to Japan and I’ve been here by myself for the past few years. Thing is, I’ve already established a life here with a wife, house and friends, but the more I go back to Japan to visit family/friends and the months pass in the state, there is an ever growing feeling of wanting to move back.
Now my biggest dilemma’s with moving back are:
– Lack of Japanese. My Japanese skills are very low because I haven’t used Japanese once I moved state side. Essentially it’s been stuck at a 10 year old level, but degraded (especially in reading/writing) since I don’t use it daily. Sure, I talk with my friends/parents in Japanese, but with parents, its usually the same questions so its easy. With friends, I sometimes struggle to understand what they’re saying or how to reply just due to vocabulary, but this is mainly topics or things I haven’t heard of before or topics you generally won’t hear regularly.
– Massive salary cut. I’m a Software Eng (Full stack: backend, frontend, security) in the Bay Area making a very very comfortable salary. Just talking to my friends/random folks in Tokyo who are also devs, my salary would be easily be cut 5x.
– Finding a job. Even though I have almost 4 years of experience in the States and dev’s are quite short handed in Japan, I’m hearing that the market for engineers is relatively small. Also, lack of Japanese might make this even harder to land a role.
– Work life balance. I enjoy my WLB here in the states as it’s dynamic. 1 week, I might barely need to work because we just delivered a massive feature and just need to be close to a computer in case something comes up. The next week, I might need to work long just for a day or two to get a feature out. In Japan, you’re pretty much pushed to work long hours. Thoughts?
– History to start life back up. The historical thing I have about me in Japan are my citizenship and medical/school records from when I was a child. Basically a huge hiatus. Issue is, if I try to start renting or buy a house, they might ask for more historical information, like where did you live previously? Rent history? etc… How hard would it be to rent or buy property or other things to establish life with a lack/hiatus of history?
– Pension. I know that if you become jobless you still need to pay into the pension system. Would I essentially need to pay back into the pension system from the age of 20?
Are my thoughts pretty on point? Any other things I might want to be aware of?
10 comments
This is a copy of your post for archive/search purposes.
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**Moving back home to Tokyo after years in America.**
To preface, I was born in Tokyo and moved to the US at the age of 10 since my father found a very high paying job after working international sales in Japan. From that point on, I’ve lived my life in the US, completely dropping Japanese by finishing school and working here for a few years now. Life state side is okay, but when I’m back in Japan, I actually feel at home. It doesn’t help that my parents also moved back to Japan and I’ve been here by myself for the past few years. Thing is, I’ve already established a life here with a wife, house and friends, but the more I go back to Japan to visit family/friends and the months pass in the state, there is an ever growing feeling of wanting to move back.
Now my biggest dilemma’s with moving back are:
– Lack of Japanese. My Japanese skills are very low because I haven’t used Japanese once I moved state side. Essentially it’s been stuck at a 10 year old level, but degraded (especially in reading/writing) since I don’t use it daily. Sure, I talk with my friends/parents in Japanese, but with parents, its usually the same questions so its easy. With friends, I sometimes struggle to understand what they’re saying or how to reply just due to vocabulary, but this is mainly topics or things I haven’t heard of before or topics you generally won’t hear regularly.
– Massive salary cut. I’m a Software Eng (Full stack: backend, frontend, security) in the Bay Area making a very very comfortable salary. Just talking to my friends/random folks in Tokyo who are also devs, my salary would be easily be cut 5x.
– Finding a job. Even though I have almost 4 years of experience in the States and dev’s are quite short handed in Japan, I’m hearing that the market for engineers is relatively small. Also, lack of Japanese might make this even harder to land a role.
– Work life balance. I enjoy my WLB here in the states as it’s dynamic. 1 week, I might barely need to work because we just delivered a massive feature and just need to be close to a computer in case something comes up. The next week, I might need to work long just for a day or two to get a feature out. In Japan, you’re pretty much pushed to work long hours. Thoughts?
– History to start life back up. The historical thing I have about me in Japan are my citizenship and medical/school records from when I was a child. Basically a huge hiatus. Issue is, if I try to start renting or buy a house, they might ask for more historical information, like where did you live previously? Rent history? etc… How hard would it be to rent or buy property or other things to establish life with a lack/hiatus of history?
– Pension. I know that if you become jobless you still need to pay into the pension system. Would I essentially need to pay back into the pension system from the age of 20?
Are my thoughts pretty on point? Any other things I might want to be aware of?
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Although we live two completely different lives we share the same feeling towards Japan. In the end, I decided to stay in the UK. At my current job, I get about 5.5 weeks of paid holiday a year, do good hours, paid overtime etc. I could travel to Japan twice a year if I want to. Japan has many positive sides, but most of your time will be spent at the workplace and that has many negative sides. You might love the thrill of moving to Japan, and perhaps enjoy the first year or so, after that your current comfort will kick in reminding you of the bad decision you might have made.
You should just take great vacations in Japan every 3 months or so and keep living and working in the US.
I don’t think you’ll be living the extreme overtime salaryman life as a dev in Japan, especially if you’re coming from overseas. There’s also websites that cater to foreigners for renting apartments too. And if you did japanese up to age ten I’m sure you could learn it a lot quicker than other foreigners who move here to work in tech without any japanese as you have an inherent base to some level. Maybe you could try asking your current job if you could go renote for a month or two and come over to test our if you like it enough to move. And while you’ll take a hit in salary your cost of living will be much lower than in the bay area, as regards pension I think as a US citizen you can still have access to index funds for investment and just manage your own pension etc as I’m sure there won’t be much of a state pension left by the time you retire unfortunately.
You should be able to find a job that doesn’t require you to speak Japanese, but it may be a good idea to go to a language school to learn Japanese. People tend to be less tolerant toward a Japanese person who can’t speak in keigo than toward foreigners.
No, banks don’t ask for your medical/school records for mortgage. It’s good enough if you have more than a few year’s work history in Japan at a decent company. You do need to pass a health checkup for a life insurance called 団信 though in most cases.
No, you don’t have to pay pension for the period you were not in Japan.
Why not move to Japan for a year or two to see what it’s like? It’s one thing to vacation in Japan but it’s quite another to work, and there’s no knowing if both you and your wife can adapt until you give it a try.
You can still find six-figure jobs as a dev in Japan, and that money goes a lot further since COL is lower. I’ve seen plenty of dev/engineering/SRE jobs starting at like 12 mil JPY and up.
The pension thing is complicated but IIRC the US and Japan have reciprocal agreements around taxes, social insurance, etc. You should talk to an immigration attorney to get more details though.
I mean what does your wife think of moving, it’s not just you in this equation.
I moved from the bay area to Tokyo last year, software engineer. Not Japanese but 5 years of study + N2 before I moved. Sounds like at your comp level you’re making big tech money with 4 years of experience maybe L4, L5? You’re claiming 0.2x salary, but if you work at a branch office (外資系) for big tech you’ll be closer to 0.6-0.8x (depending on what exchange rate you want to use…). Note that RSUs will still get paid out in dollars which makes for a very interesting exchange rate + stock price changes. Work life balance is essentially the same as US companies, and internal coms for engineers are in English. Work with Japanese customers you’d need some business Japanese.
Disadvantage is indeed the number of companies you can work for, you lose job flexibility and are limited to a few foreign firms. Additionally it’s hard to grow past L5, since that normally requires greater org impact. Also note Japan branches weren’t immune to layoffs and most are still in a hiring freeze. There isn’t the same hum of tech stuff constantly around you (like a group of people working on startup in every cafe), though I’m not sure many places can match SV for that. Funny enough, seemed like chatgpt got everyone talking about tech for a bit.
After 13 years in the bay I just couldn’t deal with all the problems that money couldn’t fix. I took the salary cut but am much healthier and happier. No longer stuck in 1 hour traffic trying to meet friends, enjoying walking everywhere, amazing service quality without tip flation, no longer worried about my stuff getting stolen (in my trunk, if I leave it unattended to use the restroom).
Sounds like me except I already alluded to semi-retiring in Japan vs moving right now.
Work 9 months a year for 25% pay cut and spend Summers in Japan by yourself. Leave the family in SF. It will be a tough conversation but you pay the bills, right?