Good afternoon everyone.
Just enjoying my time in Kanazawa these past few days and wondering if there are any expats who can share their experiences living in the city.
Looking to move to Japan for a year and wondered what it’s like to live in a small city outside of Tokyo.
Your shared experiences is much appreciated.
I noticed that not many people walk their dogs out on the street. Will it be a problem to rent if I import my dog 🐶 from Canada?
Thank you
4 comments
This is a copy of your post for archive/search purposes.
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**Moving to Kanazawa**
Good afternoon everyone.
Just enjoying my time in Kanazawa these past few days and wondering if there are any expats who can share their experiences living in the city.
Looking to move to Japan for a year and wondered what it’s like to live in a small city outside of Tokyo.
Your shared experiences is much appreciated.
I noticed that not many people walk their dogs out on the street. Will it be a problem to rent if I import my dog 🐶 from Canada?
Thank you
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Being a foreigner and having a dog will severely limit the places that are willing to rent to you. Furthermore, the process to bring a dog in from Canada is *extensive*, so I would suggest you have a look at the [wiki on the topic](https://www.reddit.com/r/movingtojapan/wiki/pets/).
It’s a lot different living here in comparison to visiting so just be aware of that when considering moving here. Plus bringing dogs over is a lot of work from what I’ve heard and if you’re only planning on staying for a year, I’m not sure if that’d be worth it to you if someone from home can watch them for that time. Although I know that’s a hard choice but ultimately up to you.
I lived in Kanazawa for a little over 6 months when I first moved to Japan. I was working at an eikaiwa that went bankrupt (the original Nova – [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_(eikaiwa)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_(eikaiwa))) during the bankruptcy. When they were going bankrupt I was on a working holiday, which meant I could do pretty much any job I wanted. But my Japanese was not close to professional level. So I was not able to find any jobs at all. I moved to the Tokyo area and have been here ever since.
These days I’m sure Kanazawa has significantly more tourists then when I was living there. I was there before the Shinkansen line had made it that far. If you weren’t able to speak decent Japanese you basically lived apart from society. Its probably better now since google translate (and similar products) exists in everyone’s pocket. But generally speaking if you’re outside of the big cities you can’t expect to find anyone to speak anything other than Japanese.