I Can Leave Japan Now

Or maybe I’ll walk a horse to a Japanese village and retire there.

September of 2025 is the 30th anniversary of my arrival in Japan. Does that mean my roots are so deep now that I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, leave?

I’m far from alone among foreigners living in Japan in that the question of, “do I stay or do I go,” is a near constant presence in the back of my mind. And while the question has remained the same, the tools I use to measure my answers change all the time.

Sometimes Japan has been an adventure, where I weigh the decision to stay or not by whether or not I’m having fun. Sometimes Japan has just been a place I live, where I measure its suitability for me in terms of mundane things like healthcare services, taxes, and cost of living. Sometimes Japan is an opportunity, or an opportunity cost, and I wonder if it’s adding to or subtracting from my ability to become something more than what I am now.

I could go on. There have been countless iterations of how I frame the question. Each time, I think I’ve cleared the fog a little more and now I have the real way I should be thinking about it.

With each variant of the question comes a different answer, for a time, and my reasons for staying evolve. That evolution leads me further and further away from the reasons I came in the first place.

Why I Came to Japan in the First Place