After a two-week trip in 2015, my husband and I came home completely hooked on Japan.
Reliability was the baseline; trains ran with a clockwork precision that transformed the daily commute into an exercise in discovery. We fell for the profound sense of safety that allowed small children to navigate the streets alone, the atmosphere of the neighborhood shrines, and the level of public order that made everything back home feel chaotic by comparison.
What began as a simple holiday evolved into a total life reset that would take over the next eight years of our lives. We decided Japan wasn’t just a spot to visit but the place we would raise our family.
We stopped saving for the “someday” dream of homeownership in New Zealand and instead invested in the present, putting our money toward several return trips to Japan to scout our new life.
In preparation for our move abroad, we researched local customs and dedicated ourselves to intensive language study. My husband and I enrolled in university-level courses, while we arranged private tutoring for our daughter to give her the best possible start.
We convinced ourselves that if we planned carefully enough, nothing would catch us off guard. By the time the move finally happened in 2023, my husband and I, along with my daughter, felt ready for anything.
We assumed the hardest part would be the logistics of moving and that first wave of culture shock. After two and a half years of actually living here, I’ve learned we weren’t even close.
You cannot plan for a change in identity
I’ve always liked to feel prepared and in control, which is probably why it took me eight years to feel ready to leave New Zealand.
Before we moved, I researched everything I could think of, from how Japan’s specialized health clinics differed from our general practices in New Zealand to the specific paperwork required for city office registrations.
I watched vlogs of people sharing their grocery hauls in Tokyo, noting the prices of staples like milk and eggs, and read blog posts detailing a day in the life of expats in Japan.
Talk of culture shock and language barriers didn’t scare me, as practical problems often have practical solutions. What I couldn’t have anticipated was how living abroad would make me feel like an imposter.
On the surface, I looked confident and capable, sharing photos of our newest adventures with friends and family on social media. In reality, even small, daily interactions left me panicked and second-guessing myself.
My heart would race whenever someone asked me a question, and I couldn’t find the words to respond.
I felt embarrassed every time I had to rely on Google Translate at the supermarket or to make sense of yet another form. A parcel even sat on my bedroom floor, undelivered, for six months because I was too intimidated to figure out the local post-office process.
For someone who built her identity around independence, constantly needing help from others felt frustrating and humiliating.
Being the parent at school who needed things repeated, the customer holding up the line, or the one relying on her husband to translate slowly chipped away at my confidence.
Living without a support system is harder than I thought
That same fierce independence I’d always been proud of also meant I didn’t prioritize building a support network when we arrived in Japan.
I assumed friendships would happen the way they always had — through school events, casual chats, and repeated proximity. I figured I’d naturally end up grabbing coffee with a few people, even if the coffee wasn’t quite as good as New Zealand’s.
It turns out friendships are harder to build when language and cultural barriers sit between every conversation.
So instead, I buried myself in work and told myself I was too busy to socialize. Our family travelled most weekends, which made it easy to stay occupied and harder to admit I felt lonely.
The few friends I have made, I love dearly. However, deep friendships take time, and life feels heavier when you don’t have someone nearby to lean on.
That absence felt sharpest when my grandmother passed away in 2024, and I couldn’t show up for my family. I wasn’t able to cook meals for my mum, sit with my grandfather, or say goodbye properly.
Grieving from afar isn’t something you can really plan for; you realize too late that a final goodbye is gated behind a 14-hour flight and a four-figure plane ticket.
Despite the small four-hour time difference, the geography of our new life meant I was out of reach when it mattered most.
Japan has made our lives easier in many practical ways. We save money, travel more, and have access to high-quality medical care whenever we need it.
However, all the convenience and travel in the world can’t replace community.
Even our best expectations didn’t survive real life
Before we moved, we thought we’d covered the language gap: My husband completed a four-year Japanese degree, our daughter grew up exposed to the language, and I studied as much as I could.
We assumed that would be enough to get by, and from a practical point of view, it is. I can grocery shop, book appointments, and navigate daily life without much trouble.
However, existing within a community is not the same as belonging in one. At parent meetings and school events, conversations move too quickly for me to follow, and I rarely feel able to contribute anything meaningful.
Over time, I realized language wasn’t the only barrier to belonging.
Understanding the system’s gears didn’t mean I knew how to be one of them. I understood that Japan prioritizes the group over the individual, but adapting to this is a lot harder in practice.
Every time I asked school staff for an exception for my daughter — a quiet corner during assembly or permission for her to wear her noise-cancelling headphones during music classes — the smiles across the table turned thin and rigid. There was no argument, just a heavy, polite wall of silence that told me I’d stepped out of bounds.
It left me in an impossible spot: I was fighting to get her the support she needed, but by speaking up, I was highlighting the very differences I was trying to help her navigate.
Japan has still given us the life we planned for, just not in the ways we expected. Now, we have to decide if the life we worked eight years to build is worth the community we’re living without.
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