I moved to Japan in 2020 and have been living here now for three years. A lot has changed and happened. I have previous blog posts about year 1 and year 2. A quick summary of what changed since beginning of 2020:
- Moved abroad;
- Started living alone;
- Got married;
- Got a job as an English teacher;
- Our first appartment;
- Our second appartment;
- I became a father;
- I became a house husband.
House husband?
The part of becoming a house husband was not in the video as at the time of filming I had no intentions of quitting my job just yet, however my health told me otherwise so the decision eventually came to quit my job. As I haven’t achieved the N2 yet, many places won’t even consider to hire me.
The final decision to actually become a house husband, 主夫 (shufu) in Japanese, came after a lot of talking to my wife. We decided that for our future this is probably the best approach. I have time to get my health back, I can study Japanese and work on my other skills, and I can spend more time with my kid.
How is life in Japan?
Except for the work conditions in this country, excellent! Food is delicious and not too expensive, public transportation is extremely convenient, many places to visit, almost everything is quite reasonably priced, … There have been a lot of downsides as well.
I’ve especially started missing Belgium food, especially the snacks hahah. Here in Japan most snacks. I’m not that big of a fan of salty food. ^^” Another bad thing about snacks here is that they are sooooooo expensive!! Everything comes in small packages but costs double the amount of what something similar in Belgium would cost.
Our apartment
We are very lucky with our apartment, it’s a little on the expensive side, but we are living very convenient and the size of our apartment is just right, not too big nor too small. We do wish however to get our own house in the future but that’s not going to be possible anytime soon because I’m without a job for at least the next one and a half year.
Parents finally came!
We were finally able to have our wedding ceremony and my parents finally came to see me. The past few years because of all the lock downs and restrictions it was nearly impossible to see each other and even now, plane tickets are way too overpriced making it still almost impossible to visit each other.
It was very nice seeing my parents again, even though it was only for a week. Our wedding ceremony was a small one with only close family members attending. We planned our whole wedding ourselves, with ‘we’ I mainly mean my wife as she did most of the work and planning. Because of doing it ourselves we were even able to make a profit of our wedding hahah. Weddings here in Japan are very expensive, even though wedding gifts are big amounts of money, we are talking between 10 000 and 100 000 dollars for a simple wedding.
Stress in Japan
I’ve been struggling a lot with way too much stress, most of this was thanks to my workplace. Too many details is something I won’t be sharing, the only thing I will say about it is: If you come to Japan, be careful of English teaching jobs. Always remember that you are a number in Japan. Your ID card is even called ‘My Number Card’. In Belgium people in companies often say as a joke that they are just a number, well here in Japan they really embrace that mentality ^^”.
In short, working in Japan is quite stressful, and paperwork is just incredibly complicated. Moving to Japan 3 years ago, I knew paperwork was going to be bad, but I did not know that for certain things you have to write 5 different papers with basically the same thing to accomplish something quite simple.
My improvements
My Japanese has of course improved, but another thing I’m quite proud of is that I especially improved in programming and other IT related skills. At this moment I can basically fix almost anything. I’ve fixed air conditioners, radio’s, laptops, PC’s. Been daily driving Arch Linux (one of the more complicated operating systems). And been working on creating some games which you can find on my gamedev journey channel.
How’s my Japanese
I’m very happy to say that I passed the N3 last February! It was quite difficult even though I passed the practice tests without any problems at all. I feel that the real test was a lot more complicated for no apparent reason. However, I passed and my next goal will be the N2. I may take the N2 at the end of this year, not certain if I’ll have enough time to study for it though ^^”.
What’s next?
What’s next in my life? Well, we are thinking of having a second child, and I’ll be trying to do some freelance work instead whilst I’m a stay at home dad. I wonder how this 主夫 life will be, so far it’s going great and my stress levels have gone down a lot. My youtube channel will start changing soon in a channel more focused on my life as a 主夫 and my Japanese learning content will be switching to Voylin Sensei instead. Another big change to my channel will be that my videos will start targeting the Japanese audience a lot more.
The reason for this switch is because I’ve been wanting to separate my life and Japanese language learning from my channel for some time now and now that I’ll have more time to make content, this is going to be the perfect chance. The content may come slow in the beginning but will be published faster as I get more used to my new life.
Big steps
The change of focus on my youtube channel and the start of Voylin Sensei and Voylin’s gamedev journey will make my life a little bit more busy. Also, this website has been completely re-made as well and still requires some more work to become better. But I’ll be taking my time and break down these big steps one at a time. I got too stressed at work, let’s try not to get panic attacks at home as well. ^^”