How to move to Japan

The road to Japan starts here. How to move to Japan? You just go. A long time in the dreaming, now the planning has taken over. So much done and yet more still to do.

The easy answer to the question of how to move to Japan is: get a job and go. But the longer version is full of conversations with friends who had also done some teaching English abroad, especially in Asia. Then there was the decision to do the Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (the CELTA). If it was a film, there would be a sped-up montage of the time spent saving as much money as possible to see me through the time studying and the first few months in Japan. Interviewing with a company in the UK that offered help finding a place to live – although not with flights – then meant waiting quite a few months for a place to come up. Easy, right?!

In my last dull office job, I had a little black and white picture of Mount Fuji pinned to my cubicle wall. Sometimes I used to think I had this plan of escape so I could duck out of responsibilities here, claiming I wouldn’t be around to fulfil them. Now, having made the decision to go, I know it is the right one. I am not going to be one of those people that stand in the pub talking about how they would love to do something, I am going to be one of the ones that does it.

It might be all I dreamed of, or it might be completely rubbish. This could be the start of a worldwide voyage or I could be back in a month, missing mushy peas, tea bags and the endless rain. Still, I will have given it a go and at the very least, I will have some new anecdotes to share when I am propping up the bar in the local, wherever that local ends up being.

Photo by Ningyu He on Unsplash