12 Reasons NOT to Move to Japan

tell us the bad stuff about japan if there's anything bad everything on this channel always seems so overly positive about the country overly positive that's not true this all right there might be some element of truth in that in many ways over the last nine years this channel has become one great big sales pitch for living in japan uh you know look at the stunning scenery taste the mouth-watering food look it's mount fuji and bullet trains and a guy in a bathtub the truth is the channel has been so positive about japan because i've had an overwhelmingly good experience living here and the videos kind of reflect that as a result i have been biased and i've never really talked about the not so good stuff that comes with we're living here and honestly this country certainly isn't perfect i mean nowhere is right except maybe norway and narnia so i've thought long and hard about it and i've come up with 12 reasons not to move to japan some reasons are obvious others might come as a bit of a surprise i'm aware this might feel like i'm betraying some viewers who've seen japan through these videos over the years and dreamed of living here someday like i'm crushing some dreams but honestly despite some of the bad things in this video my aim isn't to dissuade you from moving here far from it i want to prepare you for any situations and cultural hurdles you may face or encounter in everyday life and no it's not going to be one of those click bait videos like reasons not to live in japan number one the food is so delicious you'll die from overeating no get out so let's dive in and hopefully by the end of this video and the 12 reasons your dreams of living in japan will firmly be intact yeah there you go good as new [Music] [Applause] do you like watching films in the evening without headphones or having a space in your kitchen to cook food maybe you just enjoy sitting in your chair without hearing your neighbors through the wall yeah get ready to say goodbye to all those things and more as you move into your tiny apartment with walls made of paper that's actual noise from the wall yes it's the obvious one accommodation is often small expensive and poorly soundproof just yesterday i heard my neighbours through one of the walls have an argument for about an hour and it was so clear that i could pretty much hear every word they were saying like it sounded like she was angry at him because he wasn't subscribed to abroad in japan that was a cheap shot even by my standards sorry now i'm never really minded about living in a small apartment as i have done the entire time i've been living here it's kind of fun fitting your life into a small space it gives you a sort of minimalistic mindset where you have to be very careful about the things you buy and what you fill your apartment with and in my case i choose to fill the apartment with cheap hats from 100 yen store covered in weird english in this case jumping pounding the rock it's my new favorite addition to my prestigious hat collection brilliant spending a thousand dollars a month on a tiny studio apartment it's just the reality of living in a city like tokyo and in your 20s or even in your 30s it probably won't be too much of an issue the problem though for me has always been the lack of privacy uh when i first moved to sendai i lived in what looked like a nice modern studio apartment it was well lit the bathroom was nice and the bed smelled like daffodils but then i moved in and started sleeping in the bed and i discovered i could hear my neighbour snoring through the cardboard wall so clearly at night i used to genuinely wake up at night and think someone was in the room it all felt a little bit like silent hill another time i ended up with a neighbour who happened to be the worst neighbour in the history of japan with a daily experience that pushed me to the brink of my sanity every morning at 7 00 a. m i'd be in bed fast asleep and my neighbor this guy would leave for work and there'd be a bang in the door and you'd hear his footsteps trail off and then just as he drifted off and fell back to sleep you'd hear the ominous sound of the footsteps returning the door would unlock and then and this is completely true and i can't believe it happened he would open and close the door 25 [ __ ] times every single morning i would count it one two three [ __ ] in my desperation i brought these super mega noise cancelling wonder headphones you could be in front of a [ __ ] fireworks factory going up in flames split these bad boys on and hear nothing perfect just peace and quiet well not quite because every time he shut the door the whole bloody building you could feel the paper wall moving you could feel the bed rattle honestly by the end i felt like slamming his head in the door 25 times every morning but realizing it was probably some deeply ingrained psychological trauma instead i ran away for six weeks and rode a bike across japan and journey across japan was born so if you've ever enjoyed watching journey across japan it's all thanks to my noisy neighbor genuinely but i miss the days of watching a film at 11 p. m and not having to worry about my neighbours i miss the days of having friends come over and not having to worry that someone's laughing or talking too loudly and that's before you've even got your apartment which is a process so incredibly unpleasant it'll make you want to jump up and down pounding on the rock so the hundreds of foreigners i've met living in japan over the years i've never met a single one who's looked me dead in the eye and said yeah i love looking for apartments in japan like it's not fun and that's down to a simple factor and that is as a foreigner living in japan many apartments don't allow you to live there to rent it out now i should preface this by saying if you come here with a job a lot of the time your company will sort you out an apartment and certainly in my first three years i was very lucky that my apartment was all ready to go however after that i moved to sendai and i was looking for apartments i found one that i really liked and i put in a bid and they turned me down because i was a foreign resident because i wasn't japanese and that's something that happens a few times and it's not a nice feeling to be discriminated against just because you're not japanese the only way i could get over feeling irritated and kind of angry about it was to try and be sympathetic and try and look at it from the perspective of the landlord a good friend of mine who's a foreign resident rented out one of his apartments a few years ago and the property management company actually warned him not to allow foreigners to stay there there's a little box you can tick that says no foreigners in your apartment and they presented him with some numbers and statistics to sort of suggest that foreign residents are a flight risk that they would skip the country on their last month and not pay the rent which does unfortunately happen causing a lot of stress and problems for the landlord not only that but the odds of having a foreign resident are very low in your apartment by virtue of the fact that 98 of japan's population are ethnically japanese whatever way you look at it it doesn't stop the whole process from being unpleasant like i can't put a positive spin on it it's just not fun except for the fact that when you do get your apartment finally you do feel like you've completed the world's hardest video game albeit a costly video game that you didn't enjoy playing and one that was riddled with relentless discrimination [Music] certainly no pac-man no discrimination there although there is a guy there being weirdly attacked by lots of yeah anyway [Music] a few years ago there was a news story of a japanese train that had done something truly unthinkable a railway company issued a public apology after a train scheduled to leave at 9 4 a.

m left the station at 9 44 am oh my god i can't believe wait what yes that's right a train had left the station 20 seconds early it was supposed to leave at 9 minutes 44 and 40 seconds but it left at 9 minutes 44 and 20 seconds oh my god while westermedia had gobsmacked at the concept of a train apologizing for leaving more or less on time it also makes sense in japan the country where things are formidably punctual things are on time and things always run and work like clockwork as a consumer japan is pretty much perfect i mean we've already seen that but of course all of this comes at a price there's a reason everything works so well in japan and it comes at human cost it's built on the back of a workforce who sacrificed so much for the greater good of society working for a japanese company can be brutal particularly medium to large organization the hours are long the lack of control over your own life is minimal taking holiday leave for a japanese worker is almost as difficult as getting an apartment as a foreign resident like studies have shown that only half of workers in japan take their paid vacation they get 20 days of annual leave and they only take 10 of them which seems unthinkable coming from the uk where everyone is very much keen to go on their holiday and the reason for that is leaving your workplace and going on holiday in japan it looks bad you will get ostracized for it by your colleagues by your superiors maybe not to your face but certainly behind closed doors you won't be seen as a team player if you're somebody who's not in the office much it's a very strange thing like you don't actually have to be doing anything productive at the workplace in japan you just have to be present being seen at work or present in the office is viewed upon more favorably than being productive or doing anything actually good even i got a taste of this as an english teacher i could go home at 4 30 p. m every day but if i stayed until 6 p.