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Why I left Japan

By on October 11, 2023

I left because my salary was comparatively low to someone in a similar position in America and after almost ten years in Japan, I’d felt it was time to return to my home country. I thought my job prospects would be better in America and I was offered a job in a different field at a much higher salary.

But when I moved back to America, I quickly learned that this job was not a good fit for me. More than that, many of the cracks in the American system that I never noticed before became glaringly obvious after having spent time in Japan. Health care was prohibitively expensive—even the bare bones cheapest plan was more expensive than what I was paying for the more comprehensive public health insurance in Japan. Cost of living was also ridiculously more expensive than Japan. I’d been renting a 3DK apartment in Japan for about $500 a month. An equivalent size apartment in San Diego (where my new job was) was $1400, almost three times as much. Groceries, going out, everything felt like it was far more expensive in America than in Japan.

And that’s before we get into the safety issue. “There’s no crime in Japan” is absolutely a myth and there are dangers in Japan—it’s not as safe as the Japanese government wants its citizens to believe. That being said, in Japan, I never had to worry that some psychopath would walk into a Walmart, buy an AR-15 without so much as a background check, and then walk into a school or a mall or a grocery store and start mowing people down.

Plus, the education field in America is becoming harder and harder for teachers. I’m an adjunct university teacher in Japan and what I’m able to make in Japan allows for a comfortable lifestyle. Adjuncts in America are often living in very difficult conditions, some of them even being forced to live out of their car because they can’t afford rent. Add to that the aforementioned health care problems and if you get sick, then your best case scenario is that you set up a GoFundMe page that goes viral.

So after about six months, I moved back to Japan. I’ve now been back here for about six years and have since started a family. I could not imagine moving my family back to America under the current situation. We get child care subsidies here, my kids get free health care and free pre-school starting at age 3, and when they start going to school, I won’t have to live in fear that their little bodies will be pulverized by a weapon of war.

Is Japan perfect? Absolutely not. Not by any stretch of the imagination. The ruling political party is an absolute failure, wages are stagnant, taxes are too high for not enough benefit, sexism continues to be a massive issue, and the only opposition parties with any idea of improvements are in too weak of an electoral position to have a chance at victory.

But I’d take it over America any day of the week.

About Perry Constantine

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