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The US sucks, don’t have a job. I’m considering just moving to Japan and staring life anew. Thoughts?

Don’t.

For some reason (anime, gaming, etc etc), guys tend to think of Japan as some sort of American-guy-Mecca, complete with beautiful girls, tons of jobs, fame, fortune, and fun. This is pretty much anything but the case, unfortunately. Honestly, Japan is a great place. I’ve lived there for a while, and it’s somewhere that is an absolute blast, especially if you know enough of the language to get around properly. Japan is not, however, that remarkably different than America.

Being a foreigner in Japan can be a lot of fun, but you are very deliberately discriminated against, and many foreigners in Japan find themselves stuck in a low paying, low respect job simply because Japanese society does not trust them any more than American society would. I’ve seen a lot of guys get stuck in Japan in low end teaching jobs in the middle of nowhere simply because they were desperate to go to Japan. I’ve also seen a lot of foreigners in Japan in lots of debt due to their inability to get a job. The job market in Japan is almost as bad as it is here in the U.S., making the whole situation for foreigners in Japan even worse.

Geek culture in Japan is just as marginalized as it is here in America. Indeed, anime may play on the television and the country may be filled with people who play video games, but this does not mean that, for example, an obsession with magical girl anime will go over any better there than it does here.

On top of it all, so far as dating is concerned, very very bad things can happen with unwary foreigners and the Japanese girls who actively hunt them. There are certain Japanese girls that for numerous reasons (I won’t go into specific details) “hunt” foreign guys, and in many cases these girls are fairly creepy and sometimes outright dangerous. Naturally, lots of Japanese girls are wonderful (and ridiculously holy-hell-I-want-to-pet-her cute), but the ones who seem unnaturally attached to foreign guys tend to have issues.

I may be sounding a bit mean here, so let me get to my point: Japan is not that fundamentally different than America, and that’s a very important fact to understand. If you aren’t doing well here in America, there is virtually no chance you will serendipitously do so in Japan. If you want to change your life, do it here, and then go to Japan for fun — don’t think of a country as some way to fix your problems. Trust me.

Tags: Japan, life, School and Work, travel