WHY I MOVED TO JAPAN | My Biggest Life Decision

[Music] [Music] deciding to move to Japan to work as an English teacher five years ago was easily the biggest decision I've made in my entire life I never lived abroad I'd never learned a foreign language and I'd never taught English either and quite honestly the thought of standing in front of 40 school kids for 20 hours a week scared the absolute gala happening naturally a lot of people ask me why I came here there was no one reason but ultimately it revolved around the combination of ambition romanticism and fear or their knowing the order [Music] the first two decades of your life you're kind of on an academic conveyor belt going through school doing tests and exams every year without really thinking that far ahead and then for many people when they reach the age of 18 and they come off the academic conveyor belt and they graduate from school all of a sudden they have no plan and no sense of direction and that was me when I graduated from school back in 2008 I knew I wanted to go to university but I didn't really know what course I wanted to take so I took film studies because it was the only thing I was good at the only courses I've done well in were media and film I got an A in an A and in business I got a B and in English and I got a C so it wasn't that great and I thought I'd go off to university and become the next Martin Scorsese and it was gonna be magical but then suddenly around September which is when you start University in the UK I realized becoming Martin Scorsese is not that easy and all of a sudden I realized I was probably making a big mistake and after speaking to some film studies graduates and my local supermarket I realized that studying film at University probably wasn't the best thing to do so I postponed my degree and took a gap year to get a sense of direction and get some clarity on who I was and what I was doing so in September 2008 with all my closest friends going off to university I went off in the other direction and started planning my gap year now some people spend their gap here traveling the world swimming with dolphins and building villages in Africa and to me that's what I wanted to do I wanted a year of unbridled adventure and discovery it was gonna was gonna be amazing and then I got a full-time office job staring at Excel spreadsheets for 40 hours a week and it was the worst year of my life ever [Music] having finished school and delayed my degree for a year I now found myself in an office job in an energy company just moving numbers around a spreadsheet five days a week my adventurous plans to travel around the world were destroyed by my lack of money and even though I had two jobs the relatively small amount of money I made just about covered my monthly expenses but certainly wasn't enough for any real overseas travel and after a few months I just became depressed as I realized my gap here wasn't going anywhere it was just nothing rubbish for someone like me he likes to be creative he likes to make things being trapped in an office job with absolutely no creativity was just a horrific fate to be consigned to but it was while I was working this mind-numbing office job that my imagination started to take over sitting at that desk for hours on end doing nothing of any real value I became obsessed with the idea of entrepreneurship and I got addicted to reading autobiographies and biographies and self-made millionaires people who had come from nothing and go on to do great things and whilst I was sitting at this desk doing nothing and I became consumed by this idea of starting my own business one day in the future and it became a bit of a running joke with my colleagues as I started sitting there on my lunch break reading books as opposed to sitting with the usual crowd I didn't mind at first I found it quite funny but when I started talking about my dreams and my ambitions about starting a business I kind of was met with lots of pessimism and laughter and everyone was kind of very dismissive in the UK you'll find people who are ambitious to kind of shot down and ridicule more often than not you tell someone about your plans your plans to do something great you'll usually just be dismissed and yeah you'll just kind of put you down it's quite the opposite to America in that regard where everyone believes they can do something great and there's a real sense of entrepreneurship embedded in the culture but after six months of reading all these stories of entrepreneurs and becoming completely consumed by the idea of starting a business I came to the worrying realization that I lacked the self confidence in the sort of self belief to ever become an entrepreneur I knew I would never succeed so I came to the conclusion the only way I was going to ever level up was to do something really bold and out of character for me at the time and I decided I would give myself the ultimate challenge of living and working abroad and learning a new language in a completely different country and throw myself into the thick of it after university quite honestly this idea of living and working abroad really scared me really was outside my comfort zone and the area of the world I knew I wanted to try living in with Asia because I wanted to see the world from a completely different perspective I figured if I could live in the country in Asia and try and acquire a new language and adapt to a different culture than I could probably feel like I could do anything and I knew as it was outside my comfort zone there was a chance that it might work after doing some research online I discovered the easiest job to get overseas was an English teaching job so in early 2009 I switched my degree from film to business and English linguistics the final piece of the puzzle fell into place in April 2009 when I went to visit my then-girlfriend he was on a ski season in the French Alps having the time of her life which I definitely wasn't envious about it was on the trip to France that fate kind of jumped in and steered the direction my life would take on the flyover I found myself sitting next to a friendly middle-aged couple and we chatted for the duration of the two-hour flight we go on to the inevitable subject of what I wanted to do after university and I told them that I wanted to go and travel the world and become an English teacher and live and work overseas as luck or fate or destiny or coincidence would have it their daughter was working as an English teacher in Japan on the Japan exchange teaching program the jet program and they told me their daughter's amazing experiences in Japan and apparently she was having the time of her life and for the route the duration of the flight they sold this idea to me this idea of living and working in Japan after I got off the plane there was a four-hour coach journey from the airport to the ski resort and for the entire four hour journey I just kept thinking of this crazy and exciting idea of living and working in Japan whilst listening to Phil Collins because for some reason it was the only artist I had on my phone at the time but I didn't know a great deal about Japanese culture I've never really been into anime or manga I watched quite a few Japanese films and lots of film set in Japan and I had lots of images and misconceptions about the country but it was I was excited by what I didn't know about the country and what I could learn rather than what I already knew I just pictured myself walking through these beautiful rice fields and temples singing karaoke and drinking beer with strangers and salary men and having romantic encounters like lost in translation I'd always wanted to visit the country but two weeks just didn't seem like enough and it was so far away that I never thought I'd ever be able to go and I realized by living and working there I'd really be able to absorb the culture and truly appreciate the country and the language and the people and so by the time the coach pulled up at the ski resort I remember getting off with this idea that I was going to live and work in Japan in fact I remember saying to my girlfriend when I got off the bus I've decided to move to Japan and I don't think she took me too seriously and to be honest not even I to myself that seriously but my mind was made up there and then and it was from then on that I started to read and learn about the culture for the next few years through my awful boring job through a degree that I didn't really enjoy in the university studies that bored me Japan was my guiding star this idea of living and working in Japan gave me a sense of direction and purpose and it made me realize the importance of having a dream and a sense of direction and then a because after that I became really motivated and from the first time ever I actually put some serious effort into my academic studies in three-and-a-half years later after that decision on that fast lo and behold I found myself sitting in a chair in my tiny apartment whinging about a noisy Hall having stood in front of hundreds of people and spoken in Japanese managed classrooms with forty teenagers in I've just learned how to read and communicate in a completely alien language all my confidence issues and lack of self belief have completely disappeared faded away and I feel I can truly do anything I want now if there's one thing I want you to take away from this video though it is have a dream be bold make it scary make it challenging and then go off and do it push yourself out of your comfort zone and you will feel amazing when you go off and triumph [Music] you

Channel: Abroad in Japan

Views: 1,662,455

Rating: 4.9692888 out of 5

Keywords: japan, move, tokyo, japanese, living, working, apartment, jobs

Id: rp29BYtee2w

Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 03 2017