Image by Nathaniel KS

It’s almost exactly three years since my partner & I moved to Japan. We knew we wanted to move abroad & had spent a long time discussing where to go, when suddenly, out of the blue, I was offered a job in Tokyo. One month later, we’d packed up, done the big goodbyes & we were on a flight. We didn’t really have time to anticipate problems in advance, but now I’m back in England there are things I often reflect on, which might prove useful to other travellers & expats.

Seizing the moment

I suppose it’s only natural to look back & regret the things you didn’t do, even after 18 months crammed with adventures & new experiences. I try not to waste energy on regrets – I know that I will have days when I want to hide under the covers wherever I am, & beating myself up about that won’t make it any easier. That said, with the wonders of hindsight, of course I rue every wasted minute. It’s so easy to put things off until tomorrow, but when you’ve limited time in one place, better save the procrastinations for when you get home!

Learn the lingo

The biggest single thing I would change is to learn more of the language, & learn it sooner. Every day that I couldn’t communicate, I was missing out – conversely, the more I could communicate, the more I received from the country.

I was held back by a fear of accidentally offending people or doing the wrong thing. My partner was the opposite; he was determined to practice his Japanese & so reached out to everybody we came into contact with. Next time, I’ll follow his lead & remember that people are actually very forgiving, especially if they can see you are trying.

Shipping

Never again would we take so much stuff away with us – pots, pans, bedding, too many clothes & three bicycles. We even took a hairdryer & other electrical goods that were the wrong voltage to even use. To top it all, we didn’t check the cost of import duty in addition to the actual shipping costs – customs charges in Japan more than doubled the total bill.

Guests

We’d just mastered the basics, but were still having to mime animals to order in local restaurants & balance our desires against our communication skills, when – my family came to stay.

It had been years since we were all under the same roof, & having them under m roof in a city I was still getting to grips with was a recipe for disaster. Unless you can mime ‘I don’t like raw fish & will only drink soya milk’, give yourself at least six months before you have your first guests. If possible, put them in a hotel!

You can run, but you can’t hide

Part of our reason for going away was that my world & my partner’s world are so different, & we thought that travelling would bring us closer together. It did – especially for the first six months, when we were all the other had. But now we’re back, the problems & differences loom larger than ever.

Since being with each other is, I hope, the one constant in our lives, perhaps we should have been much clearer about why we were going, put more energy into our relationship, & really managed our homecoming.

Hindsight really is a wonderful thing.