#精品长文创作季 ##中年人##移居##移居日本##人物故事#
This is the 3,535th real story we have told
For the sake of my children's education, I gave up my stable life in Beijing to convince my family to move to Japan with my family.
But when people reach middle age, they don't understand the language at all, and they come to Japan, where they are not familiar with life, which brings a lot of inconvenience. But we remain optimistic and happy. I believe that through our unremitting efforts, everything will get better and better.
(I'm in Japan)
I am Tus, 37 years old, from Wuhan, Hubei.
I was born into a happy family of three. Although our family is an ordinary working family, we have a good family atmosphere since childhood.
Since childhood, he has been regarded as a top student, and finally was admitted to Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and then took the master's degree of this school.
In 2012, after graduating from graduate school, I went to the Post and Telecommunications Design Institute under China Unicom to do strategic and market planning work.
Because I was young and vigorous at that time, I felt that working in a state-owned enterprise was very boring every day, so I resigned decisively in February 2014 and came out to start a business.
At the end of 2015, I started entrepreneurship in the financial sector with my partner, and I worked until 2022.
In 2022, I feel that the best time for private enterprises to continue to engage in the financial industry in China has passed, so I want to transform into other fields.
So I came out of my original company and tried some other directions, but all the factors combined were not particularly successful. That's why I came up with the idea of bringing my family to Japan and starting over.
The most important thing here is the issue of children's education.
(Gymnasium ice rink in Osaka)
Because education in Beijing is really getting more and more volatile now. Especially after the epidemic, the overall income situation of our family is not so stable.
Instead of letting your children grow up and then study abroad, it is better to plan a different route for them in advance. And as far as I know, Japan has a relatively complete range of social benefits for children, and some of them are free until the age of 18.
Another important reason is my future health plan for my wife and me. Because as you get older, all kinds of physical problems may appear.
Japan's health insurance system also has a monthly out-of-pocket limit for the vast majority of people, and it is rare for people to become poor due to illness.
When I thought about going out as a family, I compared many other countries, and the reason why I chose Japan was because we traveled to Japan a lot in the past, and we should know Japan quite well.
Japan is the closest to the country, and it takes more than two hours to get there by plane. We are quite adaptable in terms of culture and living habits. Japan is also the largest developed country in Asia.
So after weighing up, we chose Osaka, Japan.
(Osaka City View)
In fact, as early as 2021, I returned to China with a friend who has lived in Japan for a long time, and during the meal, I learned that there is such a way as a business manager visa in Japan, and I was thrilled to hear this.
Then I started doing all my homework on managing visas and how to move to Japan, and it wasn't until 2022 that I made up my mind to bring my whole family to Japan.
When I had this idea, I started communicating with my family.
Everyone thinks that we have a house, a car, a hukou, a company and children in Beijing, which is already very good, so why bother tossing?
Besides, if you come out, it means giving up a lot of things, and you are going to a completely unfamiliar country, and you don't understand the language, and everything has to start from scratch, which is indeed an extremely important decision.
The old people on both sides didn't understand at first, so I patiently reasoned with them, explained the current situation, and it took a lot of effort to convince them.
Fortunately, it was my lover who took the lead in supporting my decision, and then the old man stopped insisting on his opinion and finally agreed with me.
I really had to do a lot of preparation before I came out, but what I did the most was mental preparation.
(Osaka Subway)
Make up your mind to give up everything you have now, then adjust your mindset and restart your life, all from scratch. This mindset is the most crucial, and then there are some material preparations.
In addition, it is necessary to be prepared for all kinds of difficulties, or courage.
When we came to Osaka in March last year, we really didn't know anyone. Even the friend who helped us apply for a visa was still in Beijing at the time, so it can really be said that she has no relatives.
It was not easy to go to the national bureau and ward office on our own, and to rely on translation software to handle all kinds of things.
Although we are helpless here, we have a better mentality.
We have only been here for the first month, and we are basically traveling and running errands at the same time. It's also fun to play around with the kids.
The enrollment of both children was quite smooth. There is no need to buy a house or a hukou, and all the government and school staff are quite friendly.
By April, the kids were going to school and my husband and wife were starting to get back on track.
I came here on a business management visa, and this visa has a lot of requirements, for example, when I first came here, I only had a one-year visa, and then I will renew it after that, depending on the company's operation. Under normal circumstances, it is continued in one year, one year, three years, and five years.
In the first two years, the Japanese Immigration Bureau did not have very high requirements for the company's operation, so there was still some room for maneuver.
(Nagasaki Cityscape)
I did a lot of research before I came out, including the Japanese business management visa, the highly skilled worker visa, and so on, so I also planned some paths for myself to come to Japan.
My idea is that after coming to Japan, I will learn the language first, and then after passing the Japanese level test, I can change to a more convenient high-end talent visa.
If you want to live in Japan for a long time, you still need to learn Japanese.
Japan's highly skilled visa, generally speaking, is education, work experience, income, language, etc., and it has a comprehensive score.
According to my score, if I can pass the N2 level in Japanese, I will be able to reach the threshold of high talent.
Because I had good grades since I was a child, and I passed CET-4 in high school, I originally thought that learning a language from scratch should not be particularly difficult.
But the truth gave me a slap in the face, and it was not at all what I thought.
When I actually started to learn Japanese, I found that I was in my 37 or 8 years old, which was completely different from the state I was in when I was in my early twenties.
Not only is the decline in memory significant, but the decline in concentration is even worse. Another is that my study time is very shredded every day, and there is not much time for really large chunks.
(Sunset in Osaka)
Based on this situation, I referred to the Japanese learning methods of some self-media platforms and roughly planned my own Japanese learning path, so I officially enrolled in the offline Japanese basic class from around May 1 as an introduction to Japanese.
Then I started to study Japanese step by step, and when I came back from class, I had to study on my own and try to catch up as much as I could, including a lot of things that I started to prepare for exams in August and September.
I did the math, I started to learn languages in Japan, and then it was supposed to be two hundred and a few days before the exam, and I probably didn't miss a day except for illness.
I might study for one or two hours a day, and if I studied for more than a month, I had to study for at least five to six hours a day.
I've seen people say on the Internet that it takes about 500 to 600 hours of effective learning time to go from zero to N2.
So, I arranged my whole study cycle very full, hoping to pass the exam in one go, but I also felt that it was quite difficult.
At first, I was full of confidence, but the fact was that I memorized 100 words the day before, and there may only be 20 left in the second flip book, and my memory is not a little bit worse, which is super hit.
And the concentration of doing the questions has also decreased a lot, for example, when I do the questions, I may want to look at the phone after 20 minutes or so, so I put the phone far away.
Later, I thought of a way to start a live broadcast on Xiao H book, live broadcast my own learning process, and let netizens supervise me, so that I could seal the phone.
(Osaka's seaside)
The hard work paid off, and I passed the N2 exam as I wished.
My friend said that my study state was quite wrong, and it has been nearly two months since I finished the exam, and I haven't even touched a book.
It has been nearly 15 years since the last time I took so seriously preparing for an exam, and I have once again adjusted myself to a state of exam, and only I know the hardships of it.
Therefore, I also advise many middle-aged friends who have come to Japan in Little Sweet Potato that if you don't have a strong self-discipline and feel that you can't do it, you must not take the path of self-learning Japanese. Because it's really hard to stick to it, signing up for a class is a great option.
Because many of my neighbors around me are Chinese, after the results came out, the mothers who lived near us asked me how to take the test, and they also wanted to try it to take the test.
Then they also formed a group and asked me to supervise them and teach them some tips on how to pass the exam.
I didn't expect that my incident still has a certain motivational effect, and it can be regarded as a very positive thing.
Many people on the Internet say that N2 in half a year and N1 in a year, it is still very difficult for middle-aged people like me.
I would also tell my friends that this is a very, very difficult thing to do, don't think about it as simple, don't underestimate how difficult it is.
(Park of Kumamoto)
It's been almost a year since we came here, and the children are the fastest to adapt, which also breaks our previous worries about children.
In fact, the most important thing to worry about is whether we adults can adapt to it.
Take language as an example, I studied so hard, and I just passed the exam, but I am not at all good at listening and speaking. But our two children have basically no problem hearing and speaking so far.
However, for us adults, even though I have passed N2, I still can't understand or speak.
After the exam, I finally have to start working hard this year. I started running a coffee shop and trading coffee beans with my friends.
In Japan, I think the quality of Japanese employees is relatively good, but they have a strong sense of rights.
Generally speaking, within eight hours of their normal work, even if you are not staring, they will do their job well, and there will be no laziness or fishing.
If they are required to work overtime, once or twice once in a while, it is generally not a big problem. However, if they need to work overtime for a long time, they will be very concerned about overtime pay, as well as their own rights and interests such as compensatory leave, and they need to negotiate in advance before arranging overtime.
One of the biggest barriers to doing business in Japan is credit.
The Japanese government has basically no rules about business, and you just pay your taxes on time. However, if he finds out that you have something wrong with you, he will definitely punish you heavily.
(Hot springs in Beppu)
Because Japan is a credit society, new companies, especially foreigners, do not have any credit base.
In addition, if you don't have a Japanese friend or a Japanese trading company to introduce you, it will be difficult for you to rent a house, or if you want to find a supplier to work with.
Because of this, I came to Japan to open a credit card, and I was rejected countless times. Later, I finally opened a credit card with a limit of 1,000 yuan.
One of the biggest difficulties we had when we came to Japan, and the first one we encountered, was renting an apartment.
In Japan, there is a market where buyers and sellers choose each other, and if you apply for a house, the landlord will not necessarily rent it to you.
But I'm fine, when I first arrived, the house was already arranged for me by a friend. Although the house is not big, it is fortunate that it is a school district house, so it is just convenient for children to go to school.
I wanted to change to a bigger house in November, and I applied for both houses and was rejected. Fortunately, I rented a friend's house by mistake.
Osaka is so small that it's only a 10-minute bike ride to the city center. Take the subway a little farther away, and the subway is very developed here, so we don't have the need to buy a car in a hurry.
(Elementary school students who go to school alone on the streets of Osaka)
I think the only thing that is expensive here is transportation, whether it's public transportation or taxis, it's very expensive.
I found that bicycles in Japan are very expensive, even a normal bicycle can cost about 1,000 to 2,000 yuan. The kind of electrically assisted bicycle is generally around 8,000 yuan, and the second-hand one is generally around 4,000.
It's very cheap to buy a car, but it's expensive.
There are a lot of parking lots, but the parking lots are very small, and the price of different parking spaces varies greatly.
Some parking spaces are capped, and some are not capped. For example, three or four hundred yen an hour, but the upper limit is not capped, and you stop for two hours for about 50 to 70 yuan. Some core areas may be a little more expensive. That time a friend went to the business district, and the parking fee alone may cost four or five hundred yuan a day.
So especially if we are new to it, there are many things that need to be paid attention to.
(Osaka's parks)
Taxis in Japan are also very expensive, and there are quite a lot of taxis in Japan, with a starting price of 30 yuan. Now there are also online car-hailing platforms like the domestic ones. But we rarely go to take a taxi unless we have special circumstances.
I think the overall cost of living in Osaka should be similar to that of the first-tier cities in China, but it is much cheaper to buy or rent a house.
Japan is actually a low-materialistic society, and there are a lot of second-hand stores here, and we often visit them.
We used to understand that second-hand stores in Japan sell brand-name goods, but Japanese people go to these stores to sell things, and foreigners buy things.
Especially before the epidemic, Chinese bought all these stores, but many Japanese people will go to some ordinary second-hand stores.
And some other ordinary second-hand stores sell very everyday clothes, bags and many other things.
Buying a piece of children's clothes is only about 5 or 10 yuan. We adults only buy a piece for about 3 or 40 yuan.
At the same time, everything can be sold to second-hand stores, but the price is very low, we have taken a large bag of children's clothes and shoes to sell, and finally settled for us for only 8 yuan.
(Conan Statue in Osaka)
Japanese people now like to go to second-hand stores to buy that kind of brand new things, because there are indeed some brand new, and even some clothes with tags are sold in second-hand stores, which is very cheap.
I have some very curious places in ordinary second-hand stores, there are some very old shoes, even worn shoes, can be sold in second-hand stores, and there will be people who buy them, which makes people feel incredible.
However, in Japan, they may have liked these second-hand products, and they will feel that there is a story on them, so many people will like to buy them.
After the second-hand store receives these things, he will have his own strict classification, cleaning, disinfection and other processes, and then he will hang them out for sale.
(Nara Koka)
This year, in addition to coffee-related things, self-media will continue to do it.
I think the little sweet potato is still very helpful to me, and I quickly established a friend Q after I came to Japan, and I have contacts and resources.
After I landed in Japan in March, I hope to have a platform to share some of my life and insights in Japan with some friends in China, and this platform provides me with opportunities.
Let everyone know what I do in Japan, what life in Japan is like, and what Japanese society as a whole is like. For those who are about to come to Japan, we will provide some information and references.
(Together for the Future)
In the future, I will continue to study Japanese and practice my speaking and listening well. It is difficult for the elderly to come here now, so I may consider a visa for the elderly in Japan in the future, but I heard that it is very difficult and there are many restrictions.
Finally, I would like to say to my friends my age that if you want to change your life, do so as early as possible, it's never too late to start.
The first step is to make up your mind, and the second step is to learn the language well. When moving in middle age, the most important thing is to be mindful, empty yourself and start over.
(Welcome to "Tus-Jun in Japan")
[Dictation: Enlightenment]
[Editor: Qingwan]
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(*This article is based on the oral statements of the parties, and the authenticity is the responsibility of the oral narrator.) Friendly reminder from this account: Please identify the relevant risks by yourself, and do not blindly follow the trend to make impulsive decisions. ）