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Hi there

I lived in Japan for over four years from 2010 to 2014.

During that time I lived in a rural city in Kyoto Prefecture called Fukuchiyama.


I worked at an English Cram School which ran after school hours and on Saturdays. I taught students from age 2 all the way up to 18. I consider my Japanese language skills to be intermediate in level.

I can answer questions on getting a job in Japan / living in Japan as a foreigner / basic general questions about Japan. I was always an outsider in Japanese society and I'm probably not the best person to ask about more complex societal issues or what it's like growing up in Japan.

A lot of people talk about how amazing convenience stores are in Japan and how it makes it easy enough to not need to cook a lot of meals. Did you find that to be true for you? Also, what are some of your convenience store favorites (snacks/drink/candy) from Japan that you can't get where you're living now?

Actually one thing I often think is "I wish I ate out more" because eating out was just so cheap in comparison to cooking. The price of meat and vegetables was just eye-watering.

But I loooove convenience stores. They're one of the things I miss the most! Snacks I miss:
- Onigiri
- Chicken Karaage. Especially the spicy ones 🤩
- Cheap drinks! Canned tea for 100 yen. Bottled water even cheaper.
- Coffee Machines. We have these in Australia, but the ones in Japan did not only hot, but also *iced coffee*
- Nikuman (Japanese name for Baozi / Pork bun) ... although I preferred the Curry and Pizza variations!
- Meiji chocolate bars and chocolate coated macadamias

You could also get heat-and-eat spaghetti and curry which I very rarely ate for dinner. They were kind of sad and only eaten after a long exhausting work day.

Hey, I actually want to make a similar thread, but it seems you did it first. I'm currently living in Japan as a student. So maybe I can help to answer the question from another perspective (if that's allowed)


So my question is, what was your biggest challenge/struggle while living in Japan? Other than the language, if it was.

Is it expensive to live in Kyoto? How much apartment rent cost there? And how much average monthly food expense that you spend when you were still in Kyoto?


Do you plan to visit Japan again someday?


@NamaTamago: ehh, you’re currently in Japan? I’m ryuugakusei too, currently live in Shizuoka! Lol. Where do you live in Japan? Maybe we can meet up someday lol! I love meeting new people and making new friends! 😆

Oh that's awesome I'm sure there are plenty of things people could ask you too!

Two things that come to mind is:
General boring life administration. Utilities and so forth. When I moved into my apartment, the previous tenant was another employee from the company. He wasn't leaving the company, just moving a short distance away. So he kept his internet setup and I just paid for the bills which were in his name. However, when he finally decided to leave the country he wanted to shut down the internet account (even if I was reliable in paying the bills, there was no guarantee the next tenant or the next tenant would be).

So on top of having to get a Japanese person to help me fill out a bunch of complicated Japanese paperwork, the internet didn't want to just change the name of the account. They wanted to come to my apartment, pull out the optic fibre, close down the account, come back to my apartment, reinstall the optic fibre and turn it back on again.

I just feel like they get really caught up in the rules, even if logically it makes things more time consuming or difficult.

And secondly was culture-shock. At the time, I didn't really identify it at the time, but for the first few months I hardly left my apartment. On weekends and even during Golden Week I mostly just stayed at home.

I'm a pretty self-sufficient kind of person so I didn't struggle as badly as some other foreigners I knew.

I didn't live in Kyoto city I lived in Kyoto prefecture. By rapid train I was about 90 minutes away from the city - so if you're asking about Kyoto city I really can't help you there. 100% different situation.

It was a ワンルームマンション(one room mansion) and I think even by Japanese standards it was a little on the small side. It set me back 50000 yen a month so it was an absolute bargain! As for food... I'm not sure. I didn't really keep track of my spending in that regard. Fresh fruit, veggies and meat were always horrifically expensive which I'm pretty sure is normal for Japan, and made even worse by living in a rural place. At the time there was also an embargo on American beef which meant all the beef was Japanese (which translates to expensive!). But just months before I left, the embargo was lifted and beef literally quartered in price.

As for going back - I've already been back once, and I'd love to keep visiting. Every time I have job instabilities back in Australia I'm always 🤏this close to just packing up and heading back there. For all its ups and downs I at the very least had a steady job.

Did you have any really good or really bizarre experiences with the Japanese?

The Japanese people were overwhelmingly very nice. One experience that I remember happened when I was only a week or two new in the country. I was doing practice teaching around the city of Nagoya. It was late at night (9pm or later) and I had to get off at Nagoya central station, but I made a mistake and got off at Nagoya(something) station. I pretty much had a breakdown at this point but there were two very nice Japanese ladies who helped me back onto the right train 🥺 They asked me something in Japanese and I responded "Nagoya..." and they laughed. In retrospect I realise they asked me where I was from 😆

Bizarre...
At a rural train station late at night, there was me and one other guy waiting. I saw him make a phone call just to tell whoever that there was a foreigner. 😆

As I'm personally slowly starting to learn Japanese (I started off with learning Hiragana and Katakana), I was told that the experience you have in Japan is wildly different depending on just how well you know the language. I figure that this is true for every country, but apparently it's specifically different in Japan.

Apparently, they're far more distant to tourists that do not know the language there or to those that know a little bit of the language but still speak very slowly, and once you can speak fluently their attitude towards you makes a 180 degree turn.

The person that told me about this was my Hiragana and Katakana teacher, who first visited Japan without knowing the language and later returned as a fluent speaker. He also gave an example of taking his students Japanese there and letting them meet a group of Japanese students. Apparently, the native students remained distant and very quiet towards his students until the very second they learned that the others spoke Japanese rather fluently as well, which is when they suddenly became the most friendly and welcoming people ever.

Did you have a similar experience? Did people's attitude towards you become better over the years or did you feel welcome from the start?

Hmm I can't say I really noticed this. We weren't allowed to speak Japanese in classes, so opportunities to connect with students like that were a little limited. It definitely helped to know what they were talking about, not only to know if they were bored or confused, but because they’d talk freely with the assumption you wouldn’t understand . I had multiple instances where students were being very overtly rude towards coworkers and they’d have no idea or even think the students were being friendly.

In a more day-to-day situations experienced a lot of shock or relief that I spoke Japanese. For example I once stayed at a hot spring and I got the feeling it was the kind of place that didn’t get a lot of international visitors. When I filled out the paperwork and was able to pick my breakfast time and so forth the owner of the inn was like “THANK GOODNESS YOU SPEAK JAPANESE!!”