Tarto in Japan

A dream comes true!

I've been preparing this trip for almost 2 years, and it finally becomes reality! Now it's more concrete than ever: I'm leaving France today, and I'm going to spend one year in Japan! I feel very excited about this trip, but I also feel very sad, because my girlfriend is staying in France and we're not gonna see each other for 3 months...

As you all know, my mother is Japanese, but I've always lived in France. It's been nearly 2 years since I made the decision to go to Japan. This idea came during my first trip to Cambodia, when I met a French guy who was living in Japan. He told me about his (fascinating) story, how he arrived in Japan with absolutely no knowledge of the language, no job and hardly any money, how he managed to get a job in his field, and how he ended up spending 5 years there. Then I don't know what happened, but as the days passed I started myself to consider going to Japan. I think he had somewhat awaken a feeling lying in me...Anyway, by the time I came back to France, I had made up my mind.

However, I had no clue what to do there. Would I try to find a job, or just tour the country? How long would I stay, where would I go? Sure, I have relatives there, but they live in a small (and boring) town and there's no way I'd like to stay there for more than a month. There seemed to be too many obstacles to overcome, but in the end it all went down to three words: money, job, language. Finding a job was definitely impossible because my Japanese was way too bad. On the other hand, to afford studying Japanese in Tokyo, I needed a job that would provide an income...

I decided not to rush headlong into this project and accepted the fact that it might take one or two years to achieve. I entered a Japanese institute in Paris to improve my Japanese and went back to my mom's apartment to save up money (much!) faster. I gathered information about the visas, checked out the job offers in Japan, browsed through a bunch of Japan-related websites to gather information and read about other people's experiences...But I still couldn't find a way to put everything together.

I found the solution by chance: as I was browsing the Internet, I came up across a Japanese language institute called Yamasa. They had an incredibly detailed and informative website, and I quickly found out that it was a very serious institute with high-quality language courses. On top of that, they were located near Nagoya, which made them much cheaper than their counterparts in Tokyo, making it affordable for me...I had made my decision!

From then on, everything flowed nicely. I obtained a working-holiday visa pretty easily, which allows me to stay one year in Japan and have a part-time job. I found a flight that wasn't too expensive, took out a health insurance, resigned from my job, subscribed a new bank account to make overseas fun transfers easier, and did a lot of other little things to prepare my trip. And the most important: I met a pretty and lovely girl I fell in love with!!! :-D

So here's my planned schedule:
- spend the first 3 months at Yamasa institute
- go to Tokyo, meet my girlfriend there and spend one month with her. We'll probably stay a couple of days at Tokyo then travel around.
- maybe go back to Yamasa for another 2 months
- visit my relatives in the south-west of the country, for about a month
- visit friends in Tokyo and find a part-time job there
- meet my girlfriend again, and tour Japan with her and other friends
Of course, this is likely to change...But I'll keep you posted!