Job Discussion Forums

[relientk]

Hey guys. I'm in real tough situation right now and any advice at all would be well appreciated. Here's the rundown: I'm a 25 year old American with a Japanese fiance. She lives in Japan currently (Oita to be exact) and I'm in Colorado (however, I'm here in Japan now visiting for the holidays). She has a job she likes and everything is cool on her end. For me, I'm still in college studying for a degree in Business. I got a late start, I know.
Ultimately, she wants to stay in Japan and I have no problem with that, but I'm worried about finding a job to help with the bread-winning seeing as how I have no degree. I can continue my studies here in Japan, via distance-learning, but it will still be awhile before I graduate. Now that you have an idea of the situation, my questions are:

1.) Would we be better off moving to a bigger, more well-known city for me to find a job?

2.) How hard will it be for me to find work being a married, no-degree havin' gaijin?

Any advice/help would be greatly appreciated as we don't want to stay split up until I'm finished with school. Thanks in advance to anyone who posts.

[PAULH]

[Glenski]

How soon are you planning to get married?

1.) Would we be better off moving to a bigger, more well-known city for me to find a job?
Well, the obvious fact is that larger cities have more job opportunities. What sort of work are you interested in? How good is your Japanese?

2.) How hard will it be for me to find work being a married, no-degree havin' gaijin?
Fairly tough. Even though a spouse visa will allow you to work at most any job, the fact is that you still need to have the qualifications that employers want. If that's a degree (which is true for most English teaching jobs), then you need a degree. If it's work experience only, then you need the work experience. Of course, in the larger cities, there is more competition, so you have that double-edged sword working against you.

Taking Paul's advice about thinking far into the future, I would strongly suggest that you become as fluent in Japanese as possible as quickly as possible. It will require a lot of work, but if you intend to stay in Japan, you'll need that skill, even if you finish your degree.

I can understand that you two don't want to be separated, but what is the reality of your situation? If one of you can't afford to visit the other's country often enough, then you will have to live separately.

[osakajojo]

Finish your degree. Have a long distance relationship. If it doesn't work out than it wasn't ment to be. If it does work out than you will by then have a B.A. and the minimum requirement to get the usual job here most Americans get and can be with your girl and live happily ever after.

[abufletcher]

This doctor's recommendation? Take a heaping helping of reality at least once a day for the duration of your holiday here!

Accept that you will have absolutely no future together unless you get your our future squared away. As a business major you must have at least some understanding of economic realities. Finishing your BA is just the very beginning. Unless your girl is independently wealthy YOU will probably end up being the primary income course at some point. This is just the way that 90% of the world works at the moment. I'm just a humanities major and even I know that. Most Japanese women do not plan to work once they have children. This is just not the life-story they imagine for themselves. And even if YOUR particular girl does claim (at the moment) that you plans to work her whole life ((oops! how's THAT for a Freudian slip!)), many Japanese companies hold descriminatory attitudes towards working mothers. So unless she has some major power career planned YOU WILL END UP SUPPORTING HER.

In Japan, just about your only (long-term) option will be to start up your own Eikaiwa (English language school) -- like every other schmoo. If you don't like teaching kiddies, you'd better learn to in one heck of a hurry! And the language school thing is no easy life. You can plan on working 6 days a week for most of the foreseeable future and even then just barely make ends meet. And that's not even considering the possibility of children.

Your chances of working for a Japanese company are next to nil -- unless perhaps you went on to complete an MBA in a useable specialty area and became fluent in Japanese. You might find factory work - along side the manual laborors from Peru and Brasil. These ARE the facts.

Also accept that to make a multi-cultural marriage work you're both going to need to be flexible in the extreme. I've been married to a woman from Mexico for 24 years and it's been one long (and for the most part pleasant) exercise in cultural gymnastics the entire time. Deciding at this young age that you will live in Japan forever is not a flexible position.

In short, get real and come down off cloud nine.

[PAULH]

If you are new to the forum and havent read much of mine or Glenskis posts you would not know that both of us have Japanese spouses and children in this country. My case is only one story but fairly typical of what you can expect

To add to abufletchers posts, once you marry, its possible your wife can think she doesnt need to work again, and she will definitely stop work when she has kids. Women here are entitled to maternity leave, but the work culture here is highly disadvantageous to working mothers. If she earns over 80,000 yen a month or about $750 the tax department will tax your income for secondary taxes. Most if not all women with children work very part time or not at all.

I raise two kids in Japan and my monthly outgoings are around 400,000 yen a month. That is more than most conversation school teachers make in salary each month. that is what I SPEND on supporting a wife and two children. You have school fees, club activities, piano, swimming lessons, toys, trips to USJ, books and videos. You need to make sure you have a stable income that can support not only a wife but kids as well.

OK so maybe you say you will live in the US. thats fine but you need to consider what you can actually do as a career, what jobs your wife can do. She also needs to get a green card to work there. Taikibansei is now working in the US and his Japanese wife has been badgering him for the last 3 years to return to japan. he has finally got a job back here, but is not that keen on returning here (or hasnt been at least, until he got this latest job)

I dont want to put you off, and Im not saying not get married, but when you take in the responsibility of someone elses life, especially from a foreign country with a foreign language and culture it is fraught with difficulties and setbacks. 50% of international marriages between japanese and foreigners end in divorce. My marriage is not perfect (13 years) and we have our problems, but I also have two growing kids to think about and educate. I have to worry about staying employed and finding a job every three years and making enough to pay the bills.
My wife and I also have differences about raising kids like most couples do, but my biggest complaint at the moment is a different understanding of what it means to be a husband and wife, and a married couple from different backgrounds and cultures.

The thrust of this message is that you are still young, are still at university and planning to marry someone while you do not even have the legal right to live and work here unless you are married. with a BA you can get the most entry-level of jobs and am some point I will see you aiming for a Masters so you can upgrade your job, skills and income. Turnover and burnout is extremely high in the teaching industry (90% at NOVA) and the average eikaiwa teacher lasts about 2 years before quitting or returning home, or doing a graduate degree.

get married and it becomes harder to afford graduate school or pay for extra qualifications. I'm doing it now, spending about 14,000 pounds ($US25K) on a degree and have to work weekends to pay for it. it almost means I never see my kids and they grow up before you realise it.

I'm not you, and i wish i had done this sooner, but i would actually sit down with your fiance and TALK, and actually discuss what your future plans are together, and i mean EVERYTHING. Job, career, where your live, your expectations of her, hers of you, children, professional development, money. Then there will be no surprises later on.

I understand you want to be with her but if you dont get your future and your income stream and financial security sorted out now, you will end up struggling later on and it could come back to haunt you later on, as you get stuck in a deadend, low paying job trying to support a wife and kids in a country that you can not call your own.

[abufletcher]

[PAULH]

PS Do you have any idea what it costs to fly four people from Japan to the US every year to visit grandma in the US, as well as car rentals, hotels, food expenses, souvenirs and travel expenses?

Three years ago I took wife and kids and mother in law to Hawaii for six days, stayed in the Sheraton and the whole package round trip cost US$6000. Thats just to Hawaii, going to the US mainland will cost more. This is money that comes out of after-tax earned income and it may take you a year to save that kind of money if you are on a NOVA teachers salary. The airfares alone were about $3000 flying economy class.

I dont want to get on your case too much, but when you get here the expenses and outgoings will pile up: buying and maintaining a car, health insurance, pension payments (domestic and offshore) insurance, city and resident taxes, key money, travel. This is before kids. This will likely all be on one income as your wife will probably not work and i know some foreign guys here whose wives downed tools as soon as the wedding ring was on, meaning he had to work for a wife who could, but wouldn't, work.

Abufletcher, Glenski Taikibansei and I are working professionals with professional qualifications and reasonably high paying jobs and can support spouses. However someone coming here, diving into a marriage with no means of supporting themselves or making a living or even affording the basics is in my opinion a recipe for financial suicide.

You don't have the means to afford key money or set up an apartment, transport, living costs, insurance, schooling and tuition fees for graduate school and everything else you pay for here, yet worry about how you can live here with no degree. The simple answer is YOU CAN'T, not on the salaries that an eikaiwa will pay you, and thats all you can do here if you don't speak Japanese or have any marketable skills outside language teaching.

[guest of Japan]

I'm in complete agreement with the above posters.

To add to it, our Japanese wives and girlfriends often have zero understanding of the hurdles foreign husbands and boyfriends face in Japan. It's very easy for a Japanese person with no university degree to find stable employment in Japan, but this is not the case for foreigners. Getting a low level job in Japan is not very difficult, if you have a university degree. Moving up is quite a bit more difficult. Without the degree the challenges are extraordinary. The OP's girlfriend may be feeling the longings of love now, but that love will fade real quickly when fighting poverty.

[abufletcher]

[PAULH]

[abufletcher]

[PAULH]

[johanne]

I would just like to reiterate that all the above is true - it's impossible to raise a family here on a English conversation teacher's salary. My situation is quite good as I work full time teaching at an international school where the salary is much higher than teaching English and comes with 14 weeks paid vacation. My husband is working part-time as he has decided to change careers and will be in school for the next 3 years. Essentially we have just changed the roles of a typical Japanese family. I know of no Japanese women with school age kids who works full time, except for one who is a single mom. There is very little in the way of the "dual income" family here is Japan, so it is important for you to get all your ducks in order, so to speak, before coming here. 8 years ago, after 4 years of teaching English conversation, I returned to Canada to get my teaching certificate and then worked for 5 years teaching elementary school in Vancouver which is why I could get a job at an international school upon returning to Japan.
I only have one daughter who goes to the school I'm working at and gets a 90% discount on the tuition fees and we are spending roughly 400,000 yen a month in living expenses. We just came back from 12 days in Hawaii and that cost about about 700,000 yen. Yes, it was great, but these things cost. We deliberatly haven't bought a car so we can have extra money for travelling. Of course, living in Yokohama means there is plenty of public transportation, so for us it was an easy decision, but this is just to say that even with "good" jobs you can run through the money pretty fast. My daughter and I will be going to Canada for a month in the summer, but can only do this as we have friends and family to stay with the whole time and are only really paying for the airfare.
On a positive note, I'm enjoying raising my daughter here. She is surrounded by family which she didn't have when we were living in Vancouver and her Japanese is really picking up. She's also keeping up with English and I will be making sure that continues even after she starts attending Japanese public school. With careful planning we should be able to travel somewhere in Asia at least every year, since we have one and a half incomes, and this is a wonderful experience for her.
Anyway, good luck. I know when you are in love (especially at the beginning) it's tough to think about the practicalities but it will be worth it in the long run.

[abufletcher]