How I got my Japanese permanent residency
dampfkraft.com
dampfkraft.com
For example:
- You'd like to get a work visa as a third-country national? Meet the requirements in FNA, Chapter 5, section 1 [0].
- You'd like a C-permit (permanent residence permit) in Kanton Zürich? The requirements, in as much detail as I could ever ask for, are here [1].
Switzerland has to be the most rule-based society I've ever lived in. This is baked into the very constitution itself as Art. 9 [2]: "Every person has the right to be treated by state authorities in good faith and in a non-arbitrary manner."
[0]: https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/20020232/...
[1]: https://www.zh.ch/content/dam/zhweb/bilder-dokumente/themen/...
[2]: https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19995395/...
If you are from a "good" country things are a lot easier. E.g. I didn't have the TELC B1 test done when I sent in all the papers. So I had a co-worker help write a formal letter explaining I would forward the test results when ready and got the permit before the results.
There is even a set of countries that are exempt from the language requirement (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Liechtenstein). Some of which make sense as they share a language with Switzerland while others I wonder what the story really is...
In contrast, friends from a "bad" country would be stringed along on 6 month L-permits, also for the spouse (who didn't get the right to work) while I brought my partner (we still aren't married) and got her a B-permit that could easily be upgraded to a working visa from the get go.
I wish the system wasn't so discriminatory :(
There are very few people from 'good' country list that want to go to Switzerland (or any rich country) for nefarious reasons. Be it running from law or wanting to live off benefits. So there is less hoops to check those people.
There are far more incentives to try to get to rich country from a poorer country, if you make the process too easy you will get an increase of people wanting to come in. And those are hardly going to be only doctors and engineers. It will be poor and low income in general, willing to bet all.
This isn't fair, its discriminatory and racist approach. But it is also reality of this planet. Life is unfair.
Overall, I argue that those treaties are worth the price, and they are entirely fair considering what we want from the EU, but they are unfair in their treatment of Euro vs non-Euro immigrants.
If you have a cap to total immigrants and can’t limit EU immigrants, the open spots have to come from ROW
* Switzerland is relatively densely populated, especially considering that a sizable proportion of it is not really habitable.
Not really true, it's around 23% and on about 1,900,000 immigrants, over 85% are Europeans, 300,000 are Italians, 295,000 are Germans and 110,000 are French, which are not really immigrants in the real sense being official languages in Switzerland (Italians were over 450,000 in the 80s, so there are less Italians than before in Switzerland).
On the other side Germans were very few in the 80s and are now the second largest group, due to tax benefits Swiss banks can guarantuee to very rich people (Switzerland is basically a tax heaven, that's the main drive for immigration, they are not really having an "immigration problem" like other countries in Europe are facing).
One popular example of such auto inflicted "immigration" is Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA founder, who lived in Switzerland for 40 years or Carlo De Benedetti, industrialist and media publisher, who's born Italian but naturalized Swiss citizen .
One other point to consider is that immigration in Switzerland is also due U.N. agencies being there.
The third and last point: Switzerland is surrounded by Alps, immigrant go there using planes, they are not the kind of immigrants that come to Europe on shitty boats in the Mediterranean sea.
Yes, it is true: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/population/m...
The discrepancy between our numbers is most likely that about a third of the foreign born population of Switzerland is naturalized. The number you're citing is foreign NATIONALS. But naturalized immigrants still are foreign born.
> [Italians, Germans, and French] are not really immigrants
They were born in one country, and moved to another, which makes them immigrants. Whether they speak a national language is immaterial (and, in the case of Germans, the spoken language in Switzerland is not all that close to many German dialects).
Is an Asian Indian or a Kenyan in the US "not really an immigrant" if they speak fluent English?
> tax benefits Swiss banks can guarantuee to very rich people
Swiss banks used to be fairly powerful, but I can assure you that this power did not quite extend to setting tax rates for individuals. You're probably thinking of Lump-sum tax agreements, which do exist, but only for about 5000 people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump-sum_tax
> a tax heaven, that's the main drive for immigration
There are certainly a good number of wealthy immigrants for which this is true, but for the vast majority, I'd think that high wages are the main driver. This is true both for countries like Portugal, whose immigrants typically take low skilled jobs, and countries like Germany, where many immigrants are in high skilled professions.
> immigration in Switzerland is also due U.N. agencies being there
True, but not numerically all that significant on a national level.
> not the kind of immigrants that come to Europe on shitty boats
I can assure you that Switzerland still has more of those than billionaires coming for the tax benefits.
That's a moot point in my opinion, Italians in Switzerland come mainly from the areas near the border (I used to live half an hour away from Lugano).
And there's a big difference: Italian is an official language in canton of Ticino (southern Switzerland) because the population is in large percentage of Italian heritage, it was formed by occupying Italian cities, and is an independent self governed Region inside the Helvetic Republic (formerly Helvetic confederation) where Italian is the solely official language.
Kenya uses English as national language because it was colonized by UK, but their original language is Swahili.
Kenya and US don't share a border where both countries use the same official language.
Do you have any data on this? Anecdotally, it feels like quite a few came from southern Italy.
> the population is in large percentage of Italian heritage
Most of them were Swiss for several hundred years before Italy was a country, so I'm not sure how far that heritage extends.
I know for a fact that Swiss Germans see themselves as quite distinct from Germans, and Romands see themselves as distinct from the French, and I don't think Ticinesi see themselves as any more Italian than the other population groups.
> where Italian is the solely official language.
Bosco/Gurin would like to have a word with you…
> Kenya and US don't share a border where both countries use the same official language.
Use Kenya and Tanzania, then. Or France and Belgium. Or the Netherlands and Belgium.
In the decade 1961-1970 Italian migration to Switzerland increased, because Switzerland needed more and more workers, in 1964 the two countries signed a new agreement about immigration policies and in 1970 there were over a million Italians in Switzerland.
Italian came mainly from Lombardy, Piedimont and north east (an area called tri-veneto) but in the middle 60s thanks to the economic boom in Italy they had the option of staying home so Switzerland started looking for workers in the southern regions.
You can read about it (in Italian) here
https://www.larivista.ch/laccordo-del-1964-relativo-allemigr...
> Most of them were Swiss for several hundred years before Italy was a country
Italy existed before it was an official country
Swiss occupied Italian cities in the 1500s
> don't think Ticinesi see themselves as any more Italian than the other population groups.
Just like in Veneto they see themselves differently from Italian from the south
It doesn't make them different though...
> . Or France and Belgium. Or the Netherlands and Belgium.
In fact they aren't immigrants
They are both EU citizens
The point is Ticino and northern Italy close to the border (Varese and Como area) are practically the same place
In Switzerland they speak Italian, French and German, in Italy we speak Italian and French and German are two recognized official languages, in some areas there are two official languages, documents can be written in both and places have double names for example Bolzano/Bozen or Noasca/Nauchi
There is even a franco-provençal recognized community in Apulia, in the deep south. Those countries go back in history for thousands of years, they had relations from the dawn of times, saying that an Italian or a French in Switzerland is an immigrant is like swearing in a church.
That's why we made EU, because especially the original group of 12 should have no reason to call people from other countries "immigrant"
Who ever said that immigrants don't count as immigrants if they already speak the national language?
My mother's family immigrated from the UK to Australia when she was a child. They all spoke English as a native language. That fact didn't make them any less "immigrants". Back then (early 1950s), the vast majority of immigrants to Australia were native English speakers and had always been (back to the very start of European colonisation). It was only in the subsequent decades that immigration to Australia diversified and native English-speakers became a successively smaller percentage of all immigrants. But even today, the number one country of birth for foreign-born Australians remains England; China and India are in the second and third spots, respectively; New Zealand fourth. (Australian immigration statistics treat the four constituent countries of the UK separately.)
https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/lookup/3412.0Media%...
See my response here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24108135
Full disclosure, my uncle went to live in Switzerland in the 70s because Canton Ticino is Italian, people living there were and still are Italian and they chose to have Italian as official language, because it was their language.
Italy and Canton Ticino share a common border and speak the same language.
Same thing on the French side, a little less on the German one.
UK and Australia aren't even on the same side of the planet!
Whereas the border between Italy and Switzerland if you pass with an Italian plate or document is virtually non existent.
I used to go skiing in Livigno and it is faster to got through Switzerland, most of the times they didn't even stop us.
They saw the vignette on the windshield and didn't even bother to go out in the cold to check.
I don't consider a French person in Italy an immigrant, but a fellow European.
Switzerland is basically part of the EU without the Euro.
They adhered to the free trade market in 1972, entered EFTA in 1992, they are part of Schengen since 2008, EU is the largest trading partner for Switzerland importing ~50 billions of goods and services, accounting for ~7% of Swiss GDP, why in the hell some Swiss think that Europeans (especially those coming from bordering countries) are immigrants is incomprehensible to me...
A person from country A who voluntarily moves to country B with the intention of staying there permanently is officially an "immigrant". That's the international standard definition used in immigration statistics, so we can compare immigration statistics between different countries. As far as the official definition goes, it doesn't matter whether the source and destination countries have a common border or are on other sides of the planet, whether they speak the same language or not, whether they are culturally alike or culturally dissimilar.
Now if you are talking about what "immigrant" means informally, that's something which varies in different countries. In Australia, you get anti-immigrant sentiment, and a lot of Australians respond to that anti-immigrant sentiment by saying "we are all immigrants! (except for the Indigenous)". In Europe, I think the term "immigrant" has a more negative connotation. That method of "reclaiming" it doesn't work if your ancestors have lived in the same place so long that nobody is really sure when they immigrated to it, but whenever it was, it was likely thousands of year ago. Hence the term tends to be associated more with immigrants from poorer countries, whereas immigrants from richer countries don't want to be called that, and others don't want to call them that, even if that's technically what they are.
> Switzerland is basically part of the EU without the Euro.
Well, Denmark and Sweden are officially part of the EU without the Euro. Switzerland is not officially part of either the EU or the EEA. Although a messy system of piecemeal bilateral deals makes it a quasi-member of the EEA.
> why in the hell some Swiss think that Europeans (especially those coming from bordering countries) are immigrants is incomprehensible to me...
Because by the formal official definition of the term they are, even if by many people's informal definitions they are not.
It has been de jure independent since 1648 (with the exception of a few years of Napoleonic control), and de facto for at least 150 years before that.
And yes, in between there were were several hundred years where Switzerland was part of whatever passed for "France" and "Germany" in those times, but I'm not sure that era was any more fundamental than the rest of history.
Which, together, still make today 50% of all the "foreigners" living in Switzerland.
They are called immigrants, but are actually people with a grandfather who went there 50-60 years ago who never became a regular citizen.
Only 0.1% of the Swiss population are non-naturalized third generation immigrants, and only 2.4% are non-naturalized second generation immigrants. https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/population/m...
This is still higher than e.g. in the US, where the corresponding numbers are close to zero, but it's not nearly as high as it used to be.
Who is also countinously looking for people going to work there.
I got a call for a remote job for a U.N. agency two weeks ago.
They are calling it immigration, but it's more people going there for tax benefits or because have been called there or because the U.N. and many Financial or Legal HQ offices are there.
On the flip side, it's a brain drain for the exporting countries, of course.
If a country already has a high per capita GDP why does it need more money? What do the people in the country gain from more money in total? More labor generally lowers how much workers are paid so each person in the country is likely to get less money afterwards. More productive workers means more workaholic workers which again moves the bar so locals are now expected to work more as well. Again, a net loss for the existing population.
This is absolutely not true. I don't know why anyone would lie so blatantly.
Engineering and CS graduates are present in abundance, and the job market is brutal.
BTW an abundance of graduates don't always equal "good engineers". There is also an abundance of mediocre engineers.
I suppose it will be mostly used by tech companies.
What do you think about that?
I've lived in a major urban region of Switzerland for the last 12 years and I could not disagree more. I've seen companies looking for capable software engineers for years, including paid relocation and arranging temporary housing for them to move into.
Any profession which has inbuilt labour limits (chartered accounting/lawyer) means those professions get paid fair market value.
Yes. It favours the privileged but countries tunes the thresholds for points based on kind of people they want in their country. In the example you mentioned, more educated.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/01/02/national/abuses...
Looking at immigrants I've met, yes, qualifications count for something, but sheer hustle and ambition can play a role as well, and often those propagate into the next generation too.
In hiring decisions, I was told to try to select for potential, not qualifications. Points systems are the classical "select for qualifications" move.
A point system doesn't mean the parameters are well chosen but by it's very definition it's more fair then an interview without any formal requirements.
That potential is usually extremely subjective and unproven.
It’s fair to the country as the country is able to make informed admission decisions weighted by the needs of the country, rather than a take-all-comers model.
It’s fair to the applicants as they have a clear set of guidelines as to what they need to do to become eligible for admission. Need to learn English to boost your score (As in Canada)? Cool. That’s tangible and clear. On the other hand America’s system of, roughly speaking, “Indians need not apply” isn’t exactly fair to the applicants.
Note: a points based migration scheme doesn’t preclude for instance refugee admissions, and Canada’s system has a points escape hatch if a province nominates you based on their specific needs too.
Further, private groups can sponsor refugees as well (pledging to support them):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Sponsorship_of_Refugee...
* https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
At least you have some agency in qualifying if there is a clear points based merit system around education.
Less so if it’s things you can’t control (country of origin, ethnicity, etc.)
Everyone knows the rules coming in:
> 1a: marked by impartiality and honesty : free from self-interest, prejudice, or favoritism
> b(1): conforming with the established rules : ALLOWED
Let's not kid ourselves: fairness* would be if migration would _not_ be restricted. A point-based system is a good way to further grant privileges to the already privileged, though.
* As in: no additional layer of unfairness created by the State.
If the borders were completely open then it is likely this system would collapse or perhaps be forced to introduce the idea of "second class" citizens with tiered benefits.
It's possible this might not happen but as far as I know the experiment has never really been tried.
There's a lot more to nations than just "land and freedom of movement". There's a regulatory climate, political system, local culture(s), defence, social contracts. It feels to me a bit like you are handwaving away all the "hard" parts of being a nation.
The half-way solution is to restrict immigration those who can demonstrate they'll contribute and not be a drain on locals (i.e, not divert too much resource away from existing citizens who currently benefit from and support the system). It's very divisive and a compromise that leaves many unhappy. Interested in your thoughts on balancing universal benefits with open borders.
Housing prices in e.g. Zürich and the surrounding area are already insane. There's something fundamentally sad about being priced out of the place you grew up in, let alone the country.
Unfortunately, there's no scheme to allow foreigners to stay as a resident if they work remotely for a company that doesn't have a presence in Japan, as I do. (I'd even be willing to pay taxes in Japan!)
Of course, such a provision is pretty rare, but it's still a bummer. I wonder if immigration policy might ever consider such situations—such a worker is basically injecting money into the Japanese economy for little cost on Japan's part. But perhaps there are downsides that I haven't considered.
Gitlab [1] uses Safeguard Global [2] to act as official employer in a number of countries (including Japan). I'm sure Gitlab is not the only employer using Safeguard's services, and I'm sure Safeguard is not the only company offering this service.
[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/blob/master/dat...
I was considering that route to self-employment before I learned about the change in the HSFP visa.
> (I'd even be willing to pay taxes in Japan!)
If you are a resident of a country it's only reasonable to expect you to pay taxes there...
As you make friends and build up a network you're certain to find a way to make it work.
In practice, visas are easier for people from Western developed countries. The only major risk of overstaying a visa is getting a random stop from police and at worst you just get deported. It's really not as restrictive as it seems. I've met plenty of people who visited Japan on a whim and ended up staying for years.
Unfortunately it is not that easy to go through that
That are all countries though and not just Japan.
And I remember seeing somewhere else that some other countries in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean either have similar visas or were planning for them.
I ask because from all that I've read, foreigners take even generations to feel comfortable and accepted in Japan. What's the permanent residency a path towards, for most?
I do. It's a "sweet spot" place to live. No threat of violence from law enforcement, significantly reduced threat of violence from the general population, extremely high standard of living, and the country is well-positioned as a base of operations for travel or business across most of Asia. Also, despite some high expenses compared to America, it's a great place to own a sports car if that is a major hobby (and it is for me). Many of the happiest people I know are Western expats in Japan who are small-business owners. It's important to disconnect from the "Japanese corporate wage slave" or "English teacher" life experiences. I'll never back to the US if I can avoid it.
Do you feel you've gotten to "neighbor acceptance" level of integration? Or do you seek to achieve that?
You'll always be "the gaijin" but most people are friendly. I had some good experiences in Thailand as well, having just the right physical features to kinda blend in as long as I didn't open my mouth. But that's a longer story...
this is interesting - could you elaborate? I would have assumed the opposite, but I guess you don't live in a heavily dense urban area?
Permanent residency is mostly thought of as a relief from the stress of having to re-apply for visa extensions and not relying on having a job.
Until you get PR, you could be forced to leave Japan if you lose your job and don't find a new one right away.
Seriously one of the most simultaneously exciting and annoying pieces of mail I’ve ever received.
I don't speak Japanese though, so there are a couple of things I'm curious about. For instance, it says "Either graduated from a Japanese university or completed a course of a Japanese graduate school" and I did a semester in a Japan university as an exchange student. But it was as an undergraduate, so I'm not sure if it counts. I'll be contacting the linked company in the article, thanks for the read!
Does anyone have a link to this list?
>>>What changed in 2017 was that if you could demonstrate that you had the points historically you could apply for a PR without ever having the HSFP visa. That's the process I used.
Yeah that's a big change.
https://www.jetro.go.jp/en/invest/setting_up/section3/page7....
It looks like in some documents the term "permanent resident" is used to refer to "residents of more than five years" or similar, but it's not a reference to visa status.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2016/10/30/how-tos/lo...
Besides the terminology issue, I suspect that part of the confusion may be that the PR application does require proof you've been paying taxes, and Immigration can ask for further proof. In my own case my annual tax statements were enough.
http://www.immi-moj.go.jp/newimmiact_1/en/point_3-4.html
To add to what bojo said, when you apply for it at the airport these days you basically just fill out a tiny piece of paper and they say "OK, see you when you get back" if you're going away for less than a year. I don't go overseas much but if memory serves the process is basically the same for PR and non-PR visas.
I don't really know much about the implications of only coming back once every five years or so.
I’m not aware of anyone trying to game keeping their PR, but I do know that if you need to repeatedly stay out of the country for awhile you need to provide a solid reason (like caring for a sick parent).
Your figure sounds like one of those weird Japanese legends. And I haven’t read Arudou’s naturalization story, but he’s well known for over-dramatizing everything and has an incredibly biased agenda so it’s probably best not to take anything he says too seriously.
https://www.davidchart.com/2014/11/17/applying-to-naturalise... https://www.davidchart.com/2014/12/05/first-naturalisation-i... https://www.davidchart.com/2014/12/24/certificate-of-citizen... https://www.davidchart.com/2015/02/25/second-naturalisation-... https://www.davidchart.com/2015/03/13/actually-formally-appl... https://www.davidchart.com/2016/01/18/renouncing-uk-citizens... https://www.davidchart.com/2016/04/12/stateless/ https://www.davidchart.com/2016/05/18/japanese/
The gap between highly skilled professional and regular worker seems to be a huge chasm. You can get PR in 1 year with enough points but you must wait 10 if you are a regular worker.
Also, to apply for PR on a regular work visa you must have a visa length longer than 1 year. This can effectively be used to block PR applications. I know someone who had been in Japan for 15 years who cannot apply for PR because of this rule. As the application is never even allowed to be made, these people do not show up in statistics about successful Vs rejected PR applications either
At my first job I was a "contract employee", which was a much less stable position than I realized when I signed up, and I couldn't get more than a one-year visa either. Later I changed jobs and became a full employee and got a 5-year visa without issue.
edit: interestingly I get 70 points, so maybe I don't need a medal from the emperor.
Before going down that route, keep in mind that you are obliged to file taxes on your global earnings, but if your "foreign" earnings are taxed at a higher rate than they would in the US and that country has unilateral reciprocity agreements (most places you would be thinking of going would meet both criteria) and you don't have any US income, then you have to file but don't pay anything. If any of the previous points isn't met then you will have to pay the difference. Basically Americans always pay at least an American tax rate, no matter where they are.
This sounds like the blasphemy punishments for leaving a religion or cult.
What’s the point of that?
Of course, it's still obviously worth it since your children won't have to pay the inheritance tax again...
(I'm an American in Canada, so I've had to become familiar with all of the above as applied to my case.)
- you spent over 330 full (midnight-midnight) days outside the US + its territories, with some important but clear exceptions for things like traveling
- you are a "bona fide" resident of another country; this involves an review by a US government official. typically these people pay taxes in another country, send their kids to school there, etc.
"Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under a lava flood of taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become only a study for archaeologists. Its condition is so bad that when I write about it, as I intend to do soon, nobody will believe I am telling the truth. But it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio." - Lafcadio Hearn (1850 - 1904)
https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/expa...
Moreover, some countries like Finland require you to pay taxes on worldwide income for a number of years after you're no longer a resident of the country and only then granting you tax freedom from income sourced outside of the country. And there's no amount of income you can exclude like the USA's $108k or whatever the figure is currently.
And there are talks in the air that other countries might follow the suit to buff up their state coffers - https://nomadcapitalist.com/2020/05/12/citizenship-based-tax...
A friend did it and left afterward for Australia because he realized he didn’t want to be middle-aged in Japan as a foreigner, and also regretted it in the end due to the tax liability.
Wait, what?
I wouldn't expect such quirkiness from an American university, though being founded in 1764 kinda explains it.
(The translation, while correct, is also extremely literal and a bit outdated)
The current university president is less proficient in Latin, so she does most of the ceremony in English, only using Latin for the few bits that the University rules require to be in Latin (including the moments when the degrees are formally conferred).
Combined with all those looting these days I'm actually very interested in countries like Japan or Singapore via immigration, enough bullshit here indeed.
Learning Japanese is the largest challenge, I can do English in Singapore, maybe Australia.
And no to Europe, both Europe and USA are on their death road to socialism.
I'm curious why you would do this. In any other occupation, I could understand it. In many respects, Japan is a more advanced civilization than the United States. But as a SWE, there is nowhere else in the world that you can make a higher salary than the United States. Even if your long term ambition was to move to Japan, wouldn't you be better off becoming financially independent first and then moving?
I regret nothing. I'm so much happier here than I ever was in the Bay Area, and I doing this early in my life allowed me to have a lot of fun and stories to tell. Why would I "waste" my precious 20s and early 30s being miserable and retire at 35? Who even wants to retire? I wouldn't even know what to do with that money? Buy a house and sit in the garden the whole day? :) Not the life I wanted.
This whole "make a lot of $$$ and be miserable in your 20s to optimize for the future" is such a common thing I see in SV and HN as part of the narratives that these VCs are pushing. I think you have it all backwards. You can make money any time. You can never back to your 20s and 30s where you don't have health problems, are full of energy, and have an easy time making friends.
A few months ago I read a comment from somebody on a documentary about people optimizing for retirement in their 30s and it stuck with me:
"Live like a caveman until you are 35, then retire and live like a caveman until you die."
At least for me, this was one of the reasons why working at FAANG where everyone is striving for $$$ made me miserable. It gave me such a warped view of the world.
This really hasn’t been my experience at either Google or Facebook, in fact I would nearly go so far as to say the opposite is true. I’ve seen far more “striving” in the traditional corporate world
This is kind of what the comment you’re replying to was suggesting. Take advantage of the high income first before moving.
> “You can make money anytime.”
Sure, but interest compounds - money earlier is way more helpful than money later.
I always wonder a little about the family wealth of people that write things like this. Most of the people I know who left high paying jobs come from wealthy families and they’re already basically working for fun.
I didn’t grow up poor by any means, but I also don’t come from family wealth. If I want to have a family of my own, and make sure we will always have a place to live, saving high salary (and equity) in order to reach financial independence is worth it.
If you don’t want a family or you come from wealth then prioritizing other stuff is probably fine. If you do want these things though, I think it’s helpful to be more forward looking until reaching financial independence.
> “Not the life I wanted.”
Totally reasonable, but what people want over their life changes. Financial independence gives you freedom to be able to change too.
Seriously, these replies that turn securing a future for you and your family into some kind of avarice anti-virtue are ridiculous.
I'd rather want to "work" (as in the thing you do for happiness) for the rest of my life and be "rich" at the same time.
But big SV money? I wouldn't be so sure. Ageism is rampant in tech. FAANGs love their coders young, in 20's-30's. Also the dollar saved earlier in life is worth exponentially more later thanks to compound interest
There's no better place to solve your financial problems than in SV in your 20's.
I’m now back in the States though, and all that skill building I did in Japan paid off. Making boatloads managing a software engineering department.
So what am I supposed to do in order to accomplish the goal of working in Japan? I've self-studied the language since high school and would say I'm competent at reading and listening but not production. I haven't taken the JLPT yet but I would study for it if I'm going to take this seriously. I also have a lot of savings so money is not really as much of a concern.
I would really, really want to if time is quickly running out for me, but I don't understand what relationship I have to the country that would merit being able to stay there at least on a work visa besides the fact that I want to live there and enjoy the culture, which TFA states is not good enough of a reason. The author's NLP job was itself related to the Japanese language, but there is no specific connection to Japanese that my skills would provide. And I haven't so much as gotten a response back from my dozen attempts at an internal transfer at a Top 100 company. Sometimes it feels like the only reason you're able to get a job is because you know the right people, and I don't personally know anyone living in Japan.
Knowing Japanese helps a lot, but some tech companies hire English speakers - possibly because most of the employees are foreigners anyways.
You can apply directly to companies if you can manage to track down their career pages (and read it if no English version), no prior connections required. However, it’ll be hit or miss as to whether they will sponsor you, and a big question mark if American during this COVID crisis.
I assume this is something that is person valued, and the easiest way to ensure it happened was to just do it. The optimisation proposed also has a hidden risk of never doing it at all, or other things getting in the way.
That reminds me of the Japanese craft of kintsugi, where broken/damaged everyday household objects honored and elevated above their station via repairs with gold inlay. It’s finding perfection in the mundane, leaving something undone, just so. Very Japanese vibe.
Some things are better off left broken in view of being later restored, rather than being discarded and instantly replaced with nondescript sameness. Newness itself isn’t bad, but it is alluring; and yet, we can’t leave our culture by the wayside. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi
The US can't be beat if what you want out of life is a big house, a big SUV, and as much money invested as possible. If you want things like a lot of paid vacation time, the option to live in a walkable community, working public transit, more psychological and economic security in the face of major illness or injury, etc, then you'll get a better deal elsewhere. Most places other than Japan also offer a much better work-life balance. Which is better really depends on what kind of lifestyle you want.
For some reason a lot of people assume high salary is the most important aspect of life. Sure, US SWE salaries are absurdly high, but SWE earns relatively well in almost any other developed country too,
1- The restrictions are not about race, but about which countries have mismanaged the pandemic. People from Taiwan and some other south east asian countries are allowed to enter. (Ironically, exactly those people are / have been much more commonly the target of Japanese racism).
2- They most likely would prefer to also ban Japanese citizens (whatever race) from returning from hot-spots like Florida or Brazil. They just can't because of legal reasons. Citizenship gives you certain rights.
3- You can call PR and other visas "second class citizenship" if you want, but the fact is: you're just not a citizen. You also can't vote. You also can't become prime minister. You're not a citizen and don't have the rights of a citizen. That's the same in every country, including yours. Why didn't people with PR complain about being "second class citizens" for years about those other rights?
I think it’s pretty clear that if you plan your life in a secondary country, and they allow you to via permanent residency, you would not want them to lock you out at a whim.
1. The people that choose to live in Japan are well aware of this fact and consider it to still be a good place to live. Japan is a very unique place.
2. There is a difference between Permanent Residency and Citizenship.
The post is about acquiring residency, not citizenship.
>Aware of foreign residents’ concerns, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said last month that Japan would loosen some of the rules. On Wednesday, immigration officials said at a news conference that they had begun readmitting those who left before the start of the restrictions in April.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/business/japan-entry-ban-...