If you have your income generated by something other than participating in the salaryman culture, sure. But I'll take my worklife without a serving of karoshi.
Is it better though? You still have salaryman culture in the US, and crazy work hours. But zero guarantee with regards to benefits, and the employer has zero loyalty to you.
I spent a few years in Tokyo. Work hours were long, but there was strong morale and espirit de corps among my team. As a young person, it was bearable.
In Silicon Valley, hours were also long, but with none of the pride or loyalty I saw in Japan. For example, a manager would dump a huge task on my lap at 4:00pm, expect it done by the next morning, and then promptly leave me for the day. Eventually I learned how to defend my time, but I was a sucker for longer than I'd like to admit.
I'm in Sacramento now, and the vibe is different. The machine doesn't love me, but expectations are reasonable. Life is pretty great outside the office.
So it all depends on location, workplace, etc. The same is probably true in Japan.
For what it's worth, I have a Japanese spouse, and we could easily choose to live in either country. We choose the US for a variety of reasons. It's not an easy decision though, because Japan is a very nice country in a lot of ways.
A lot of the reasons to stay in America are personal.
* Compared to my in-laws in Japan, my parents here in the US are younger, more able, and far more supportive in general. We're getting way more help with our kids here than we would in Japan. We're getting more financial support. It's difficult to admit but it's a very simple truth.
* I have an older brother on the autistic spectrum who greatly benefits from having me nearby. And I'd probably need to take up his care if something happened to my parents, so it makes sense to be settled in the US.
* Our kids are biracial. Their social lives would probably be more difficult in Japan. Meanwhile, that's almost the norm where we live in California.
* My career prospects are far more open in the US. You definitely feel the "gaijin glass ceiling" when you're working in a Japanese company. This may be changing today. But it was very true back in the mid-00s.
* Likewise, my wife's career prospects are more promising in the US too. It's very difficult to get a salaried, high-paying job in Japan, especially as a woman, and especially as a person reentering the job market in middle age. That's not easy in America either, but not impossible like Japan. It would be a massive shame for her mind and education to go to waste. Japanese society is fucking this up badly.
* Today's Japan does not smile upon children. If you take your kids to a restaurant, or take them on the train, or really try to do anything with them in public, then grit your teeth. You're going to be surrounded by old people everywhere, and many will be shooting you evil glares. To simply have kids is to disrupt the harmony. I've literally seen public parks get shut down because old people living across the street couldn't tolerate the sound of kids laughing. This isn't specific to my having half-breed kids; I hear the same from almost everyone. We actually know a lot of Japanese families (several dozen) who are staying in America mostly for this reason, planning to go back after their kids grow up.
I loved living in Japan as an unencumbered young person. There are many things that Japan gets really right, like big city life, that's almost universally terrible in the US. When we go visit Japan, we come back kind of disgusted by America: there's trash everywhere, food is gross, certain neighborhoods are unsafe, every other person is obese, etc. Still, considering the above, the scales tip in favor of the US for us.
>Today's Japan does not smile upon children. If you take your kids to a restaurant, or take them on the train, or really try to do anything with them in public, then grit your teeth.
Maybe very small children. But in Japan, kids are pushed to walk themselves to school around 7 years old or so. Here in the US, parents would be arrested for that, and in a lot of places kids aren't allowed to be outside unsupervised at all.
>That's not easy in America either, but not impossible like Japan. It would be a massive shame for her mind and education to go to waste.
Aren't there a fair number of foreign companies now operating in Japan? This might be a possible solution to this for some people.
>Compared to my in-laws in Japan, my parents here in the US are younger, more able, and far more supportive in general. We're getting way more help with our kids here than we would in Japan.
I thought it was much more common in Asian cultures for grandparents to help with the kids. In fact, looking at many of the home plans in Japan, I noticed that many houses are specifically designed so that a younger couple with kids can live with their parents; the parents get their own floor or side of the house, to provide some privacy to both sides, but it's very easy to go from one side to the other. In America, people just don't live near their parents much any more because people (I'm talking college-educated people here, like the HN crowd) move around the country so much for work.
> Maybe very small children. But in Japan, kids are pushed to walk themselves to school around 7 years old or so. Here in the US, parents would be arrested for that, and in a lot of places kids aren't allowed to be outside unsupervised at all.
My kids are 6 and 4, so this has been our experience. We're not alone. In Japan, you're not even allowed to take your kids to the park supervised in a lot of places now, unless your kids just sit on a bench and finger their phones. No fun is allowed.
> Aren't there a fair number of foreign companies now operating in Japan? This might be a possible solution to this for some people.
It's more possible in some lines of work than others. Don't forget we're talking about a woman. Sexism is deep in Japan. Why deal with all of that when chances are so much more accessible elsewhere?
> I thought it was much more common in Asian cultures for grandparents to help with the kids.
I'd bet this is usually true, but it just doesn't apply in our case. My family in the US is super close and awesome. Her family in Japan is not.
I'm not making excuses for why we don't live in Japan. Like I said, we have papers and we could return tomorrow. We could make it work. But our lives in the US are good. There's no great reason to leave.
>My kids are 6 and 4, so this has been our experience. We're not alone.
Everything I've read about Japan says that kids routinely walk themselves to school, take public transit all over the city by themselves, etc.
However, this is of course talking about kids who are older than 4 or 6, probably more like 7-8+. I haven't read anything about what parenting 4-year-olds is like there, just that your typical 10-year-old is quite independent, unlike here in the US where you will really get arrested in some places if your 10yo is at the local park alone, or in other places the cops will bring him back home and give you a lecture about stranger danger.
>Don't forget we're talking about a woman. Sexism is deep in Japan. Why deal with all of that when chances are so much more accessible elsewhere?
That's a pretty easy thing to answer for anyone: emigrating is hard, and it's a really hard thing to leave your home country and culture you grew up in and try to make it someplace else. This is true for any human. It's especially true if you're going to a country where the language and culture are especially alien to you. (i.e., emigrating from UK to US isn't that hard; we have the same language and similar culture. Emigrating from Japan to US is a huge, huge change.)
On top of that, other countries have their problems too. US is an extremely violent country with a 3rd-world-level murder rate, an almost non-existent public transit system, a shockingly expensive healthcare system, and a rather low ranking on any quality-of-life index compared to other industrialized nations.
>I'd bet this is usually true, but it just doesn't apply in our case.
Of course, individual experiences can be very different than national norms. It's too bad her family isn't more involved.
I'm not sure how to respond. I'm speaking from my lived experience here.
My wife is an ethnic Japanese citizen who grew up in Japan and speaks Japanese perfectly, with a Japanese college education and strong Japanese work experience in her field. It's still far easier for her to get a good job here in the US. This isn't some theoretical assumption. This happened!
She's lived here for a combined thirteen years. She speaks excellent English. We've already moved back and forth between US and Japan a couple times. Emigration is a massive PITA but it's not like a soul-altering, deep-grit odyssey for us at this point. Not sure what this has to do with sexism.
Yes, young kids commute to school alone in Japan. They're also not allowed to have fun, make sudden movements, or whisper in public without scorn. It's not a healthy environment.
Where exactly is this "scorn" coming from? I've been to Japan, but of course only as a tourist; I didn't grow up there or live there. But I did see kids, in groups, aged 10+, hanging out together and generally having fun. It looked like maybe they had just gotten out of school, as they were all wearing school clothes. They certainly weren't looking unhappy, or refraining from sudden movements or talking, in fact they were quite animated. This was in pretty open, public places however, like the big crowded outdoor markets.
What I did notice about Japan, compared to the US, was that it seemed like I could do just about anything there as long as it wasn't illegal. I might get stares of disapproval, but it seems like the society has a strong attitude of minding one's own business, and a pretty severe case of non-confrontationalism (sorry, I made that word up) whereas here in the US you can get nasty comments from random people if they don't like something about you, especially in the "friendly" South. So there seems to be a strong culture of conformity enforced by silence and expecting people to know social norms, but then you see some people acting out in various ways, like dressing really crazily, but everyone just ignores it. Of course, there's also the subways where no one talks (very unlike the US), but I can see the reason for that due to the crowding and it's actually pretty nice IMO, as people on the DC Metro get really loud at times.
Of course emigration isn't a soul-altering odyssey for you, because you're a couple with one person from each country. Getting adjusted to any country is 100x easier when you're married to someone who grew up there. Try moving to Congo or Saudi Arabia and see how easy you find that trek.
None of this has anything to do with sexism, to address your comment, I'm just talking about what I've seen and read about kids, and trying to understand your experience. From everything I see about raising kids in the US, it's pretty horrible, and I cannot imagine why anyone would want to do it, though it probably varies a lot from place to place. I grew up in the US of course, but it absolutely was not like it is now; when I grew up, kids could and routinely did roam around without adults, but that was decades ago before helicopter parenting became the norm.
>When we go visit Japan, we come back kind of disgusted by America: there's trash everywhere, food is gross, certain neighborhoods are unsafe, every other person is obese, etc.
This is exactly how I feel when I return from the Japan. The same goes for coming back from Switzerland or Scandinavia. If more Americans traveled, they would probably be more upset about how terrible the US is compared to any other industrialized nation.
That certainly depends on what part of the US you're talking about. In my experience in the south, working overtime is very rare. Most people have families and are out of the office by 5. Silicon valley might be a different story.
