We Moved to Japan

This year started out by taking a huge leap of faith and moving to Japan for work. This was an extremely scary and exciting opportunity. I am blessed to have a loving and supportive husband that was excited to share this amazing opportunity with me. Kenney and I were also sick of being a part while I was leaving and going to Japan for months at a time yearly.

In March we moved into our beautiful new home for the next several years in Zushi, a town in the Kanagawa Prefecture about 30 minutes from work. Our house is still not set up all the way but is slowly coming a long. We just got a delivery of furniture from IKEA. Our house in the USA is almost 3 times smaller than our house here and we got rid of some of our furniture prior to leaving so this house was extremely empty. It is starting to feel like home but not 100%. I am sure this is because Astro, out fur baby that made the move with us is stuck in quarantine until July.

There is some things that are very different living in Japan. Driving is one of them, other than the obvious of driving on the right side of the road and everything is in kilometers. The roads are far more narrow here and some of the hills are STEEP. My husband and I fans of driving manual transmissions so we went out of our way to find a manual transmission car. We got a 2005 Mini Cooper hard top S manual. There has been a few hills that have been on the scary side, but with some e-brake assist manageable. Another thing that has been an adjustment is the amount of tolls. I know a lot of places have tolls, but they are not common in Washington; where we moved from.

Grocery shopping is different too. One of the biggest challenges is not being able to read the packaging. Although I speak a little Japanese, I can not read it. In grocery stores out in town, there is a very small selection of international foods. I am learning how to cook a lot of new foods. We are lucky and have access to the commissary which has the majority of the foods that we like that we can’t get out in town. Commissary is also a lot cheaper than shopping out in town. Fruit is super expensive here. An apple can cost 500 yen or more for one. Although groceries can be on the pricey side, eating out is super affordable to eat at. On average we spend around 3000 yen (less than $30) for a nice filling dinner. There is a lot of “mom and pops” restaurants here vs a lot of chain restaurants. Ramen and Tempura are some of our favorite so far. Kenney has even found sushi that he likes. Plus there is a lot of fun different street foods to try.

All in all, we have been extremely happy with our decision to move here. We are extremely blessed to have this opportunity and plan to take full advantage of it. Prior to being put on lock down with the global pandemic, we were getting out and exploring. We have been stuck at home for almost a month now. There is nothing wrong with doing our part to slow the spread of the Coronavirus but we are ready to be able to go out again.