掲示板 Forums - İs Japan good for living?

Do you mean if it's a good environment, or friendly? What do you mean?

You have plenty of time to change your mind. Do what interests you.

Japan is a good place, IMO. It’s not perfect, it might not even be better than where you live now. But it’s not bad.

Every country has good and bad stuff in it, there's no such thing as a perfect place. Japan has some great stuff about it (it's remarkably safe, public transportation is stellar, social safety nets are generally pretty good, there's a lot of natural disasters but it has infustructure built exactly for those disasters), but also some bad stuff (like sexism, racism, a work culture that is really rough on even school kids let alone adults). But like @Row (KN) said language learning is always a good thing :) Language learning isn't really about the country itself; it's about communicating with the individuals that make up that country.

I think language learning is always something great to strive for regardless of what language it is, and I think all the work you put in has the best chance of sticking if you enjoy having an excuse to practice that language. If you like anime and manga, J-Drama or J-pop, then Japanese is a great choice of language to study! If you live in an area with lots of Spanish immigrants and you want to be able to talk with your neighbors more, Spanish is a great one to study; if you have deaf family or friends, ASL is a great one; if you love k-pop then Korean is a great one

(And even if you find it doesn’t stick with you in a concrete ways, it's remarkably how the things you enjoy and put effort into always find a way back to you years later when you least expect it. There's never any wasted effort, just effort you won't see the use for until it surprises you way later)

I can attest to this because I (begrudgingly) learned French during my youth. I assumed that I had forgotten all of my French studies a decade after I quit, but I was pleasantly surprised when I saw a French comment online and automatically translated some of the words from memory. The brain is actually very good at retaining languages even if it doesn't seem that way at first.

I'll add that I've lived just under half of my life in Japan (born in the US). Unless you are going from a developing country to Japan, I think it ultimately boils down to this:

1. Japan is going to have just as many good and bad points as any other place.

2. Do the good things in Japan jive with you more, and the bad things affect you less than where you live now.

I'll give you a simple example: I feel like I love and dislike both America and Japan equally (it's one of those: I sure wish I could combine the two! kind of things). For me, though, living in Japan is much cheaper than the US, and that affected me more than the other things, making Japan a good choice for us. That very same point, though, could affect others differently, or not at all!

Lastly - you really don't know if a country is going to be good for you to live in until you live there (chicken and egg problem). Travelling cannot tell you, nor can exported culture. They can hint at things, of course, but it's *never* the full story.

Life is "ordinary" - that is, our daily lives (at least, compared to movies and travelling, it is!). You never hear about that, but that is exactly what is going to make a place a good or bad spot for you to live - how you enjoy/stress out over/cope/love the ordinary.