Anime and manga may have opened the first door to Japan for me, but by college, my interest had already grown far beyond the media that started it.

I was studying Japanese, going to Japan every year, and taking every opportunity I could to experience more of the country. Most of those trips lasted about a month, so by the time I arrived at Kansai Gaidai University for a full semester from August to December 2011, Japan itself wasn’t completely new to me anymore.

That distinction matters because I wasn’t arriving after one vacation with completely rose-colored glasses, thinking Japan was some perfect place because I had watched anime. I had already spent quite a bit of time there and had started seeing the difference between the Japan I had first discovered through media and the real country in front of me.

What was new, though, was actually having to live there on my own.

My previous trips had still been structured in some way. Someone was organizing things, I was part of a program, I was supervised, or I was traveling with other people. My semester at Kansai Gaidai was different because, for the first time, I had to actually fend for myself.

I lived in the dorms and had a structured class schedule, but everyday life was suddenly my responsibility. I had to shop for my own food, budget the allowance I was given, figure out how to get places by myself, make plans, navigate transportation, and create my own routine. They sound like incredibly ordinary things, but that was exactly the point… I wasn’t just visiting Japan anymore. I was living there.

And I loved it.

I felt free in a way I hadn’t on the more structured trips before. That semester was the first time I really understood that I didn’t just enjoy traveling to Japan. I genuinely liked the lifestyle I had when I lived there.

I actually tried to convince my parents to let me stay for another semester because the person who would eventually become my best friend was staying for an entire year, but realistically, it wouldn’t have worked. It was my final semester before graduation, and I still had requirements to finish back at Elon so I could graduate on time.

So I went home, and I could not stop thinking about Japan.

That was when the goal really shifted. Instead of asking when I could visit again, I started asking how I could get back there and actually stay. I looked at different possibilities, including getting a job with a Japanese company, English teaching, and graduate school. Eventually, graduate school was what stuck.

I was accepted into the MBA program at Doshisha University for the Class of 2014, and in August 2012, I moved back to Japan. At the time, it felt almost like an extension of studying abroad… I was a student again, just in Kyoto this time. My biggest responsibility was getting good grades, and I was having the time of my life. I felt accomplished simply because I had found my way back.

The harder reality didn’t really hit until my second year. Eventually, I had to graduate, and if I wanted to keep living in Japan after that, I needed a job and a proper work visa to go along with it.

That sounds obvious now, but it was the first time the question of staying became genuinely serious. When my parents came to my graduation in September 2014, they eventually gave me a deadline. If I didn’t have a job by December, they were done funding me and I would either have to come back to the U.S. or find another way to support myself in Japan.

If I was serious about staying in Japan, I had to make it work myself within the limit my parents had given me.

So I buckled down. I became less picky, I applied, I worried, and I wondered whether I could really pull this off. I was genuinely scared about the future, but I knew I wanted to stay in Japan.

I met that deadline with time to spare and got a job in November. I started working in December.

The moment I remember most clearly, though, came when I picked up my new work visa. It was a five-year visa, which I would know until many years later is an actual miracle to get as your first working visa in Japan. I remember walking along the Kamogawa River in Kyoto afterward and thinking, “Japan ACTUALLY still wants me. I can’t believe it. I’m here for five more years.”

For five more years, I had a way to stay.

But getting the visa and actually building a sustainable adult life were two very different things.

That first job was also my first real full-time job anywhere, and reality hit hard. I worked for a small, traditional Japanese company in the suburbs of Osaka and had to learn Japanese office culture from scratch.

I realized very quickly that my Japanese was not as good as I had thought it was. I also learned that having an MBA did not automatically mean as much in the workplace as 24-year-old me probably imagined it would. It was humbling.

My life became mostly home, commute, office, commute, home. Osaka City was about 30 minutes away, even more for some parts of the city, and I didn’t have much of a social life. There were plenty of moments when I wondered if I could actually do this, whether the salary was worth it, whether the office culture was worth it, and whether I really wanted this badly enough.

What kept me going wasn’t some dramatic declaration that I would stay in Japan no matter what. I just kept plugging along because I still wanted to be here, and the good moments and the lifestyle I loved gave me little glimmers of hope. I also had support in Japan, including my best friend and some other good friends, who understood what this life meant to me. That mattered a lot during the harder periods.

Eventually, I moved to a writing position at a new Japan travel website. I enjoyed the work much more, but it was a contract position. About a year and a half later, the website wasn’t performing the way the company had hoped, and when my contract ended, so did my job.

I found another position after that in the rush to secure something before my contract ended. I won’t get into the details of that job, other than to say it was another difficult experience.

By the time I joined what would become my final Japanese company in the summer of 2018, I was a completely different employee than I had been four years earlier. I was no longer the naive 24-year-old walking into her first office. I had four years of work experience in Japan and three companies behind me, all with different office cultures.

This company trained me properly. The salary was better, and the people were nicer and more supportive. Just as importantly, I had enough experience by then to understand how to integrate into a Japanese workplace much better than I had before.

When I renewed my visa in the fall of 2019, I received another five-year work visa.

By then, Japan wasn’t a dream I was trying to reach anymore. It was simply where my adult life was happening.

I had learned how to work here, how to struggle here, and how to solve problems when my parents couldn’t step in to help because they didn’t know how life in Japan worked either. Everything was in Japanese. Paperwork was in Japanese. Work was in Japanese. Life was in Japanese… and I had to figure it out.

Somewhere along the way, that changed me. I learned to listen more before speaking. I learned to understand the environment before giving my opinion. I learned that sometimes perseverance means hanging in there, and sometimes it means recognizing when you need to pivot.

I still didn’t know exactly where all of this was going, but the bigger goal had remained surprisingly consistent.

I wanted to stay, and little by little, I was proving to myself that I could.

Read Part 1 | Go to Part 3