Irina lives in Tokyo and heads a web development department for an international retail chain. She moved to Japan to learn the language, rebuilt her career from e-learning and design into UX and frontend, and discovered a culture where open competition is rare and direct confrontation is frowned upon. Her story is about visas, language school, restaurant work, and the strange feeling of being an outsider with an expiration date on her residence status.
“Please take me, or you’ll lose me altogether”
— You worked as a UX engineer and Frontend Developer, but you began your career after graduating in a humanities field. How did you get into IT?
— I love technology and computers, and I thought about studying something in radio engineering. But physics and math scared me, while I enjoyed talking to people. As someone who hadn’t fully decided, I enrolled in the psychology faculty at one of the Minsk universities.
During my studies, I responded to a vacancy at a large marketplace that was actively recruiting customer service specialists. I worked there part-time after classes.
After university, I was sent for practical training. There I worked with people who had committed serious crimes. We had to determine whether they showed signs of mental disorders. It’s very difficult and heavy work. Both in terms of the people you encounter — murderers, pedophiles, and so on — and in terms of bureaucracy and legal issues. Lots of stress, lots of injustice. I didn’t want to stay in such a gloomy environment.
But assignment is assignment. I had to either work for two years in such an institution or find something myself. So I went to negotiate with the marketplace where I had already been working part-time. I said: “You have a division that trains new employees, and I have the right education. Take me there, or you’ll lose me altogether.” I really had very good sales, my calls were used as examples for training materials. And they replied: “Yes, of course, you’re a very valuable employee.”
The company was growing, hiring people, and the training center expanded. At some point I suggested automating training, using an app that allowed new employees to upload and go through training materials step by step.
That’s how we got e-learning. That kind of training turned out to be more successful. People learned faster and more productively. Another division appeared in the company, a digital division, which handled the design of all those courses. One day I was offered the position of lead of e-course design. I agreed, and that’s where my work on the digital side began.
“I like Naruto, I love Fullmetal Alchemist, and a lot of Japanese things that are loved worldwide”
— I really enjoyed working at that company, which invested a lot in creating a corporate atmosphere and gave opportunities for growth. And it was at that peak that I had to leave.
I left with a heavy heart. Before leaving, I met with my manager. She told me she was going on maternity leave in a couple of months and wanted to hand her position to me. And I told her that in two months I was leaving to study in Japan.
— Why did you decide to go to Japan?
— I saw it as a challenge connected to my desire to learn Japanese, to understand the lyrics of Japanese songs. I really like old Japanese J-Rock, and old Japanese classics in general. Deep down I’m a retro person. Though young, I’m retro, with nostalgia for something old that I haven’t even seen in real life. I like Naruto, I adore Fullmetal Alchemist and a lot of the Japanese things that are loved all over the world.
But that’s not the main reason I moved. The main one is the sound of the language. It may seem strange, but if I didn’t like how Japanese sounds, I wouldn’t even have come here.
I also watched a lot of YouTube videos made by bloggers living in Japan. And all of it seemed to me like a fairy-tale culture that had to be mastered. It just had to be.
— You have a very interesting motivation for moving to such a distant country. Do you remember where your love for Japanese culture came from?
— In my school days, many people didn’t particularly respect anime fans. But I loved Jetix, I loved Naruto, for me it was something else. I loved Hellsing and the old cult works of Hayao Miyazaki. At some point my parents recorded Spirited Away on a cassette, and the ending was chewed up, so I couldn’t finish watching it, which upset me as a child. And to this day all of it is associated for me with something nostalgic, warm, and homey.
“The city is wonderful, but choosing that college was a big mistake”
— So your first visa to Japan was a student visa. How did you get it?
— First you choose which part of Japan you want to go to — Tokyo, Kyoto, Kobe, somewhere else. And you choose a school. You contact it, write an email: “I want to enroll with you.” The admission season in Japan usually falls in spring. Documents need to be prepared six months in advance, around September.
If you suit them, they reply: “Yes, come, we have these options available for you.” True, now it may be more difficult. There’s some kind of boom, many popular schools are overcrowded.
They also write what documents need to be prepared. Among them there must be a bank statement. If I remember correctly, it must show at least $14,000, plus movement must be visible, that money was regularly coming into the account. If you have a sponsor — parents, husband, or wife — you can submit their documents too, so it’s clear they can help you and send money if needed. Some schools conduct a mini-interview with you, about 30 minutes. They tell you about their course, what the daily schedule will be, what opportunities you’ll have in the future.
You send the required documents and photos — and wait. If everything is fine, they send you an invoice for payment. For foreign students, payment for the first year is usually required in full right away. After payment, they submit documents to immigration. If your documents pass screening, you get a certificate of eligibility, which arrives literally a month before the school year starts. With that certificate you go to the embassy to apply for a visa. The visa is given either for a year or for a two-year study period, depending on the school’s rating.
I decided to go to Kobe, a city in the south, in the Kansai region. There I enrolled in the Japanese language faculty at a local electronics college. The city is wonderful, but choosing that college turned out to be a big mistake.
Classes at the college run from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., and it’s hell. Because all that time you must be at the college and study the language. In a class of 25 people, about half were Chinese, the rest Vietnamese, Bangladeshis, Nepalis, and some other mix. I arrived in Japan shortly before the pandemic ended, and there were no Europeans at all in my class. There was one American, but he got tired very quickly and flew back.
Europeans and Americans leave such colleges very quickly. They come here, attend a language school for which they paid a lot of money, got a visa thanks to it, and think they’ve landed at a resort. But attendance here is very strict. If you’re even five minutes late, it’s counted as a full absence, which is taken into account at the end of the year. If your attendance is below 85% — it depends on the school — your visa may not be extended.
— Is studying at language schools expensive?
— Quite expensive, and recently it has noticeably risen in yen, which has fallen a lot. When I studied in Kobe, I paid about 850,000 yen a year, and with textbooks and various additional materials it came to about a million. Now you’d need to pay about 1,200,000 yen [$7,600] a year for everything.
— Does the tuition include housing?
— Schools often support students with housing only for a year or even six months. And if you go to study in Tokyo, you can forget about a dormitory. You’ll have to look for housing yourself right away; the school doesn’t help with that at all. And housing costs will be high.
In Kobe, things were good in that regard. The first year I lived in a comfortable dormitory. In fact, it was a spacious apartment where my roommate and I had separate rooms, and only the toilet and bathroom were shared. After the first year, the college helped me find an apartment at an affordable price.
A saving side job
— Did you have any job during your studies?
— The company I worked for asked me to stay; I left while remaining in the lead position. I’d come home tired after heavy classes, the workday was starting in Minsk at that time, and I’d get messages from there: “Let’s hop on a call.” I had to organize something, check something. And I realized: no. A month later I wrote a resignation letter.
When you spend the whole day at school and then work half the day more at a Belarusian rate, that’s an unjustified price. Because the amounts we get in Belarus and the amounts needed to live in Japan are very different. Living in Japan, it’s more profitable to work part-time in the Japanese service sector than to work in a managerial position in Belarus. That’s what I did.
I found a part-time job at a Chinese restaurant in Kobe. The restaurant is elite, located in a prestigious area, the Japanese adore it, there are lots of visitors. The pandemic helped me find that job: there were few foreigners, including students, in Japan then. Now the situation has changed a lot.
— After the pandemic ended, do the Japanese no longer look at you as some foreign exotic?
— Not at all. After I finished the language courses, there in Kobe I enrolled in web design courses. And after them I was offered a job in Tokyo.
In Tokyo, it doesn’t matter at all who you are. Whether your face is white, black, or something else. Here the pace of life is enormous, and the only thing that matters is how you behave. You follow the rules, don’t make noise on the train, bow where you should. If you live the ordinary life of a salaryman, everything is fine, no one pays attention to you.
— How well did you know English when you flew to Japan?
— I had English that allowed me to get through airport check-in without problems and handle everyday matters. But no more than that. Now it has become much more confident.
— In many countries, English is a lifesaver that helps you somehow explain yourself to locals without knowing their native language. Does that work in Japan too?
— Tokyo is more advanced; there are many young people here who strive to learn English and communicate with foreigners. But first I came to Kobe. There, and in the Kansai region in general, you’ll encounter signs that aren’t duplicated in English, and Japanese people who don’t speak English at all. There English won’t save you at all.
— Was all the instruction in the web design faculty in Japanese?
— Yes. Because I studied in Kobe, not somewhere in Tokyo, all the teachers spoke exclusively Japanese. No one could answer anything in English even if they wanted to.
— And how did you manage all that? Japanese is extremely difficult for Europeans, after all.
— A huge plus for me was my part-time job. I talked a lot there because I worked in the hall as service staff. I had to do many different tasks. For example, I had to describe each dish in detail. The first year was hell. I was given an earpiece through which they commanded: take this to such and such table, and that to that table, the customer at the third table has an allergy, so something needs to be removed from the dish. There was such a huge amount of information that I began to understand spoken speech very quickly.
To learn to form sentences and speech in Japanese, you need 7–8 months of active communication. The restaurant job was perfect for that, where you’re in a no-way-out situation and must explain to the customer what dish they paid for.
We had a morning and an evening menu. And every season, once every three months, the menu changed. Plus dozens of different utensils, each dish had its own. Customers come who spend 30,000 yen [about $200], not counting drinks — with drinks it could be $500 or $1,000 per person. They sit and look at you: “How do you eat this? What is this dish made of?” And you explain to them.
— At least they left decent tips?
— In Japan, tips are forbidden. If you took something, someone handed you something, you probably won’t be fired immediately. But the boss will talk to you: “Why did you take it? That’s not done here.”
“You simply have no right to speak rudely about a colleague, because ‘we are a team, we are a family’”
— How did the Japanese treat you on an everyday level? Did customers react normally to your mistakes?
— I had ideal relationships with customers. I remember two women who asked why I came to Japan, and I said I loved Japanese songs. It happened that the songs I like belong to the period of their prime. We got very carried away talking. They paid for their food and left the restaurant, but an hour and a half later, when the restaurant closed for its lunch break, they came back, knocked, and asked to pass on a box of chocolates for Irina.
There were other moments when I was given tips, even though it’s forbidden. One customer shook my hand and through the handshake slipped 2,000 yen [$13] into it. But usually such moments are stopped by colleagues.
The problems I had in relationships were with some of my colleagues. There was a student in our team, a couple of years younger than me, who was studying hotel business and doing an internship at the restaurant. She played various nasty tricks on me. She could swap the napkins on the place settings, which had to be strictly a certain shape. Or swap the dried fruit on the little plates — once she slipped nuts to a customer with an allergy who couldn’t eat them.
There were several such situations, and each time she pretended not to know what I was talking about. But I’m a straightforward person, and after the nuts incident I told her directly what I thought of her. After that, she and I simply ignored each other. Because of her, it was very hard for me to work during the first six months.
— Was the reason that you were a foreigner? Or would she have done the same to a Japanese woman?
— No, Japanese women can give as good as they get. But here she saw my weak spot in communication: I couldn’t even properly say that she had approached the order and deliberately changed something in it.
And on top of that came the peculiarities of the Japanese language and Japanese communication. If you directly accuse someone, for the Japanese it looks very rude.
Any direct confrontation — and you immediately become the problem.
You simply have no right to speak rudely about a colleague, because “we are a team, we are a family.” Even if someone swapped the dried fruit, you must apologize and say: “I’ll change them now.” You accept defeat and bow your head like a loyal samurai.
“I studied for a year and realized it wasn’t for me. I can’t sit here with these kids”
— Did you finally switch onto the rails of UX design already in Japan?
— Yes. My active transition to UX, to full-fledged development, happened here. And the most interesting part began. Because in Japan, without Japanese experience, you’ll be perceived as a person with zero experience, no matter what your previous experience was.
— You mentioned so casually “I was offered a job” when you were telling how you moved to Tokyo. Was it actually not so simple?
— Oh yes. To understand how difficult all this is, let’s go back a bit. After finishing language school, my student visa ended. There were two paths: go on studying and spend huge money on it, or go look for work. Fortunately, my language level allowed both: I passed N2, which is a business level, second after the highest N1.
The language, grades, and attendance allowed me to go to university. But I thought: “What university? That’s another four years. And employers look at both experience and age, plus I’m a foreigner. I’d graduate closer to 30 and find nothing at all!”
So I decided to enroll in a one-year web design course at the same college. Especially since I like Figma; even before enrolling I watched many different tutorials on YouTube. I started writing myself, studying HTML, CSS, then bought JavaScript, began watching how to properly build websites, how to do responsive design, how a layout design is handed over to a frontender.
I went into web design, studied for a year. And they asked me if I wanted to go into a second year, already in the promotion faculty. But I said: “No, thank you, I’ll look for work.”
I should note that education in Japan is very slow, designed for a Japanese audience. In Belarus and CIS countries, people learn at high speed, strive to get into practice faster, master something, take a bunch of courses, gain skills. It’s literally a race among people.
In that respect, Japanese education is chill — but that doesn’t apply to the language courses I talked about above. It’s a capitalist system: you paid money — and you do what you want.
In my web design group, I was simultaneously interesting and uninteresting to everyone. Interesting — because I was the only white person. Uninteresting — because I was interested in studying. Plus by then I was already older: most students who came to study were kids of 19–20. Their parents paid the money, they came, they were given MacBooks, nice textbooks, everything convenient, luxurious, polished. It was just some five-star school like they show in TV series.
It’s like that everywhere here, because education is very expensive. For people from the CIS who studied at our universities, it looks like a huge contrast. At my university, they could give you a 2 or a 3 and send you to retake an exam even if you had memorized all the questions. Simply because the teacher didn’t like your face, or something else.
In Japan, it’s the other extreme. Here, since you paid a lot of money, they’ll still let you move on. Whether you know the subject or not, whether you submitted the layout or not — they’ll still give you the green light. In my opinion, that’s a big problem in Japan. People here don’t compete.
I studied for a year and realized it wasn’t for me. I can’t sit here with these kids. I mean, I respect them, I understand them perfectly. While I’m making a layout, they’re playing UNO Online on their MacBooks. Cool, what a carefree life! And my visa expires in a year. What do I do next, how do I extend it?
The realities we live in are absolutely different. I think everyone who moves to other countries faces this. Visas, language, some bureaucratic things because of which you look at the people living around you and think: “Why are they so relaxed?” Because they live in their own country, and they don’t need to think about such things at all.
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