In September 2018, at the age of fifty-one, I left Germany on a one-way ticket to Japan with my Japanese wife, four suitcases, a finite amount of savings, and no job lined up for me at the other end. We believed that Japan would be a better place for us to live than Germany, but we were taking a real personal risk.
For around twenty-five years in Germany, I had been working in various IT and consulting roles, and I was confident I had racked up a reasonable amount of redeemable skills and experience - but I had little Japanese language ability, and no idea whether a Japanese employer would hire someone my age.
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In a way, the story began twelve years earlier, with my decision to not travel to Las Vegas.
Since the late 1990s, I had travelled regularly to North America. I visited New York twice, travelled around the Great Lakes, explored the Pacific Northwest, the Mid-Atlantic and New England states, Yellowstone and Grand Teton, the Canadian Rockies, and Florida. In addition, while working at HP until the mid-2010s, I travelled from Germany to the San Francisco Bay Area on business more than 20 times.
Travel had become a part of my life. I enjoyed the experience of arriving somewhere unfamiliar, discovering the scenery, and observing how people went about their lives. For 2006, I had just started to consider another trip, this time to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon.
But then I woke up one morning and thought to myself: How about if I go in the opposite direction for my next trip? Somewhere in Asia, not in North America?
So, in early 2006, I started planning a trip to Japan.
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At first, Japan was simply another travel destination. But soon after I arrived, it started to become more than that. The entire first trip was a dream-like experience - the country, the culture, the people, and the particular feeling of being there resonated with me in a way that was difficult to explain.
A few months later, I met a Japanese woman - first online, then in person during a second trip to Japan in the same year. Less than a year after that, she moved to Germany, and we got married there.
From 2007 until 2018, we lived as a couple in Germany. There were quite a few aspects of that life that we genuinely appreciated. My wife worked hard to learn German, and we both enjoyed the wide-open countryside, the landscapes, the seasons (including Christmas Markets), and some of the quieter pleasures of living outside a large city.
But neither of us ever became entirely comfortable there.
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For my wife, fully adapting to life in Europe was difficult despite the effort she made. And even though it may sound strange, it was complicated for me, too: I am German, I had lived in Austria or Germany for my entire life up to that point - and yet I found everyday interactions with local people difficult and often exhausting. Germany was familiar, but over the years, a lingering feeling accumulated: we were living a life that functioned, but it did not feel fully like ours.
Both my wife and I had complicated relationships with our families. Perhaps that shared history made us especially determined to create a home of our own. Not a perfect home, and not a place without problems, but a life in which we could choose the terms.
We had also hoped to have children. Despite several fertility treatments, our wish never came true. The experience was emotionally exhausting for both of us, physically difficult for my wife, and another element that shaped the frame of mind in which we tried to figure out how and where we wanted to build the rest of our lives.
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Meanwhile, Japan became a constant presence for us.
Ever since we had married in 2007, we travelled to Japan at least once a year. We understood the old adage that visiting a country is not the same thing as living there - yet each trip reinforced the same feeling: Japan was not merely a country we loved to visit. It was a place where we could imagine living more fully and more freely.
In many ways, Japan was already present in our German home. We cooked mostly Japanese food, and my wife’s parents - who farm their own rice - would regularly send us rice and other ingredients. We made frequent trips to a reasonably well-stocked Asian supermarket in Stuttgart. Long before we moved, our "Japanese" kitchen in our German home had become one of our happy places.
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By 2018, we had decided that we no longer wanted to stay in Germany - a decision that felt both liberating and unsettling. Getting ready for the move was exhausting in a way that only becomes clear once you realize that you do actually have to go through all your items one-by-one, and try to reduce an entire life's belongings to what can feasibly be transported to the other side of the world. Each of us would have two suitcases on the flight. Everything else had to be evaluated and then packed, sold, donated, discarded, or left behind.
We ended up with twenty boxes of personal and household belongings to ship to Japan. My wife’s parents kindly agreed to store them for us until we knew whether our plan would succeed. In hindsight, this arrangement was a perfect metaphor for our situation: instead of arriving at a definitive new home, the boxes were waiting in limbo, just as we were. If I found work and we could remain in Japan, we would eventually retrieve the boxes and build a more permanent life. If our savings ran out first, we would have to bite the bullet and return to Germany - and somehow send our possessions back again.
Meanwhile, we sold most of what we owned in Germany. Household goods, clothes, books, DVDs, records, and electronics went through eBay or specialized buyers. We were fortunate to also find buyers for some of the larger items, including our refrigerator and several pieces of furniture. By the time our departure date arrived, we had managed to empty our home almost completely.
In hindsight, I can see that I made some imperfect decisions. I sold a few irreplaceable books and unique personal items that I now regret letting go, while at the same time keeping some rather ordinary things. But I guess that's how it goes when you are sorting through a life under pressure. Like Steve Jobs said in his famous 2005 Stanford Commencement speech - you can only connect the dots looking backwards.
20 boxes of packaged life inside the empty house, and later on the Nippon Express truck.
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Nobody in Germany knew what we were planning.
I had a fairly good idea of how most people would react. I expected discouragement, disbelief, and variations of the question, “Have you lost your mind?”. I did not want to spend the final months before leaving defending a decision that already required enough courage.
On the other hand, the people who did encourage me were not always realistically understanding the risks. Some American friends brought their characteristic optimism to the situation: Go for it. You’ll be fine. I appreciated the sentiment, even though encouragement alone could not calm down the worries that kept me awake at night.
Japan-based recruiters had a seemingly more practical version of the same message. They told me that once I was in Japan, it would be easier to attend interviews at short notice and that this should improve my chances of eventually finding something. There was truth in that - but availability was not the same as employability, and it was a stretch to expect that many Japanese companies would happily take a chance on a fifty-one-year-old foreign professional with limited Japanese ability.
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Towards the end of September 2018, the time had come to say goodbye to the house in Germany, and get ready for the decisive departure to Japan. Upon arrival at Tokyo's Haneda Airport, a friendly immigration officer handed me my new residence card, which felt very reassuring.
Our first apartment was a small furnished flat in Itabashi Ward, Tokyo. I still quite vividly remember arriving by taxi from Haneda Airport after the long journey from Germany. The ride toward the apartment took us through a lively street with colorful shops, restaurants, lights, signs, and the homely vibe of a Tokyo neighborhood beginning its night.
It's hard to put the mixture of emotions into words.
There was excitement: We had finally done it!
There was joy: Japan, which I had casually chosen as a travel destination twelve years earlier, was now where we would try to get settled.
But there was also anxiety: Would I be able to find a job? How long would it take? How long would our savings allow us to stay?
View from the apartment building in which we lived at the beginning, in the Itabashi Ward of Tokyo.
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The job hunt lasted around half a year, and it was an emotional rollercoaster.
There were fewer suitable jobs than I had hoped for. Recruiters often seemed unable - or unwilling - to understand my particular situation. Some sent me roles that bore no relation whatsoever to my skills or experience. Others repeatedly pushed me toward the same companies, even after previous attempts had ended in rejection. At times, I had the distinct impression that my age was held against me, regardless of what the rules might say on paper.
What made the experience difficult was not so much the rejection (which is to be expected by a job applicant). It was the feeling of being reduced to a keyworded record in a résumé database, rather than being understood as a person with a 25-year career, transferable experience, and a real desire to make a new life in Japan. As time went on, each rejection returned me to the same question: had we made a mistake?
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Then in March 2019, my luck changed.
I found a recruiter who actually listened. He made the effort to understand my experience, my circumstances, and the kind of role in which I could realistically contribute. More importantly, he had direct connections into an international team within a large Japanese company. He had already helped place other foreign professionals there, and he understood how I might fit into that environment.
I had a feeling that the interviews had gone reasonably well, but as always, I had no choice but to patiently wait for the decision.
Then one afternoon, the recruiter called me.
“Hi Norbert,” he said, in a neutral voice. “I have heard back from the company on the job opening.”
He paused.
Then his voice became upbeat: “You got the job. Congratulations, man!”
It may sound like a cliché, but in that moment I understood what people mean when they say that the weight of the world falls off your shoulders. For months, my wife and I had lived with this lingering uncertainty: whether I could work, whether we could stay, how long our savings would last, whether leaving Germany had been brave or foolish.
That phone call removed this uncertainty, and gave me the work that I have been doing ever since.
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Since then, we have built the kind of life in Japan that we had hoped was possible.
Tokyo offers a convenience, variety and safety that we love. It is a city of enormous scale, but our daily life in Itabashi Ward is actually surprisingly local - built around familiar streets, local shops and restaurants, and a well-connected subway station.
My Japanese has improved gradually over the years. I still have a mountain to climb in terms of learning, but I'm climbing it at my pace and the language no longer feels like an insurmountable obstacle. Japan has become home to me, and it feels like the place where I belong.
More importantly, both my wife and I have found a sense of freedom here. In Germany, we often couldn't shake the feeling that we were being observed, evaluated, or quietly judged against expectations about how people were supposed to live their lives. In Tokyo, paradoxically, we feel more able to be ourselves. We have more space to define our own routines, interests, and identities without feeling the need to explain or defend them.
We have also found activities that have become part of our life together. Both of us go to kickboxing training twice a week. My wife sings in a gospel choir, and I have begun learning to play the drums. These may sound like small things, but I feel happy and proud about them.
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We left Germany in 2018 because remaining would have meant continuing a life that no longer felt like the one we wanted. We chose a risky and unconventional way of trying to get settled in Japan - thankfully it ended well, and gave us a life that would not have existed otherwise. It made us become people we might not have become if we had stayed in Germany.
I should also say that we lucked out on the timing of our move - had we hesitated a bit longer, we would have hit the Coronavirus pandemic, during which it would have been virtually impossible to enter Japan or do a regular job search inside the country.
Lastly, words alone can't express the gratitude and love I feel for my wife for patiently going along with this crazy idea, and fearlessly marching with me towards the new life we have been able to build here in Tokyo.
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P.S.: I never went to Las Vegas. 😊