Japanese Culture & Photography
5 min readOct 24, 2020

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What Motivated Me To Live Abroad In Japan

@photography.japan

Some of you who are reading this article must have felt the urge to live abroad at least once in your life. Here are the reasons why I decided that I needed to go to Japan now and hopefully it helps you make that decision whether or not to living abroad.

I was born and raised in Hawaii and I first went to Japan when I was in high school. After graduating college I worked at the airport selling shuttle tickets hoping to be able to use my Japanese more. However I realized that whenever I wasn’t selling tickets to Japanese people, I wasn’t using Japanese. Also I realized that I wasn’t able to talk about anything else besides shuttle tickets since there would always be a long line. No time for chit chat. I decided to work at JTB Hawaii where I was able to use Japanese almost everyday. However I would always speak to my coworkers who were not Japanese or spoke English very well, in English. Eventually 2 years passed and it hit me. I asked myself, are you enjoying you time at JTB Hawaii?, am I challenging myself everyday?, do I see a good future at this company?

Honestly I really enjoyed my time at JTB. I was able to experience Japanese culture from the comfort of living in Hawaii. However, I realized my Japanese language skill wasn’t getting much better and I wanted more pay. JTB rarely promotes their workers so just a heads up in case you were planning to work there. I did…

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Japanese Culture & Photography

Japanese culture, food, sightseeing spots, and photography. Tokyo based Asian American professional photographer born and raised in Hawaii.