Save Point Updated

Note: This post is translated by AI. If you find any unnatural phrasing or errors, please feel free to contact me via email or other channels. Your feedback is appreciated!

First, I want to share some good news: I found a job in Japan!

But before continuing, I want to share the story from the night before I received the offer.

That night was the first time I properly talked with the other people in the share house. I was waiting for the elevator to go down to the first floor for a shower when a French guy (23y) happened to walk out of his room. He gestured for me to wait, then jogged over. We started chatting in the elevator. After going downstairs, we met a German guy (30y) and an American guy (39y), and the four of us ended up talking in the lobby.

When people first meet, the topics are usually things like "Where are you from?", "Why did you come to Japan?", "When did you move in?", and "How long will you stay here?", then the conversation branches out from the answers.

The French guy came here to attend a language school. Most of his stories were about his romantic history, though none of the people involved were Japanese. At first I was surprised that he had such a rich dating history, because he is always wearing a stained white T-shirt and lying on the sofa with a beer belly. But when I heard him share how he talks to people, I realized he is extremely delicate. He knows how to genuinely care about the other person in a conversation. He is also the soul of the share house right now.

The German guy gave me a very confident impression. He is tall, lean, and muscular. He also has a large beard, though unlike the French guy, it does not connect all the way to his hair. When he speaks, he always raises his chin high, with exaggerated body language. Like me, he came to Japan on a working holiday visa.

The American guy is an older, lean Black man. I had run into him a few times in the hallway before. He would smile and say hello, then take the stairs up and down.

We talked until midnight that day. It turned out that the German guy and the American guy were both in IT, just like me. The three of us had all left everything in our hometowns and come to Japan, but the directions we were moving toward were not quite the same.

The German guy felt detached when he was working in IT, so he wanted to come to a distant country to settle himself. He wanted to know what would be left of him after removing work and the life he had grown used to. He could not explain why he had to come to Japan, and he did not speak Japanese, but he knew he had to come. In the four months after quitting his job and coming to Japan, he has worked out regularly and done some physical labor jobs, but most of his time has been spent talking to himself. He said that during this period, he finally saw himself. He feels like a person now. When he said this, he spoke with the tone of someone narrating an epic, still holding his chin up, opening his hands wide and waving them along with the rhythm of his words.

The American guy resonated with that story. He said his past life had been successful, and that when he first started working, the situation for Black people was much harder than it is now. I am not sure about his exact position, but my guess is that if he was not at FAANG, he was at a company of a similar level.

He said, in a sorrowful tone, that he no longer recognized the America of today. Before coming to Japan, he quit his job and went to the desert near the Mexican border to buy a piece of land. He lived there for three years, built a house with his own hands, kept a dog, grew some plants, and looked after each other with a neighbor one kilometer away. Now he is in Japan to pursue peace. He lives in the share house on a tourist visa, entering and leaving the country every three months. Last time he went to Singapore. Usually, out of interest, he reads Rust and a few Japanese books, goes out for walks, eats, and sometimes smokes American Spirit in the smoking area. From his eyes, his tone, and his posture, I could feel that he is indeed living peacefully here.

I also quit my job and went to the Australian countryside and the mountains of Japan, living in unfamiliar and barren environments, spending a lot of time away from social media and tech products, and making a living every day with my own labor.

I actually felt that, starting last year, I was walking toward a life different from most people. But after hearing their stories, I once again felt how huge the world really is. It is so huge that somewhere in the world, there must be people doing similar things as me. No one can really be that special. But it also means that even if I feel out of place in my current environment, there must be some corner of the world that can contain me.

Before this, I had been job hunting full time for about two weeks. The more I entered job-hunting mode, the smaller my world became. Every day, I only did things related to job hunting: practicing system design, mock interview questions, and Japanese speaking. Even though there was still plenty of time left on my visa, the days were indeed counting down. Sometimes I would doubt the direction I was moving in, but other than continuing forward, there was no other choice.

After talking with them, it felt like crossing a small hill and discovering a vast plain in front of me. My restless thoughts settled down, my imagination of life became broader again, and I could calmly accept the interview results and continue preparing for the job search.

Then, the next day, because we had talked until midnight, I slept in a daze until noon. I was too lazy to cook, so I went out and casually ate some soba. After coming back, I received a call from the recruiter. They told me that between the two companies I had interviewed with, the one I wanted to go to more had made me an offer.

When I heard the news, I was not as ecstatic as I had imagined. I just sent a few messages to friends to share the good news, and naturally posted about it as well. Other than that, everything was the same as usual: watching anime, eating, studying Japanese, coding, and sleeping.

I have wanted to come to Japan since 2021. After failing in that attempt, I did not really move it forward for a long time. Last June, I finally took that step and left Taiwan. Now I have taken another step.

This step is still not the ideal one. For now, I will be working as a contractor. Because of that, the interview process was not very rigorous: one screening test and one interview. The interview mostly asked about my previous work and collaboration experience, with a strong focus on team collaboration scenarios. The technical questions were not very deep. The hardest part was answering in Japanese.

The work visa and salary package are the same as a full-time position, and it is also a well-known large company. The only issue is that when the company needs to tighten up, contractors are the first to be cut. So after joining, I will still need to keep working hard to become a full-time employee or look for other opportunities.

The ideal would be to find a full-time role and reach the destination in one step. But if I gave up this chance, I would only continue staying in the share house, shutting myself in to practice Japanese and system design. So I thought it would also be good to become a contractor at a large company first and get real battlefield practice.

If this step is a little smaller, then after going in, I will take the next step with more force.

During the years I stayed in Taiwan, I always felt that job hunting in Japan would be difficult because I had no visa, my Japanese was not good enough, and I also wanted to switch to backend. But unexpectedly, I still managed to achieve it through the contractor path.

My current state is probably more nervous than happy. Even though I passed the interview, are my Japanese and technical skills really enough? I am scaring myself in advance again. I was like this with previous jobs too, but after joining, I usually did not run into any major problems. It reminds me of when I practiced answering "What has been the biggest challenge in your career so far?" I really wanted to answer, "The biggest challenges were all during the job search!"

Every step is trembling and uncertain, like barely defeating a boss with only a sliver of HP left and entering the next stage. There is no passionate victory, but the save point has indeed been updated.