My anecdatum: I worked from home as a freelance Japanese-to-English translator from 1986 to 2005. I lived all that time in or near Tokyo, Japan's business and

My anecdatum: I worked from home as a freelance Japanese-to-English translator from 1986 to 2005. I lived all that time in or near Tokyo, Japan's business and government center where the majority of translation clients were located. From 1986 to the mid-1990s, being physically located in Tokyo was a definite competitive advantage for me. While I knew some translators who worked remotely even then, having to send and receive manuscripts by fax or mail limited the types of work they could accept. For more complex jobs that required meetings, or for jobs that had reference materials that could not be sent by fax, being able to go to clients' offices allowed me to get enough higher-paying, often time-sensitive work to compensate for the higher costs of living in Tokyo. Over the course of the 1990s, clients gradually went online and it became possible to receive and deliver more jobs in digital form. Around the year 2000, online translation companies started offering services from India and other low-wage countries, charging a tenth or less compared to what translators located in Japan were charging. The quality wasn't very good at first, but the price difference started to hurt the bottom lines of translators in Japan who did the most generic, commodified work. By that point, I had a stable set of clients who relied on my experience and my knowledge about their businesses. They couldn't easily send the work to others, and I didn't feel any effect from remote competitors. The rise of remote competition was also not a factor in my decision to quit translation and take a university job in 2005. However, I know that if I try to return to freelance translation after I retire from the university in 2023, I will face a much more competitive environment than I did thirty years ago, living near Tokyo will no longer be an advantage, and it will probably be impossible for me to return to the same income level I used to have.