> Any Americans moved to Japan? Like permanently? I grew up in California and moved to Japan forty-one years ago, at the age of twenty-six. I have lived here e

> Any Americans moved to Japan? Like permanently? I grew up in California and moved to Japan forty-one years ago, at the age of twenty-six. I have lived here ever since. As others in this thread have noted, everyone is different. In my case, what has kept me here is having learned the language well after I arrived, entering first one career (translation) and then, twenty years later, another (in academia) for which my language ability and my understanding of the culture were essential, having and raising a family here, continuing to find the country and culture interesting, and finding a comfortable living situation. Now Japan feels like home and I can’t imagine leaving. However, I have known a lot of people who started out similar to me but who ended up leaving after a while. I don’t want to generalize about them, either, but there are some characteristics I have noticed among Americans who didn’t stay: They didn’t learn the language well, or they couldn’t find jobs that suited them, or they were annoyed at always being treated like a foreigner (more common in the countryside than in the cities), or they had aging parents back home, or they just felt homesick.