Thoughts on the concept of home

Let me take a minute to discuss home ownership, restlessness, and whether I'm actually frustrated with Japan or just frustrated in general. There are a few topics I want to work through.

The first is the house. Not a house in the abstract or the concept of a house, but an actual house. There's a scene I can't get out of my head: sitting in my own yard, a bonfire, a glass of wine, a good book or just some music playing. That's the picture. It isn't ambitious. But it's been sitting there for a while and it won't leave. It took me a long, long while to create this picture by the way. Quite possibly the results of a decade of thinking.

The second is Japan, or more precisely, whether Japan is the obstacle, or simply where I happen to be standing while I'm frustrated. The visa rules, the PR requirements, the income thresholds, the fact that being a freelancer makes a mortgage borderline impossible. All of it real, stacking neatly on top of each other like lego bricks.

The third is my suspicion that neither of the first two is the actual problem. Haha, fuck me, right? That I'd be restless elsewhere too. Whether that's Singapore. Abu Dhabi. Japan. Germany. The Netherlands. Or anywhere else I imagine myself while looking out the window.

I'm going to start with the house, because it's the easiest to describe. What I want is a place where that if I decide to paint a wall, I paint it, whatever colour I like. Where I can put in solar panels and batteries, build a pizza oven in the garden, upgrade whatever I want to upgrade. Where I can drill a hole to hang a picture or put up a sunscreen without it being a whole thing. Or where I can drill holes for sake of drilling holes. Right now I can't do any of that. I can dress a rental up so it looks like mine, and I have, but it isn't, and I know it isn't, and every small thing I can't do is just a reminder. Another grievance to stick on the bill.

Then Japan. I don't feel welcome here. That's a sentence I hate to write it because it wasn't always true. When I first came here it felt different. Somewhere along the way it changed, and I'm not sure if the country changed or I did. Or perhaps we both changed. What I do know is, that the practical situation keeps confirming my feelings which isn't ideal. The visa hasn't been renewed yet. The PR requirements have moved. Taxes are going up, everything is more expensive, saving is harder than it was. A bank is unlikely to give a self-employed chump like myself a mortgage without a lot of creative structuring, and even then it's not a guarantee. Incorporate and pay myself. Split my income between my wife and me. The rules in Japan allow for so much creativity tax-wise. A fallback is to save until I can buy something outright, cash, a stack of yukis, which is a similarly long road with no guarantee at the end of it either. And, will foreigners in 5 years be allowed to buy property at all? Will it be reserved for PR? There's no way to tell. It's like a technology tree in a game that forever keeps changing.

So that brings me to a test I keep running on myself. Say I had the house, the yard, the bonfire, a wall full of holes, here in Japan. Would I still want to leave?

My immediate answer is yes. But is that also the answer when I really think about it? Because if the answer is yes even with the house, then the house was never really the point. Perhaps then the thing I want is to be closer to my family, or just to be somewhere else than wherever I currently am. And if the honest answer is actually no, that I'd stay, that I could put up with all the bullshit as long as I had that one place, then the house is the whole thing and the rest is noise I've been mistaking for a reason.

But I genuinely don't know which one it is. Otherwise I wouldn't be writing this. It's possible the yes is simply me trying to protect me. It's easier to say you'd leave, than to admit you want something you may not be able to have here.

And digging deeper, there's a thing I don't like (or do I?), which is that I might just be the kind of person who is always in the wind. Never satisfied anywhere. Always looking for the place I can call home and never arriving at it. If that's true, then moving doesn't fix anything, it just resets the clock. I'd buy a house in the woods somewhere and eighteen months later I'd be looking out the window imagining a different life.

I don't think that's entirely true. But I don't think it's entirely false either.

So what can I do where I am right now to make this place feel more like home? That's a practical question, but it feels more and more that whatever I do here is temporary by definition. I can improve a place that isn't mine and will never be mine. That's not nothing. It's also not the thing.

If Japan had rules more like Europe's, I think I'd stay. That's what I told myself while I was thinking this through. But I'm not sure it's true. It might just be the cleanest version of my story. Palatable. The easiest to digest. The story where the obstacle is external and specific, and could theoretically be removed. Maybe I'm tired of the rules. Or maybe I'm tired of something else, and the rules are just the part I can point at.

So I'm not sure where that leaves me. I keep rambling. Three things: the house, the country, and the possibility that I'd feel this way regardless. They feel connected, but they don't collapse into one single problem, and I can't solve any of them by thinking harder about them either.

I hope you didn't expect a satisfying conclusion to this post. Because there is none. Not yet, anyway.