[samurai007]

As Paul said, when you live there long term, you will of course have ups and downs, good days and bad, same as you would living back home. But I'm not disappointed at all that I went, I had a great time overall, and it was an amazing, life-changing experience.

Also, unlike Sangetsu, I went over with very little experience or knowledge of what I was getting into. It was 12 years ago when I went to Japan... anime and manga was not nearly as common or popular in the US as it today. (You never saw it in US bookstores back then, and only a few manga were just starting to be translated by companies like Viz. (Ranma 1/2, Appleseed, etc)

I had graduated from university and then spent a couple more years helping my dad in his cabinet shop before he retired. I'd never had the money to move out of my parents' home, much less travel overseas, and I really wanted to see the world a bit. I wasn't focused on Japan at all... in fact, Europe was my 1st choice. But a former JET had spoken at my university when I was there, talking about the program, and I remembered what a great impression I'd had. I looked into teaching English overseas programs around the world, and JET/Japan was by far the largest and best at the time, so I applied. I was lucky enough to be accepted.

I didn't speak any Japanese besides Arigato, and growing up in a small rural city, I'd hardly ever eaten Japanese food in my life (and that wasn't anything like the real stuff anyway). So communication and finding food I could eat were my 2 biggest worries upon going to Japan, but both turned out ok, pretty much. I learned some basic survival Japanese while I was there (though never enough to have real, serious conversations on things, and hardly any Kanji, which eventually did bug me somewhat) and I found plenty of food I liked (and also became a pretty good cook myself). I also bought a ton of Manga while I was there, and shipped it home (1600 books, nearly all of which were unknown in the US at the time. Now, a decade later, more and more of it is showing up in translated form, but the great majority of the collection still has never been translated to English yet.)