[StangGuy]

Sorry for the long and rambling nature of this post. I kind of got lost in it.

For me I had absolutely no interest in Japan prior to going there for work.
But going to Japan for 2-3 months sounded better than being in England for a guaranteed 6 months in a region that everyone says is horrible.
In the end I spent 6 months during a 7 month span in Hiroshima.
The weather was horrible at times and the working conditions sucked.

But the things unrelated to work were great.
While I was in Japan I made some good friends and some not so good ones. I also fell in love with the way Hiroshima was structured. You have factories next to housing with a restruant on one corner and the grocery store around the next and a school in the middle of it. That combined with the public transportation and the ubiquitousness of the bicycle makes the city so much more liveable than the american model where everything is confined to its own area far away from each other. Sure not everything is right next to each other but it is more accessible.

When I came home I immediately missed the atmosphere and routine I had gotten into while in Japan. This was a far cry from the "I don't care what you say I'm going home in a week." email I had sent my project manager a little over a month earlier. But what had happened was I was isolated alone in Hiroshima for the last two months. I had gone over there presumably for a month to relieve another coworker and finish the last details. I was the only American dealing with the Japanese customer and their rediculous business practices on a daily basis. For the first three weeks I had my girlfriend to keep me steady, we had met while I was there previously, then we broke up in part because I had lost myself in Japan.

I then started to hate being in Japan and lost myself even further by hanging out with the long term english teacher crowd. Which in general means going out and drinking and lamenting on something every night and going to bed a couple hours before you have to get up and go to work. After a little while I steadied again and found where I fit in. I was the white foreigner that wasn't an english teacher/bartender; I was respectable because I had a real job. I didn't have to get drunk every night, but I would go out on the weekend. I would meet up with friends, both Japanese and not. I had settled into a normal life. But now I was heading back to the states.

When I got back home, after about 1 week I started looking into ways to get back to Japan. I came across the Research Student Scholarship. It is a scholarship that the Japanese government will grant to certain foreigners with degrees in the sciences and wanting persue a graduate degree. This would be the perfect opportunity for me. I have a BS in Engineering and had been considering going back to school. So started looking at Universities in Japan.

After being back in the states for a month I am still dearly missing Japan, on a Tuesday night I decide to check on a weekend flight to Japan. There happened to be an ultra-cheap flight available and I sent an email to my ex-gf and ask her if she would meet me if I visited Hiroshima for the weekend. Even though we broke up 2 months prior, we had still seen each other and talked on a regular basis, but on my last night in Hiroshima I refused to meet her, so I think she might say no. Initially my reason for this is to just say Hi! and clear the air because I realize that she is probably the biggest part of Japan that I miss. But I realize that the biggest reason we broke up was I had forgotten who I was. I had been considering proposing at the time but didn't trust myself in that situtation. So now I was going to propose. While in Hiroshima for the weekend, we go to the Hiroshima Castle grounds and in the spot where went on our first date, I propose and she says "yes".

We have since gotten married and decided to live in the U.S. There was a bit of debate about where we were going to live. Because I have no real attatchment to my family and she is very close to hers, I suggested that we live in Japan. However, the financial aspect is overwhelmingly in favor of living in the U.S. Living expenses are about the same, but we can live comfortably on my wages alone in the U.S. In Japan an engineer with my experience makes about 2/3 of what a U.S. engineer with the same experience does. To add another perspective, an ALT make more than an engineer with less than 5 years experience does in Japan. This would mean both of us would have to work in order to survive or I become an english teacher/bartender/fake priest. The latter is definitely out of the question though, because my wife despises them despite being friends with several. And the former is just a bad decision, while I can be happy doing anything as long as my family is taken care of, the thought that both of us need to work to survive is too scary for either of us to undertake.

However, in the next 5-10 years we will probably move to Japan. This is primarily to be close to family. We both grew up with tight knit extended families and would like the same for our kids. With the exception of one cousin all of her family lives in Hiroshima prefecture. On the other hand My family is spread out across Oregon and Washington and as we have gotten older my cousins haven't stayed as close as we used to be and I hope my brother never reproduces.