Before Christmas of 2018, I let the company know that I was leaving. I told them I couldn’t align with the company’s direction anymore, and it’s hard to keep working for them without the alignment as a director, and apologized for the resources and expenses they spent for my visa support.
People were astonished by my decision to leave the US and start as a freelance writer in Japan. One of my friends said, “You didn’t say anything about it at all when we met a month ago!” But of course so, since those ideas weren’t even in my mind a month ago.
The people I was in Italy and Tokyo widened the river and I flowed down at a rushing speed.
On the New Year’s holidays in 2019, I watched a TV show in my parents’ house in Kyoto. On the show, a TV personality who is also a teacher at tutoring school gave a lecture to young people who didn’t want to work after undergrad, and his words inspired me.
“There are 2 axes when you decide your job. One is ‘what you can do’ and the other is ‘what you want to do,’ and you should put ‘what you can do’ first. If you think you want to do something, that thought is usually unreliable since it’s influenced by your situation or environment, information you have, people surrounding you at that time in most cases. On the other hand, ‘what you can do’ doesn’t change depending on the situation and makes people happy since you can deliver the value.”
When I heard these words, I thought my decision was supported.
What I can do is to write/edit copies and sentences. The reason why I was evaluated by the media or publishers when I tried to get my first job was that it was the area of “what I can do” for me who was always good at reading and writing in school. But young me didn’t value my “what I can do” highly and pursue “what I want to do” which was a marketing job. Over the time I did the marketing job, I realized my expertise was writing/editing and can deliver values with it, and then decided to make it my work. In my case, I began my career with “what I can do”, stopped by “what I want to do,” and reached “what I can do” back finally. This sounded like a very right decision to me.
There was another thing that inspired me during the holidays in Kyoto. It was an article in a newspaper.
It said recently Kyoto was looked at as a good location to have an IT department and design center for companies such as Panasonic and LINE. People might think Kyoto was a very old city only caring about keeping traditions, but actually, venture spirits have been rooted in this historical city raising world-class companies such as Omron, Nintendo, Kyocera, Murata, Nidec, etc.
I left Kyoto when I got my first job in Tokyo, but I thought it would be great to start my new career here. Actually I was going to live in Tokyo after coming back to Japan, but the idea was gone with the paper easily. Honestly, I was a little bit tired of being in a techy new city, and I felt comfortable with being in the city with a rich culture with a long tradition. Like the cities in Italy since it’s more familiar with me who used to play around near a shrine with more than 1300 years of history in my childhood. By the way, Florence and Kyoto are sister cities.
Those two things I happened to see in Kyoto drove the flow faster. You may think I’m too naive by getting influenced by media contents, but this is my river-riding boat which is so flexible and changes direction triggered by anything easily. That’s just the way I am.
In the middle of January, I flew to San Francisco. After arriving at the airport and turning the airplane mode of my smartphone off, one text message with the words “petition denial” from USCIS caught my eyes.
What timing, I thought. And felt relieved. If my petition had been approved, I would have regretted something a little bit on the edge of my mind. But everything was over, and it made me more confident in my decision. I cleaned up the remaining tasks and my apartment, said good-bye to my friends and coworkers, stopped by Portland to see my friend, and then moved back to Japan officially on February 7, 2019.
What I gained in San Francisco was huge. This was the place of restarting for the desperate, dependent girl judged as having a useless career who didn’t know even where Silicon Valley was. I got a new job, new friends, new knowledge, and English ability here. I managed a team for the first time in my career and learned how it was interesting and difficult to mentor people. It was also a great learning chance to discuss the company’s direction with the CEO. All of them wouldn’t be true if I hadn’t have googled “San Francisco Internship” in my depressing days. Nobody knew how things would turn out this way.
