The Monday Read: Life of Learning

Some of you might remember that I have been taking an online writing course called Ship 30 for 30. That finishes tomorrow and I will be starting Ali Abdaal’s Part-time YouTuber Academy… tomorrow. I enjoyed the writing course, but it didn’t quite live up to the hype and I would give it a score of […]

The Monday Read

Jet Lag Edition Finally got over the jet lag. I swear it is getting worse as I get older. In my 20s I barely noticed jet lag. In my 30s it took me a couple of days to get over it and I was pretty much functional. Now at 45 it took at least a […]

Guest Post: The Road Not Travelled

Leaving Japan to retire Today we have a new guest post from Mason Dixon, this time about retiring not in Japan. I am currently planning to stay in Japan indefinitely ,but it is always interesting to hear from people who are further along in the journey, and I am a big fan of learning from […]

The Monday Read

Don’t Miss Two in a Row Edition My apologies for missing last week’s Monday Read. The international date line was to blame, not me 😉 We made it back into Japan and it was surprisingly easy to enter with the MySOS app and the new procedures. They kept us on the plane for 30 minutes […]

Dude, where is The Monday Read?

The international date line got me Like Willy Fog (I loved watching this when I was a kid in Spain) I completely forgot about the international date line, but instead of saving me it means I missed posting The Monday Read and the weekly newsletter. Eeek. I thought I had a few more hours, but […]

The Monday Read

Oh Canada Edition Well, it seems like I’m in Canada, eh? First time here, we started with a couple of days in Vancouver. Lovely city, and we had incredible weather while we were there. Next up is Calgary, then Toronto. YouTube Thank you for your support of the RetireJapan YouTube channel. We published a video […]

Japan Pension Update 2022

Passbooks for the Japan kokumin nenkin pension.

And now for something completely different! Everyone paying into nenkin should receive an annual update, called nenkin teikibin (ねんきん定期便). This will either arrive by post, in the form of a postcard, or (if you have selected the option) will only be delivered via the nenkin website. Personally I opt to receive the postal version as […]

The Monday Read

Heading Overseas Edition Heading to Canada this week at short notice, so I had to look into entry restrictions in Canada (none as of October 1st) and Japan. Spent a couple of hours today trying to find, download, and fill in the MySOS app. Is it just me, or is the whole thing a prime […]

The Monday Read

AI Edition I’ve been playing with Dall-E (they opened it up to anyone last week) and it is kind of fun. It seems some of the writing AIs are pretty good too. Interesting to see where this ends up. Microblog Sent the first microblog entries (a bumper edition for most of September) to people with […]

The Monday Read

Praying to the Gods for Money yet again Edition This weekend my wife and I are back at Kinkasan off the coast of Miyagi, at the Koganeyama Shrine. Legend (or, more likely, the priests at the shrine) say that if you attend the annual ceremony three times in a row you will never want for […]