Kansai Bound

On January 11th 2015, I will be arriving in Osaka with my wife (J) and two kids (M & E) to begin a six-month stay. Both of my kids, ages 6 and 9, will be chronicling their experiences in Japan, so I decided I should do the same. Unlike my kids, Japan is not new to me. I have spent around four years living in Osaka and around two in Tokyo, and I've led groups of college students to Japan on six-week study abroad trips several times. But as I prepared for this trip I realized that a lot WILL be new to me this time around since I've never had to deal with the needs of a family in Japan before. Thus "Kansai with Kids."

I was inspired in part by a good friend's blog from his time in Kyoto with his kids three years ago, appropriately called Kyoto with Kids, and I will be frequently relying on the wealth of information he left there. In fact, you might even say those friends were the inspiration for this whole trip. My wife and I met as graduate students studying East Asia, me Japan and her China, so we would discuss the idea of taking our kids overseas for an extended stay before those kids even existed. But it's a whole lot easier to discuss it in the abstract than it is to actually take the plunge. It was the difficulties and successes of our good friends tackling a year in Kyoto (twice!) with three kids in tow that helped us visualize it as a reality instead of just a fantasy. If they can do it, we can too... or at least we have no excuse for not trying.

Of course, we really have no excuse for not trying anyway since we have so many advantages that are allowing this to happen. I am a professor so I have a semester of sabbatical during which I can draw full salary and devote my time to research. My wife works for a study abroad company with an office in Osaka and she telecommutes, which will allow her to continue working while we're there. In addition, our Osaka connections allowed me to get a job teaching a single course while there, which helped with my visa situation, and also got us a lead on an apartment that was both affordable and that could be leased for just six months without massive fees ... no mean feat in Japan. But even with all these advantages, there were times when it just seemed completely overwhelming. It would have been so much easier to just stay where we were, take my sabbatical from home, keep our kids in the familiar environment of their school and their friends... Of course, if my wife and were interested in the path of least resistance, we never would have turned our attention to China and Japan in the first place. Spending part of our college years in East Asia was a formative experience for both of us, and that was at least as much due to the difficulties we faced as the pleasures we took away from it. Experience has to be earned.

And now here we are. I've made it through my semester and the kids have had their last day of school. We've found someone to rent our house and someone to take care of our dog while we're away. It's less than a week until Christmas, and then just over two weeks until we're in Kansai. With all the preparations, it feels like we're already halfway through the trip and we haven't even left yet. I'll keep you posted about how things go from here on out.