When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.

– Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

In my previous post, I shared my first impressions of life in Japan from my first three months there: the challenges, the bureaucracy, but also the surprising warmth and reliability I found here.

Now I’d like to share something else. A glimpse of events that happened far away, that stretched for almost eight years of my life.

The easiest way to start this story is by admitting this: some of the most influential figures in my life, I encountered them in France. One of those people, one that I have personally worked very close with and one that I am still feeling very grateful of their guidances and aides, told me something that stuck with me for years.

“We need to justify our salary”

He said this in the middle of an ordinary day, when we were on our way back to the office after lunch time. Lunchtime, if you didn’t know, was quite a luxurious time in France. People left the office together, went out into the open air, walked far away just to buy a sandwich, or a baguette, or eating together in the Restaurant Universite. It was one of those slow day where we spent the whole lunchtime joking around, me making a full use of my (finally) good-enough French, understanding everything and enjoying the times with my colleagues.

Then we went back to our office, and, while walking quite briskly, quickly (because wow it was already almost 2PM; we’ve spent almost two hours outside?), they said that thing to me.

“Faut justifier le salaire”

I was young, far younger than I am now, and I just arrived to work in Europe, and that sentence stuck in my head.

I need to justify my salary. I need to justify my worth. My value.

I need to show these people that I’m worth to keep around and to live among them.

So that was what I did. I toiled. I worked. I somehow finished my doctoral contract. I defended my thesis, I applied for jobs. Lots of them rejected me. Interviews after interviews. Then somehow I got accepted to work for a startup in Luxembourg. I left academia behind and jumped straight feet first to the industry. To the tech world.

Years passed by. I kept working hard.

I kept my heads down, following the rules. Learning the customs. Learning the trade.

My partner and I moved fully to Luxembourg. Our first child was born. I kept working. The company was in trouble, it was COVID era, money was difficult, people were leaving, only a handful remaining.

I kept working.

My child started talking. The trains were never in-time anymore. The buses were unreliable. Waiting for almost an hour on the sidewalk for a bus that never came, deleted without notice.

I bought a trottinette. A bicycle. Then I kept working.

People became aggressive in the street. In the trains. In public places.

Streets were smelly, people leering at my family whenever we passed by the stores. Men and women squatting in front of buildings. Sometimes staring at my child a bit too long.

Reported it. Talked with people. Said c’est normal.

I kept working.

A store closed down the street. A bicycle I rented was stolen. The manager told me the location of the bike with the embedded GPS and told me to get it or face penalties. Told me to go there, snatch the bike from the hands of those thieves like a vigilante I am, and return it, or else I would have to pay.

I kept working.

Some good news coming in. The company was getting better. More and more skilled people joining in. Projects coming in. I felt confident enough to apply for a parental leave for my second child’s birth.

One month before the due date, we were told by the real estate agent to vacant the apartment because apparently the contract was saying they only allowed three people. I protested, saying I had called and talked with the proprietaire about my wife’s pregnancy months before and it seemed that everything was okay.

It was not. They didn’t care.

I got a month to find a new apartment.

I kept working.

After the sixth apartment rent application rejection (that I found out before I got onto my trottinette to go home from the office; because the parents of the proprietaire didn’t feel comfortable having kids in the apartment, even though it was big enough and there were other families in the building), I finally stopped.

I sat down on a bench near Schifflange and was silent for a while.

A week before, I had told a real estate agent that I’d be willing to pay the lump sum of the full year of rent of an apartment I applied to. Money was not a problem for me back then. My wife was about to give birth in three weeks and I just want a warm house for her and my children.

Autumn in Luxembourg was cold. Winter was very cold.

They still rejected me. Saying the proprietaire had chosen another, more suitable candidate.

I missed the sun. My country’s sun, where I could sit on the beach and watch the sun setting at the horizon of the ocean.

All these experiences–the constant need to justify my worth, the daily struggles, the accumulating frustrations–eventually led me to me questioning everything I had worked on in Europe.

So many things. Too many of them. Had happened up until that point, and much more things were about to happen from that point onward. Things I didn’t know yet at that time.

In unofficial order, those things were:

  • My packages kept getting put into the post office instead of my home, even when I was at home
  • People–kids, teenagers by their look–spat at me on the street when I passed them by
  • An old lady yelling at me in Luxembourgish in the street when I passed her by and when I asked what happened and what did she say she spat at me
  • Prices kept getting higher and higher; local stores weren’t affordable anymore
  • My trottinette got stolen after I left it only for five minutes outside a convenience store. Broke the antivol. Nobody saw what happened even when I asked around
  • Insurance who didn’t want to cover damage and said if I want to pursue it I should file a complain and possibly going to the court

Thousands of tiny things. Millions little cuts.

I wondered: all this time I kept having to justify myself. Why had never Luxembourg–France–Europe–ever have to justify themselves to me?

I had worked hard. I learned the language. I learned the culture. I learned the songs, the dance, the guitars, paid the taxes over the course of eight years.

And I couldn’t even go to an emergency room, holding my sick child asking to see a doctor, without having to be left unattended in the waiting room for four hours?

Was it because there were simply too many migrants, too many people trying to make it there, so that–just like a simple supply-demand principle–the country could do whatever they want with no consequence?

(Somewhere in my brain, an image of Ed Sheeran singing You Need Me I Don’t Need You showed up, except his face was replaced by the EU Flag)

I started asking myself the following questions: would I stay here for the next ten years? With my wife and kids–rapidly growing kids, should I just continue on what I’ve been doing up to that point?

–Three Months In Japan

That question, which I wrote about in my previous post, wasn’t born out of mere curiosity. It emerged from years of accumulated experiences. The very small part of them I’m sharing here.

I read 1Q84 long time ago in my own language. I have re-read it several times since in French and English.

Every single time I noticed small things that I didn’t notice before.

One of them is that how, in one of the chapters inside that thick tome of a book, one of the main characters said how It is impossible to live without hope.

And, to put it simply, it all felt hopeless to live there.

But then, in the same paragraph, the person also said, When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life.

And that was basically what happened to me.

I had to move. There seemed to be no hope to live there anymore for us. We had to leave.

I liked a lot of people back there. I liked my previous job. The same job where I spent so many hours during COVID trying to revive the production line, porting legacy code to Python for days, learning what Git was, what CI/CD was, what Ansible was, Docker, SQL, NoSQL, and many more.

Some people had taught me a lot.

A senior developer made me learn Golang and made me able to do my hobby these days, which is making (and playing) terminal games. My first year in Luxembourg made me study Rust because we needed a service that will never crash and have excellent memory safety.

(It worked well; as far as I remember it the service never crashed, only got updated once over four years of its service–I should make a post about building service with Rust one day)

I learned a lot. My two children were born there. I was grateful.

But now, simply, there was no justification for me to stay there anymore.

So we left Europe and started our new life in Japan. We were hopeful.

We hoped our new apartment will be good.

We hoped our kids will like it.

We hoped my new job is going to be good and allow for a lot of learning opportunity and career growth.

And, six months in, honestly, it still feels like one of the best life decisions we’ve ever made.