Slashdot Mirror
In Need of Repatriation Advice?
kir asks: "I've been living in Japan for the last 10 years -- 6 in the USAF, 4 in 'freedom'. My wife and I recently decided to move to the U.S. (back for me, not for her). I am wondering what advice the vocal Slashdot minority might give me. I'm most interested in tips on finding a job from here and gauging a proposed salary based on a location of which I know nothing. I'd also find helpful tips on preparing for culture shock (both my mild case and my wife's possibly severe one). Thanks!"
I've been in a similar situation as you (although I was only there for 8 months). I would recommend moving someplace with a sizable Japanese community. This would help ease the urges for Japanese books, food, and other media. Being prepared for a trip or two back (at least for her) would be a good idea too. You're going to want to make sure she knows as much English as possible before you go (including slang) - that'll help with the shock. Culture shock is going to suck sometimes. The best way to deal with it is to be very supportive and make sure you have a good foundation in your relationship for problems. Be prepared for your wife to be angry or upset with you as a sympom of it. The first month won't be so bad, but the next 6 months to a year are going to be very trying on both of you. Good luck.
Also, don't assume that just because you're a citizen and are coming back, your wife can come back. If you married her overseas, she has no more legal right to enter the US than any other alien (IANAL, but that is my understanding).
My advice is to talk to an immigration attorney ASAP.
Advice: on VPS providers
We can probably give salary advice, but we need to know where in the US are you planning on moving to, and what field you are in.
I'd start with salary.com, actually. There's a lot of information on cost of living, expected salary ranges by geographic location for virtually any position, and comparisons between different areas so you can start to guage how expensive it is to live somewhere.
;)
As a personal recommendation, Saint Paul or Minneapolis, MN (or the surrounding area) is probably one of the best places for a tech-minded person to find work right about now. The salaries are still high versus the cost of living, and there are a lot of positive things about Minnesota... just so long as you don't mind the freezing cold in the winters or the massive snowdrifts.
That green slime had it coming.
Don't work in IT!
The US is not the same place it was 10 years ago. Lately it's become a rather unpleasant place to live.
I suppose some people would say this isn't sudden change but rather a slow change but the end result is the same: There are a lot of nicer places in the world to live... Move to one of those places instead.
Seriously!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Requires C#/Visual Studio experience.
Click here for details.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
I wasn't in Japan nearly as long as you, but having dealt with my transition and seen couples go through the same thing -- don't underestimate your culture shock relative to your wife's, for two reasons:
... there's a reason why the expat went to the local spouse's country in the first place and a reason why the spouse was drawn to him/her. Frequently the spouse wants to head to the expat's country more than the expat does.
1) When you're accustomed to being a highly visible minority, losing that status can be at least as disconcerting as gaining it.
2) Not speculating on your particular relationship, but as a general observation
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Can't find it on-line, but just this week there was a news story about a Canadian who spent 18 months in Japan teaching English. It's a pretty commonplace thing really.
Upon his return he landed a job as a baggage handler at one of our airports. At least he thought he had until he was refused security clearance.
His sole mistake was living somewhere where the Canadian Security agencies felt that they couldn't verify his movements and activities while out of the country.
If you're considering government work you just might want to look into this ahead of time.
Three Squirrels
I'd encourage you to try to get something in a big city, something on the West Coast, or in Hawaii, which has a big Japanese community.
I have a friend who married a woman from Estonia (they met in the Peace Corps) and brought her back to Nebraska. She signed up for the local university.
It was very hard on her, and she ended up dropping out. There were a fair number of foreign students at the university, but it's pretty provincial here, and she had a hard time blending in and making friends. She was very unhappy.
I've had friends in Chicago who fared better -- there are quite a few people from other countries living in Chicago. Even if they're not from the same place you are, you can still compare notes as immigrants. I knew some Russian people in Chicago, and a girl from Viet Nam who got along better.
One friend, married to a Russian woman, moved from Chicago to Brooklyn, and I think she's a lot happier there. She can go to Russian neighborhoods (even though they don't live in one), speak her native language, buy Russian food, etc. It helps.
Having said all of that, I used to know a Japanese woman who was here in Nebraska doing graduate work at the University, and she seemed to like it a lot. So it can be done.
But she had a clique of grad student immigrant friends -- a woman from Bangledesh, and another woman from South Korea -- and she was here studying Native American culture, so professionally it was a great place for her.
I don't want to say something sexist, but I think it's harder for women to make these moves sometimes -- they tend to be more plugged into groups of friends, more social. It's harder if you're following someone else, too, and not doing it for your own reasons.
I'd adivse you to try to give her as much support as possible -- shoot for a community where she can fit in. Don't move to Utah, even if you get the best offer there.
maybe you and your wife should watch the Japanese version of Lost in Translation!!
preparing for culture shock (both my mild case and my wife's possibly severe one).
I wouldn't be so sure about who will experience the biggest shock. When you go somewhere new, you are mentally preparing yourself for this shock, but potentially the biggest shock of all comes when you go back.
At least in my case that was a big eye-opener.
Anecdotal, I know, but it wasn't something I expected.
And since you have been gone for 6 years, many things will have changed. Since change is slow and always present, it only becomes clear after watching something with a long time in between snapshots.
Because some people might actually love their country, and want to make it a place they can be proud of.
Back during the election cycle my wife showed me an interesting article about, "loving your country." A little child loves his/her mommy and daddy, and won't consider that mommy and daddy might actually be doing something wrong, or that they might need to change their ways. A mother and father love their child/children, realize they're not perfect, and that they need nurturing, love, praise, and discipline/correction as part of their process of growing up.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
If you don't like it, you can GEEET OUUUUT!
Karnal
"Love it or Leave it" is one of the most retarded and unhelpful (not to mention inappropriate) responses to criticisms of the US. My friends and family all live in the US. I want good things for them and for the US. Sure, there are much better places to live, but what I have, in terms of both stuff and people, is all here.
By quoting statistics and data that show the US is failing to achieve, people are hoping to spread awareness and interest in the hopes that people can and will work hard to change the US.
The US now is a superpower with nowhere to go but down, and we will fall, and continue to fall, unless we take the bold steps necessary to change our ways. Only through criticism and willingess to force change will we ever become the nation we think we are instead of the nation we really are.
If you hate the place so much, move. What's keeping you here?
The US now sees fit to enforce its laws even outside of its borders.
A few random thoughts...
Health insurance in the US is a giant pain in the ass compared to Japan. Try to shield your wife from this as much as possible by dealing with the paperwork. There will still come a day when some doctor's office gives her grief over some mundane insurance detail and she'll be furious at having to deal with this.
As you already know - customer service of all kinds is the US is a nightmare compared to what you are used to in Japan. This will bother you a little but drive your wife absolutely insane. Japanese people take it for granted that service workers do their job with politeness and a smile and as you know US customer service is hit or miss. On the other hand 24 hour stores in the US are way more convenient than Japanese convenience stores.
Japanese supermarkets in the US can be quite good depending on where you relocate.
Try to avoid friendships with Japanese in the US who are only here for a few years on overseas work assignments. As they go back to Japan it will devastate your wife. She'll do much better if she can meet Japanese women who are in the US to stay. This may be impossible at first but it might save her some homesick feelings. Even better would be to make some solid American friends but this isn't always going to happen right away.
The hardest part of culture shock is to stop trying to compare the two countries. There is always an urge to whine about some annoyance that is better here or better there. Try to avoid that urge and just accept the US for what it is and move one with life.
Good luck
Look really close. There are too many variables that you have not accounted for in those "facts". Go read "How to lie with Statistics" sometime.
Many of those differences are within the statistical noise.
Others are accounted for by different ways of counting, remember many of these numbers come from the governments who have an advantage if they skew numbers. For example some countries do not count children under 2 in their child mortality rate counts.
Few countries have populations as large as the US, a uniform population with far less outriggers bringing everyone down. Drop Mississippi from the US, and our math standing goes way up. How would Europe fare if they were not only all averaged together, but Yugoslavia was added in. (I'm not sure if you would count Yugoslavia as part of Europe, but that should help you understand)
Are those tests of anything useful? You can do much better than me on a test to define a lot of math terms, but if that test doesn't include using the math to do proofs, or otherwise figure, it is meaningless.
Going slightly off-topic here, but... What on earth does IHBT stand for? I can't say I have a clue.
Don't forget that in the USA, public schools HAVE to take ALL students that want in. In most European countries (notably Germany), the schools don't have to take you if you don't get at elast a certain grade on tests. Essentially filtering out those who would drag down the scores to begin with. The USA doesn't do this, hence the score are lower.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Too bad we can't moderate this with (-1, shameless plagiarism)... see the original.
.sig: file not found
I work with 3 Japanese programmers and two Indian programmers (the reason I mention the Indian programmers is because they also have the same comments).
By far, the biggest comment all of my co-workers have about the culture change, is that Americans are "uncomfortably" informal. My Japanese couterparts mentioned that it took them several years to adjust to the way Americans speak to eachother. You may also find that some Americans are somewhat uncomfortable with "over-politeness" (or our perception of it, anyway).
Finally, both Indian programmers mentioned that their Indian born and raised wives still have a very difficult time building meaningful friendships with American women. I don't know that I can speak as to why, specifically. But I can only imagine that the role of women in the United States must be very different than most other countries.
You will most likely experience a greater deal of culture shock than your wife.
Reason? She expects America to be a strange and foreign place.
You will expect it to be the same as it was when you last left it. If you haven't visited in 10 years, it's going to hit you a lot harder than it will your wife.
I spent four years stationed in Germany in the mid-Eighties and loved it so much I didn't bother coming home. When I did finally return I spent a week walking around in a daze. It seemed as if I had been frozen in time and America had raced forward at her usual breakneck pace. The only thing that hadn't changed were all my high school friends still living at home with their parents. . . I suffered from some serious cognitive dissonance that week.
Thankfully, I was between assignments and two weeks later I was in England, where I stayed for another three years before returning to the U.S. again.
Prepare yourself now. Instead of looking forward to seeing everything as it was when you left it, tell yourself how excited you'll be to see all the changes since you left. This is what I did on every return visit and it helped a lot.
As far as work goes, take a look at America's Job Bank.
It's got some good resources for veterans, especially if you have a high-demand skill and it can give you a good gauge of where the jobs are at and how much they're paying.
I spent eleven years overseas and loved every minute of it, but despite her faults, America is still the country with the most freedom and most opportunity for everyone.
Good luck and welcome home!
JimUSAF 1980-2004
"I worked hard for it. I deserve it. And I have it," Campbell said. "It's all mine."
I leave the exercise of Swiftian irony in completing these thoughts to you, the reader.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Slashdot is not the place to waste the time of the readers of this site with answering one persons personal question. That persons question should have been sent to a newsgroup or something and not broadcast to everyone. Its just a waste of time for the countless people who cannot relate to that persons problem.
It appears as if you may have missed the entire point of the AskSlashdot section.
Granted, the US has problems, but I would argue that it is better than most other countries. It is clearly better than Japan.
Let's start with your concept of the Bush family "oligarchy". Japan has had a documented oligarchy since the transition from the emperor-daimyo system that occurred after Commodore Perry's visit to the country in the 1860's. Said oligarchy brought Japan to be a major world player by defeating Russia in a war in 1904-1905.
Japan orchestrated the construction of an empire by means as brutal as any documented in history. Just ask Chinese or Koreans who are old enough to remember.
With respect to your comment about foreign policy involving killing people, it is important to remember the Great Helmsman's aphorism that "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
By the way, Kennedy was responsible for subverting foreign leaders and attempts to do so; what about the "Bay of Pigs."
The Kennedy oligarchy is demonstrably based more on immoral businesses as Joe Kennedy's fortune was made smuggling liquor during the prohibition.
Your comment "U.S. citizens often live in a mental fantasy land in which they view themselves as the best, and cannot hear anything else. " could well apply to the US Democratic party. Al Gore had every electoral advantage and lost to Bush who two years prior no one would even have imagined would have been able to get the Republican nomination.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
Here's a fun one : unless her Engrish is already really, really good (ie, you guys speak English at home all the time) she will go through a phase during which she is thinking in her native language, translating on the fly back and forth to English during conversations. Discussions will be quite a bit slower with people not familiar with her accent (and with whom she isn't used to either.)
... after about three years you can count on a radical change in life at home. Everybody says 'no way, not my wife' and three years later everybody says 'damn, Glo was right.'
Then comes the worst part - after about a year of speaking nothing but English and thinking in English she will forget some of her native language. She won't realize it until she calls home or goes back for a visit - but that's a freaky issue to deal with.
Finally, the first three years will be great - she will be the same wonderful person she is now. Your friends will see how happy you are and you know they just have to screw it up - Americans can't stand to see an obedient wife. Between subversion from your friends (esp your friends' wives) and watching Oprah while you are at work each day
Finally, if she doesn't already drive - send her to driving school. Those guys are professionals that can keep order in a car full of 16 year olds, they are calm enough to handle teaching her to drive (which would send you into a daily freak-show panic, introducing discord and unharmonic vibes into the family.)
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
How much time have you spent in Japan? (Vacations don't count.) ...
Unless your answer is "more than six years" your advice is not exactly useful; not to say anything about the fact that we have no clue as to why he wants to get out of there.
I for one, would NEVER want to bring up a kid in Japan, with their fucked up educational system. ESPECIALLY NOT a kid that the Japanese consider "half". I spent fourteen years in Japan, ten of which were working in "education," so, I have a little bit of a clue as to what is what. I am by NO means expert
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
And on top of that, those fascist Republicans stole his shift key!
Nothing, but immigrating (legally, anway..) to other countries isn't as simple as walking across the boarder. It's a long drawn out process. And is it just me, or do most countries tend to look at Americans coming to live in thier country the same way Americans look at Mexicans moving into the US.
In spite of being the whitest state in the nation, we're a rather tolerant state. From direct knowledge, the Burlington area has large and diverse immigrant communities, including Bosnian, Indian, Viet Namese, Sudanese, etc. Many are refugees who have settled here. The real estate prices are high, but in many respects the state is "backward" compared to the rest of the country, and I like that. (Think last state in the Union to get a Wal Mart, only state capital to not have a McDonalds.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Andy Grove is quoted as saying: "Every generation thinks that they invented sex"
Vocal democrats and "progressives" are echoing the same crap as they did in 1960 or 1930 or 1900. US society is full of inequities, injustices and plain stupidity, but those are things that come with all human societies.
If you think that the Netherlands, UK, Australia, Switzerland, Japan or whatever place you consider perfect are utopian societies, you are aptly demonstrating that you ARE the ignorant american that you dislike so much.
While you and your friends are screaming about Bush or the collapse of american society, you miss the benefits you take advantage of as an american.
You fail to mention your Federally-guaranteed student loans and cheap mortgages. You don't bitch about the highways that whisk you to your suburban home or the miracle drugs discovered thanks to government research.
I hate small-minded people. Particularly those who have nothing to do other than criticize and nothing to contribute over hot air. Right-wing, left-wing, a vapid windbag is a vapid windbag.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
If the USA were to become more like other countries,
then choice would be more limited. It is really nice
that the USA is different from the European norm.
It's not just that you should get out of the USA if
you don't like it. Europeans are welcome to come
to the USA if they prefer the US life. Here they
can buy lots of guns, choose their healthcare or
decide to take chances to save money, say that
Darl McBride is a crook (if true) without a
UK-style libel lawsuit, etc.
If people like you ever succeed, there will be
less choice in the world. Every country becomes
a clone of every other, with no place to escape.
you don't see school boards or education departments in Europe or Japan watering down science curriculums to please some obnoxious pig-ignorant religious fanatics, which happens all the damn time in the US.
Aside from the monkey trial from the 30's(?) and the sticker on the alabama books, I have heard nothing about any religious groups doing anything to science. Much less the dumming down part. Please provide references for this.
Oh yes, in response to your sig: Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a life time.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars