‘English is not so prevalent and you can feel a little isolated if you don’t know the language’
Philip Moore (45), from Lisburn, manages the Asia sales team for Northern Ireland company Andor Technology and has been living in Japan for more than 20 years. He lives in Tokyo with wife Yoko (45) and son Thomas (9). He says:
Imoved here in 1995 after I got a job in a Japanese Ministry of Education-funded programme teaching English. I was teaching English for three years in rural Japan and following that I got a job in Japan with IDB. After that, I joined Andor in 2001 — I’m based in Japan but my work takes me all across Asia.
When I came here, it was very different. It’s been said to me that Japan is one of the places that really does still feel foreign and it has done, even up until the last few years. English is not so prevalent and you can feel a little isolated if you don’t know the language.
I found it was very, very different from growing up in Lisburn. I moved out here in the middle of the summer and the heat and the humidity were unlike anything I’d ever experienced. There’s no daylight saving time so it gets dark at 7pm in the summer.
After that, the thing that struck me was that everything seemed to work, from the buses and trains running on time to all the processes that you need in your day-to-day life. Everything seems to flow smoothly. When you’re coming from an environment where you expect something to go wrong, it’s disconcerting but reassuring.
We moved to Tokyo in 1998 and again there was that culture shock in moving from the country to the city in Japan. Tokyo is a city that really is vibrant — it’s always on the go.
Whatever you are looking for, you can find in Tokyo — whether it be a different restaurant for every day of the year, or a different bar for every day of the year, it’s a city that is a joy to live in. It’s really crowded, especially on the train in the morning, but for a city that is so large, that it functions so smoothly is something that surprises everyone who lives here.
People here study English in school for six years and it’s studied in the same way you study maths and geography and you do tests but you don’t have to speak it. So even though everyone around you has studied English, very few people actually speak it.
The main culture shock is when you don’t speak Japanese and you have very little understanding of what’s going on. When I came out here, I didn’t speak Japanese so I thought, as I’m not going to change the country, I’m going to have to learn Japanese.
The biggest thing I could say to visitors from Northern Ireland is use your common sense — if it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. Be nice and polite, and pretend that you’re at your grandmother’s.
If you make a mistake, just politely say you’re very sorry and all will be forgiven. Good manners go a long way in every culture.”