Hurricane María did not make me want an adventure. It made me want an exit that would stay open. Puerto Rico was already difficult for anyone trying to build a predictable life, but after the hurricane, uncertainty became part of the routine. The job market was worse. Power failures stopped feeling exceptional. Plans were always conditional on whether the systems around us would work.
I had two children then. That changed the question completely.
This was a family decision
If I had been alone, I might have tolerated more instability. Adults can tell themselves that struggle is temporary or even romantic. Children do not get to choose the systems they grow up inside. Their safety, education, and sense of what is normal are decisions adults make for them.
The continental United States offered more jobs and familiar institutions, but it did not automatically feel like the safer answer. School shootings weighed heavily on me. So did a culture that often seemed to treat insecurity, overwork, and fear as the price of opportunity.
Japan was not perfect. I did not believe it was. But it offered a combination I cared about: physical safety, functioning infrastructure, good education, and the possibility of living comfortably without organizing family life around constant crisis.
I arrived in 2018 intending to stay.
Leaving was not rejecting Puerto Rico
I grew up in Magas Arriba, Guayanilla. My grandparents had inherited their home. Two cousins lived in another house in the same yard. My parents were divorced, and I spent weekends and summers at what I usually called my father’s house, though emotionally it was just as much my grandmother’s house. I spent a great deal of time with her.
I was never the person most visibly attached to conventional Puerto Rican culture. I was the rebellious skater kid shaped by alternative culture, RuneScape, and the internet. Still, I played the cuatro. As a middle-school student I traveled twice to the Puerto Rican parade in New York to perform, and once to Florida. Mofongo remains my favorite food, even if it is painfully difficult to find where I live now.
Leaving did not erase any of that. It made the ordinary details more visible.
Japan is not a moral upgrade
Some foreigners talk about Japan as though Japanese people are more disciplined, respectful, or enlightened by nature. That has never made sense to me. Japanese people are people. The country has kindness, cruelty, competence, prejudice, generosity, bureaucracy, wisdom, and nonsense—just like anywhere else.
Moving here did not mean exchanging a flawed culture for a superior one. It meant choosing a different set of tradeoffs.
Japan can be isolating. Institutions can be inflexible. Foreigners are sometimes treated as permanent outsiders. The language changes the amount of independence available in even simple situations. None of those problems cancels the things that work well, and the things that work well do not excuse the problems.
I can appreciate Japan without revering it.
What I was really trying to buy
People often describe migration in financial terms: salary, rent, taxes, exchange rates. Those matter, but I was trying to buy something harder to show on a spreadsheet.
I wanted boring reliability.
I wanted the electricity to be unremarkable. I wanted my children to go to school without the particular fear that follows American school violence. I wanted public places where family life felt normal and safe. I wanted enough stability to finish what I had started academically, keep working, build businesses, and still be present as a father.
Comfort is not luxury. Sometimes comfort is the absence of a weekly emergency.
The decision kept unfolding
The move did not solve my life. I worked while completing a Ph.D. in Genetics at SOKENDAI, with a focus connected to Biomedical Sciences. I raised children. I learned how institutions work when you do not begin with the language or the expected background. I kept building websites and income sources until leaving academia became a realistic choice rather than a fantasy.
The result was not the life I imagined as a kid in Guayanilla. It was built from decisions that kid could not have predicted: the Army, Iraq, science, parenthood, a hurricane, Japan, and the internet.
I left because Puerto Rico had become too uncertain for the future I wanted to give my children. I stayed because Japan gave us enough stability to build something larger than survival.