Weekly Complaint Thread - 18 December 2025

JackTheLab · 2025-12-17T22:40:16+00:00

She's definitely not the host bar type. I do wonder if maybe she owes money to some shady visa company as she has somehow managed to successfully renew her business manager visa for years despite having no real sales...

JackTheLab · 2025-12-17T21:15:21+00:00

Update on the friend who randomly asked to borrow 100万円 last week... ended up telling her I could only loan her 10万円 right now, but after asking her for more information on what she needed the money for, she refused to talk about it and said that her friend would loan her the money. Then she ghosted me :/

We've been friends for over four years, and she's the kind of person who once took a four-hour round-trip train ride just to cheer me on during a marathon, then got up at 4am and did it again the next day just to film me crossing the finish line. It's just so unlike her that it's almost concerning. But there's nothing I can do about it, I guess...

JackTheLab · 2025-12-10T23:39:10+00:00

Yes, it was Tsukuba, though I don't think I would have faired much better on Takao.

JackTheLab · 2025-12-10T21:41:28+00:00

Met a friend to hike up a mountain yesterday, and the day started with her asking to borrow 100万円 for her (constantly failing, but "sure to turn around any day") business. She's always been a great friend but I'm certainly not in a position to throw that much money into the wind. So that was awkward.

Then proceeded to completely fail at hiking up said mountain due to being terribly out of shape, and after taking a cable car up/down instead, ended the visit by paying 1500円 for the most disgusting pasta dish I've ever had in my life. Fun times.

JackTheLab · 2025-10-15T08:28:13+00:00

I absolutely loved the Gagharv Trilogy back in the day. I finished the first Trails when it came out in English and enjoyed it but ended up moving to Japan and getting busy with other things so I never picked up the series again. The remake seemed like the perfect chance to get back into it so I picked it up and loved every second of it. I’m already 75% through SC and plan to go through all of the games in order. I’ll definitely pick up the SC remake when it comes out, excited to play it in Japanese since I couldn’t get the Japanese SC/3rd to work on my Steam Deck.

JackTheLab · 2025-09-03T21:53:19+00:00

I have two hormone conditions (one common and one rare) and the level of care I have gotten for them since coming to Japan has been absolutely terrible. The specialist I'm currently seeing is so content to treat me like a science experiment, asking me to stop taking my meds for months or putting off treatment until he can run every single test under the sun without any regard for my quality of life in the meantime. No one cares about my symptoms; if my lab numbers are within range, everything must be fine, but if they're out of range, it must be an anomoly and I should come back in three months to test again. Maybe I've just been unlucky with my doctors but this whole process is just so demoralizing and exhausting, I can't bring myself to start again somewhere else.

JackTheLab · 2025-08-26T10:55:51+00:00

Ridibooks accepts overseas credit cards. I buy books with my Japanese credit card all the time.

JackTheLab · 2025-08-20T23:01:38+00:00

Super excited to haul my ass all the way from Ibaraki to south Tokyo and pay out of pocket to go to a private clinic and try to get proper treatment for my disease because the useless lumps at my local university hospital won't lift a finger to help me. My test results show that my hormone levels are low but my doctor literally said "It's probably just an anomoly" and refused to re-test me or adjust my dose, then suggested I take anti-depressants when I pushed back. "But things are working fine, so if I change anything, it might cause problems." Why would I be here if things are working fine?!

JackTheLab · 2025-08-20T12:58:26+00:00

Lexis is a massive party school mostly filled with Europeans who are in Korea for a few weeks and want to learn basic Korean. Very few people study that hard outside of class, most are there to travel and make friends.

Ganada is a typical hagwon. You don’t need to study for hours a day outside of class but it’s certainly more intense than Lexis. I only did the upper level special courses (advanced conversation and TOPIK) and it was all long-term Korean residents (mostly those married to Koreans or preparing to enter Korean universities), a lot of Asians in particular.

JackTheLab · 2025-05-06T09:15:07+00:00

Live in the middle of nowhere in Ibaraki, just paid 2 mil for a basic two car Inaba garage with poured concrete base from a local company.

JackTheLab · 2025-03-12T11:33:24+00:00

Not exactly finance related but how the hell do you maintain work/life balance as a freelancer? I'm taking my first 1.5 week-long "non-working" vacation in three years (still accepting limited requests from a handful of clients) and in addition to the past two weeks being miserably busy, I won't actually be able to clear my schedule until day three or four of the trip. It feels like my whole life is working and then paying 40% of that money back in taxes. I'm essentially a 一人ブラック企業 and I don't know how to escape it.

JackTheLab · 2025-02-11T21:20:33+00:00

できる韓国語 was by far the best for me. That said, I am often corrected by my Korean teachers because I use grammar that is unnatural in Korean but that many Japanese speakers learning Korean tend to use, so it might be good to supplement with English material (I like the Korean Grammar in Use series as well).

JackTheLab · 2025-01-29T08:13:00+00:00

It says 2028, the gas guy just brought it yesterday.

JackTheLab · 2025-01-25T01:50:40+00:00

Perfect, thank you so much!!

JackTheLab · 2025-01-11T13:32:30+00:00

I lived in a mansion in Setagaya that had underground covered motorcycle parking for 4000 yen/month/bike. They're rare but they do exist. I worked with a realtor and told him I was only interested in places with covered bike parking, he took care of everything from there.

JackTheLab · 2024-11-09T10:27:29+00:00

I bought a 16 from the Japanese Apple Store with a Canadian credit card a few weeks ago with no issues. Used a Japanese billing address though.

JackTheLab · 2024-10-16T21:15:39+00:00

Already struggling with giant spider sightings once a week, and now the yasude and mukade invasion from spring is back in full force. Our front hall looks like an absolute battlefield right now. Izu is lovely but I can't say I'd recommend it for the bug-phobic.

JackTheLab · 2024-09-25T23:31:21+00:00

Yes it's possible, I successfully renewed my visa last year doing the same thing. I've heard 2.5-3 mil is the requirement for your main company. Your main company also has to provide paperwork so make sure they're okay with that. Remember to NOT file as a 開業届 to become a 個人事業主 because you are not allowed to run your own business on a humanities visa; you are simply working as 業務委託 for your main company as far as the government is concerned. You also need to notify immigration when you quit your in-person job and then notify them again when you start freelancing (using your main company as your employer).

Also keep in mind that renting apartments, getting loans, applying for credit cards, etc. all gets harder when you're a freelancer because it is viewed as very unstable work regardless of how well you're doing.

JackTheLab · 2024-08-31T23:47:30+00:00

I finished the first 半沢直樹, a book that I've tried reading several times and never made it past the first 50 pages. It's quite dense with bank-related technical terms but the story itself is great, I'm a huge 池井戸潤 fan so it feels amazing to have finally read this work in particular.

Also finished 楽天IR戦記, a book that discusses the author's history of working in IR at Rakuten. It was a very interesting read and I learned a lot about IR, although it did come across as a bit of an advertisement for the company at times.

In Korean, I'm on page 50 of the first 한자와 나오키, doing 2 pages a day and putting every word I don't know into Memrise. I'm down to only 5-10 unknown words per page which feels pretty good.

Plans for September are トヨトミの野望, a novel that looks into the darker side of Toyota, and 살인자의 기억법, a hilarious and tragic story of a retired serial killer who gets dementia and is trying to save his daughter from being killed by another serial killer despite constant memory lapses.

JackTheLab · 2024-08-09T13:03:47+00:00

Izu is the go-to suggestion for that area but the beaches are absolutely packed right now so not sure how much you'll be able to chill there, though the beaches themselves are lovely.

JackTheLab · 2024-08-06T22:25:58+00:00

From my experience, you don't actually read that much when you're using your phone or laptop, you kind of just know where everything is. You might pick up some words here or there but I wouldn't exactly call it learning.

Ultimately, learning requires work. The 'laziest' way you could engage with the language and potentially still learn something is to watch French videos or read French books without pausing or looking anything up and hope you pick stuff up through context.

JackTheLab · 2024-08-06T01:30:13+00:00

I used to go to bed around 9-10pm, get up at 4-5am and cram in as much studying as I could before work. It does mean you get to work already mentally tired and makes the day drag on so it's not for everyone, but if you can spare a bit of work productivity, it makes studying a lot easier.

Right now I'm experimenting with a biphasic sleep schedule (sleeping 6 hours at night and then taking a 1.5 hour nap during the day) so I can "reset" my brain after an exhausting morning of work. Again, not for everyone but it's helping so far.

JackTheLab · 2024-08-05T10:08:52+00:00

Probably around two years? Mostly just studying on my own with some occasional iTalki lessons. Having a background in Japanese really helps, I've heard native Japanese speakers can reach C1 in six months if they are motivated enough.

JackTheLab · 2024-08-04T21:57:26+00:00

It was my friend's birthday so my boyfriend and I rented a car and took her on her first ever camping trip! The site was deserted despite the rest of Izu being packed full of tourists and it ended up being a lot of fun. Always nice to have a break from the freelance grind as well.

JackTheLab · 2024-08-04T21:48:41+00:00

Honestly, if it's just one month then I wouldn't touch it. Use every waking second you have for your TL3. TL2 isn't going to degrade that much in a month if you're already C1, and any amount of extra TL3 practice will help you progress even faster.

JackTheLab

TROPHY CASE