The Japanese Who Can't Go Home From the Philippines: An Unexpected Pitfall of Moving Abroad

I take online English lessons with Filipino tutors, a popular way for Japanese people to study English, and because of that I often watch YouTube videos about the Philippines.

Recently, I came across an interesting video titled “The Japanese Who Can’t Go Home to Japan.”

It was about Japanese men who married Filipino women and moved to the Philippines, but after a divorce or their wife’s death, ended up alone and living there without being able to return to Japan.

And many of them are elderly.

They have no family to rely on in Japan and not enough pension. It is also too late for them to go back and find work.

At the same time, life in the Philippines is not easy either.

Some of them apparently speak almost no English or Tagalog.

They have lived in a foreign country for decades and cannot speak the local language.

How on earth have they been getting by?

With a Wife, Who Needs a Foreign Language?

Probably, as long as the marriage lasted, they managed somehow.

Shopping, government paperwork, dealing with the neighbors. All the troublesome things could be left to their wife, who grew up there.

The husband himself could live entirely in Japanese.

A truly comfortable life abroad.

But the moment the wife is gone, through divorce or death, everything changes.

The country they were living in just yesterday suddenly becomes a foreign land where they cannot communicate.

When you think about it, that is frightening.

The wife was not only a wife, but also an interpreter, a life adviser, and the person handling all the administrative procedures.

And that critical piece of infrastructure suddenly shuts down.

It is a single point of failure in the marriage: the one part that, if it breaks, brings the whole system down.

Foreigners in Japan Were the Same

Hearing this reminded me of a TV program I had seen before.

It was about a foreign English teacher who had lived in Japan for many years and grown old without being able to speak much Japanese.

At the time, I thought that if he had been in Japan for decades, he could at least have learned a little Japanese.

But the Japanese in the Philippines were exactly the same.

In Japan, we talk about “foreigners who can’t even speak Japanese.” Go abroad, and we become “Japanese who can’t even speak the local language.”

Only the positions have changed.

I was wondering why foreigners don’t learn Japanese, and it turns out the Japanese weren’t learning foreign languages either.

Apparently, human beings are creatures that do not study unless they are forced to.

Harder Than Moving Abroad Is Growing Old Abroad

When you are young, you can get by even if you don’t speak the language very well.

If you are in trouble, someone will help you. In the worst case, you can go back to Japan and start working again.

But once you are old, it is a different story.

Even if you go back to Japan, you have no home to live in. No pension. No family to rely on.

Then why not just go back to Japan and receive welfare? That is what I thought, too.

But apparently some of them cannot even afford a plane ticket home.

Even if things could be managed once they got back to Japan, they cannot get that far.

On top of that, they may also feel reluctant to accept welfare.

It would not be surprising if older Japanese men in particular still felt, “I don’t want to be a burden on anyone,” or “Living on welfare is shameful.”

As a result, they struggle in poverty abroad, yet cannot bring themselves to decide to return to Japan.

They have a country to go back to, but no way to get there and no picture of how they would live once they did.

When people talk about moving abroad, they often mention warm weather, low living costs, and a relaxed retirement.

But moving abroad when you are young and growing old in that country are two different matters.

What Is Truly Frightening Is Losing a Place to Return To

Marrying abroad and living there for decades. That in itself may have been a happy life.

But when you lose your spouse through divorce or death, can you live on your own?

This is the same even if you live in Japan, but abroad, there is also the language barrier.

Moving abroad when you are young may be one of life’s adventures.

But did they really intend to keep the adventure going all the way into old age?

They were supposed to be living a relaxed life in the tropics, and in the end, they can’t even afford a plane ticket back to Japan.

That is a story you will almost never find in a brochure about moving abroad.