Terminal Control

The Spark

For some time I had always had an interest in going and living abroad outside the U.K. I had moved down to London at the beginning of 2020 and while London was enjoyable I was starting to feel a bit of an itch to finally make the jump and move out of the U.K. This was partially driven by a friend of mine who was always encouraging to head off to somewhere like Australia (which was appealing as I have family over there), but I was always very hesitant. Trying to get everything to line up always felt difficult, getting out of the rental contract for my flat and also consideration around how I would earn money or get a job while out of the country largely always held me back. I never felt like I really had the money to just commit to galavanting half-way across the globe and I also had a bit of a fear that I’m getting paid good money now, and at any moment that could stop so make hay as the sunshines as they like to say.

A couple of events and realisations eventually caused me to see and grab the opportunity to go abroad.

The first one was the removal of the mental blocker of actually going. While I had always been encouraged to go it always felt a bit like too much, I have to give up my job, my place, have the savings, etc… etc. It wasn’t until I was on a boat with a friend for a music festival did I get to talking about it, that I realised a few things.

1. I work for a remote first company.
2. We have people all around the world, in just about every time zone and my company makes it work.
3. I can always come back to London.

It’s silly, but for some reason the more I talked it through the more I realised that this was something that was very possible. I think being in a different country helped things a bit, because when I was living in London I always found it a bit hard to conceptualise my life not in London. I decided to commit myself that once my flat contract was finished in 10 months (August) I would make that the marking point to which I would jet off to my new home.

Where, When, Why, How?

While 10 months was a lot of time, I really needed to figure out the logistics of what I was going to do, where I was going, how, and ideally buy a plane ticket as far in advance as possible. So I needed to know where I was going by the 6 month mark.

For the most part my assumption was that I would probably go to Australia or New Zealand, partly because I had been to Australia once when I was young and had always wanted to return to visit family and had probably spent the most time researching visa situations for those countries. That was until I came across this post on Tokyo Dev https://www.tokyodev.com/articles/how-i-got-a-digital-nomad-visa-for-japan thanks to HackerNews. Reading through this made me realise that Japan was a very real possibility. Exciting!

Japan has been one of my bucket list destinations for much of my life and every year I have had to postpone the trip to the next year for one reason or another. This felt like a killing two birds with one stone situation, I could finally travel to Japan and live/work abroad. Once I had read the article, Japan was pretty much dialled in and short of some sort of problem was going to be my destination.

The next step was getting work on board, which was fairly easy, we are a remote first company after all. Add onto the fact that we also already had someone working out in Japan that it was pretty easy to convince them to let me do it thankfully. After they made some checks of their own on the legality of letting me work there, they gave me the thumbs up and I moved on to securing a visa for myself.

The Road To Digital Nomad

Much like the TokyoDev article suggests there seems to be three paths I could take:

1. Working Holiday Visa (365 Days)
2. Digital Nomad Visa (180 Days)
3. Short Term Stay (90 Days)

While I considered the working holiday visa since it could let me stay out for a year and I was within the age range for it, the one small hangup was that it would most likely require me to switch contracts at my work and sort out the tax situation in Japan. Not terribly ideal. The Short Term Stay Visa wasn’t ideal either as I wanted to stay there for at least 6 months, so the Digital Nomad Visa seemed like a winner.

Thankfully I cleared the requirements, the salary was a touch close, but work provided me with worldwide health insurance (excluding the U.S, because of course) and so it was off to the embassy to get my visa…

Except there was a slight snag, they needed to hold on to my passport for quite some time while they processed the application and unfortunately I was going away over the summer and couldn’t hand it in. It would mean by the time I got back and applied again it would be a tight turnaround to get out to Japan when I wanted to.

So after a bit of holidaying I returned and then hit my second snag. It turns out, I may not actually need it…

The Short Term Stay Surprise

On my return to the Japanese Embassy in London, I was quizzed as to why I wanted The Digital Nomad Visa. They explained that for the most part they don’t really see British people requesting the visa. What came next actually took multiple days to figure out, making phone calls to helplines and looking online to see if the advice lined up with what I was hearing. So I now recount here so all that investigation was not in vain.

As it turns out being from the United Kingdom confers on it a nice little benefit for the Short Term Stay visa, when you land in Japan you are granted a stamp allowing you to stay for 90 days, you can then choose to extend for another 90 days when in the country for a total of 180 days. One of the benefits of this is you don’t need to apply for a visa, show enough money in your bank account or even prove you have health insurance. You can just turn up and do it! The more people I talked to the more it seemed that the Digital Nomad visa was essentially just the short term stay visa but already set for 180 days, for countries that didn’t have this exemption. It gave no extra benefits, or differences it just meant when you arrived you didn’t need to extend during your visit. Working on the Short Term Stay visa is technically legal, as long as you are not earning income/working with a company from Japan. You are free to earn money from abroad it seems. Things get tricky if you somehow find yourself in the country for longer than six months, in which case it seems you then have to deal with the taxes, but that was irrelevant in my case.

How legal this all was, seems to be a matter of debate. The Short Term Stay exemption does let you work, but seems more geared toward the idea of doing meetings or reading emails while abroad, not necessarily all that is entailed working as a developer. Ultimately though, when multiple contact points for Japan immigration say the same thing, at some point you just have to take their word on it.

With that out of the way, I bought a plane ticket to Japan, gave notice to my roommate that I was leaving the flat and got ready to make my move to Tokyo.