Meet Three JFCs

How They Did it – Stories for Migrants by Migrants

Mark:

I first came to Japan when I was 10 years old. That was in 2002, and at that time I was in Grade V in the Philippines. But here, because of my age and date of birth, I was immediately placed in Grade VI. Because I was in a public school and unable to speak a word of Japanese I was bullied for some time by my classmates and schoolmates. I had no friends. I knew some Filipinos, but they were children of Japanese and could not speak Tagalog very well. We had a hard time communicating with one another.

After I had been here in Japan for some time already, I began working. Upon finishing high school, I had originally planned to go home to the Philippines but was not allowed to by my parents because of the expense. I was hoping to apply for admission into the Philippine Military Academy (PMA) because my grandfather had been a soldier and I wanted to be just like him. However, my father would not hear of it. He was afraid that I would be hazed, so I just stayed here.

After high school, I worked cleaning tables like this that would be rented out for about half a year, I moved to Panasonic assembling TVs. All my co-workers from the Philippines. After that, I took a job melting silicon as raw materials for computers. I also worked as a carpenter and waste segregator (not nama gomi, but recycling). I saved money so that I could go back to school with the money I had earned myself. I knew I could do it. Everything I went through came in handy even if at first, they did not seem related at all to the job I was applying for. But at least I could put them down on my resume and cite them during interviews. I could also claim to the interviewer and to my new co-workers that the experience was good for me. I was always happy to do whatever job I could get.

It was a real challenge for me to catch up at school especially in Math. Even if the formulas were the same, I could not understand the instructions. So I had a truly difficult time, also with Kanji. It took me three to four years to master Japanese with the help of tutors. But I really wanted to study and because I knew that my parents couldn’t afford to send me, I took it upon myself to find a way to attend art school to learn graphic design. I started in the school year of 2011 to 2012, but because I was self-supporting there were times that I would have to take a break to work full-time to earn money for my tuition. I then took a job for two years with a manufacturer of parts for satellites, robots, and submarines, and when I went back to school, the experience also came in handy.

I finally graduated in April 2018 and was hired by the McCann Work Group Japan whose main office is based in New York and is the number one ad agency in the Philippines.

I do posters and package designs for Amazon, Coca-Cola Japan, Google Japan, and other big companies whose names I can’t mention due to confidentiality agreements. There aren’t very many Filipinos in that field. It’s possible that I’m the only Filipino at the office. I was the only Filipino in art school, so it was really a big thing for me.

My advice is, be part of a community. Have lots of connections, because it will help a lot in your daily life here in Japan. It is not easy to find work in Japan, especially with the language barrier, so it would be to your advantage if you had a community to be part of such as Filipino churches. If you belong to a Filipino community, for sure there will be people willing and able to help you find work or sometimes, even hire you: In my case, it was very hard for me to find a job after graduation. Luckily for me, a member of the church I used to attend referred me to her husband who was looking for someone to hire. He interviewed me and then hired me.

Laine:

I come from Nueva Ecija and Bulacan where almost as soon as you leave the house, you find someone to talk to. Here, people mind their own business. Even with your neighbors, you just greet each other with a konnichiwa whenever you see each other. But the Japanese are very polite, even in the shopping centers. In the Philippines, if you don’t look rich or are just dressed in shorts and flip-flops the salespeople will just ignore you. Here, everyone is welcomed with an irrashaimase and treated the same way regardless of their looks.

I was 14 when I first came to Japan with my two brothers, one older and one younger. At first, we were told that it would just be for a vacation so naturally, we were all very excited. But when we got here, we were told that we wouldn’t be returning to the Philippines anymore, that Japan would be our new home. At that time, I was in my junior year in high school and while I didn’t have a boyfriend, I did have several close friends I was not even able to say goodbye to. I wish I had been given the chance to, as well as to prepare myself for life here in Japan. I would have started by becoming more independent because here, you do things on your own unlike in the Philippines where there is always someone to help or accompany you.

I was very happy that I was able to enter public high school because private would have been too expensive for my parents and there was just no way that they could have afforded it, with three of us. But it was a real challenge for me to learn Japanese especially since not very many Japanese in our area knew English, making it harder for me to form new friendships. Because of the language barrier, we had to communicate through gestures but we couldn’t keep doing that forever. For a while, my older brother was even bullied at school.

Another challenge for me was adjusting to the way Christmas and the New Year were celebrated here. Unlike in the Philippines, when on the night of the 24th there would be Noche Buena and on the morning of the 25th, there would already be children at the house, here all we had was a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a cake and that was it. Since Christmas Day is not a holiday here like it is in the Philippines, both my parents would be at work, and both my brothers would be off somewhere. So usually, it was just me at home. For the first four years I would really cry my eyes out every time Christmas and the New Year rolled around because I could not help but compare it to the big celebrations we always had back home. My mother came from a very large family, there were nine of them, so my brothers and I had a lot of cousins with whom we would make a lot of noise and set off fireworks.

By the time I had been here for about two or three years, I knew enough Japanese to get by. Life became more normal. I was in senior high school and had friends. I got into university (Aoyama Daigaku) where I studied English literature and had the chance to go to New York for an internship, something that would never have happened had I stayed in the Philippines. After graduating, I found a job with recruiting firm and then with an advertising company although in HR, with talent acquisition. Now I work with an IT company in Shibuya doing the same thing. I find the work very challenging, but worth it.

My advice to other young people who may be in the same situation as I was is to keep your focus on what lies and ahead and understand that there is a purpose for everything. You may be experiencing difficulties right now but know that they are only temporary and will eventually pass. If you keep striving and doing your best in all areas of your life, there is a bright future that awaits you for God said that He has a plan for us—To prosper us and not harm us, but to give us hope for a better tomorrow. This is the Bible verse that I hold on to, so no matter what challenges I face I know that I will get through because it has been promised to me. I hope this encourages you as well.

Beatrice:

When I came to Japan, I experienced bullying not by my classmates but by my own mother. I was born here because my father is Japanese, but when I was four I was brought back home to the Philippines while my mother stayed on. She smokes a lot and drinks. I think it’s because she still blames herself for the death of my older sister, who drowned in a when she was five. It was around that time that my mother became an alcoholic. Since then, we have tried several times to convince her to go into rehab but each time she has resisted, arguing that there is no need because she doesn’t do drugs and therefore is not an addict.

When I was 12, I was brought back here to study. That was the first time I discovered that my mother had remarried and met my stepfather for the first time. I thought all the while that she was a single parent. However, because I had zero knowledge of Japanese, I was told that I would have to go back to Grade I. At that time, I was already in Grade VI and about to graduate from elementary school, so it was decided that we would just return home to the Philippines where I could finish elementary school and go on to high school and then college.

When I was in college, my mother told me that she could no longer continue to support me because she was so tired from working. So I felt that I had no choice but to come here to help her. At first, we both worked but to make ends meet I worked days as well nights with only an hour of sleep in between. My Nihonggo was non-existent because I had no time to study, I was busy working. The most I could do was watch videos on YouTube, when I had the time to. Meanwhile, my mother would drink and whenever she got drunk she would become both verbally and physically abusive. She would pull my hair and once, even she bashed my head against the wall.

Finally, when I couldn’t take it anymore, I left to be with my sister, who is also working here in Japan. Even then, my mother would still come after me, demanding money. Once she even showed up at my sister’s house to beg me to come home with her, but I knew better than to give in. At that time, she was with my stepfather and obviously drunk, jumped out of their moving vehicle. She was hospitalized so my stepfather called to ask us to visit her, but neither my sister nor I did. Although my mother recovered and eventually apologized for creating such a scandal, she continued to harass us for money. So for our own peace of mind, my sister and I decided to keep our distance for the time being especially as I had also met someone at church and was about to get married.

It was going to church that really helped me. My sister is an active church-goer, so I started accompanying her. It was there that I surrendered my life to the Lord and began to serve Him with all my heart. It was also there that I found a family here in Japan and experienced real happiness. Now, because of the positive experiences I’ve had going to church, I am more understanding of my mother and what she went through. It was in church that I started praying for her, for our reconciliation and her healing. Of course, it was also there that I met my future husband. We are now happily married to a baby girl.

Share Your Life Story

If you would also like us to feature your story send us an email to stories@kakehashi-ph.jp