Layoffs, sky-high rent, and a $3,000 preschool bill convinced me I can't live in the US anymore. We're moving to Japan.

Nick Woolsey is moving back to Japan after struggling with high costs and job instability in the US. Woolsey lived in Japan for several years before moving back to the US for support raising his child. Now Woolsey is going back to Japan after starting a business. This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with Nick Woolsey, 39, who recently decided to move back to Japan after spending the last six years in the US. Woolsey, an American, is returning on a "highly skilled professional visa" after starting a company that helps people relocate to Japan. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. I wasn't really thinking about permanent residency the first time I moved to Japan, because I was in my 20s and I didn't really have a plan. Now that I'm in my 30s - soon 40s - I feel like people in my age group need a plan. In high school, I participated in a very short one-week exchange program with a sister city. Towns and cities in the United States and other places have corresponding cities in Japan, and most of the time, it's to facilitate junior high and high school exchanges. When I moved as a college student, I was going to college in Oregon, and they had a great sister school program with Tokyo International University. It was just a six-month exchange program, and then I went back to the US. After college, I did an MBA, and once I finished, I learned that there was a program for being a civil servant in Japan where you would facilitate exchange between your home country and Japan, work with nonprofits, and do translating. I felt like it was a good fit, so I applied and got in. But when I arrived in 2011, I was placed in a very little town, and they were like, "Nonprofit government management? How about you just go teach English?" And that's what I did. Raising a child in Japan was difficult I was in Japan the second time around for about eight years. I was teaching for two years, and then I met the love of my life - another foreigner, she's Russian - and she was on a similar kind of work exchange program. She got a job in Tokyo while we were dating, and she was like, "Are you moving to Tokyo or not?" I said sure, but I just renewed my contract with my teaching position, so she was there alone for almost a year. Then after that, I got a job and moved up to Tokyo and started working in tech. But kids change everything. We had our first child in Japan and we went from being completely free doing what we wanted, to caring for this little baby alone in the city. Both my wife's mom and my parents were really supportive, coming from both Russia and the States to help out when they could, but man, that was bigger than any...

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