Hi everyone, and welcome back to Global Village. 欢迎回来【小酒馆·大世界】.

All right. As we're coming sort of to the end of our Brad in Japan Series, I've heard that you also bought properties in Japan, and I say properties not just one house, but you've bought multiple. And...

Yeah, I bought two.

OK. How was the process? Was it difficult foreigner to buy properties to buy houses, flats in Japan?

It wasn't so difficult, buying a flat is going to be more difficult simply because there's like a kind of a group, you know, like an apartment complex group where... because everyone owns the property and so you're being brought into that group of people and you're all living together within the same complex.

And so that can become a problem, especially with like paying for the apartment fees and things like that nowadays you can't send money very easily without being like a resident of Japan. So if you live here, buying a flat is great, but if you don't live here, I would probably not suggest that now. But buying a house you don't have to do those monthly fees and you don't have to deal with like that group and so...

On the land.

It's actually much easier, yeah.

As far as like buying property goes, it's quite a simple process as long as you have everything taken care of. They... not something... I have seen like stamps being used in China, right, like in the US we don't use stamps.

But like in China people use stamps like when you always stamp a document. In Japan they also stamp documents and you have to have like a registered stamp with the government to do things. If you're a foreigner, you can use your signature, but you actually have to go to your embassy and get a special like notarized document saying that this is your signature in order to do it. But aside from that, if you have money, cash is king so to say, as long as you have the money to buy the property, you can buy the property.

I see. So it sounds like you really got it sorted in Japan like you're assimilating quite well, you're enjoying your life there. But for sure there are frustrating moments, no?

Yeah, I just dealt with like a whole month of a frustration after a frustration.

Oh, wow.

And I needed a few documents, so I could apply for a program that I wanted to enter, I was gonna enter a motor sports engineering program.

I had my mom sent me a bunch of stuff and got lost in the mail, like the package had got damaged. It was like held up for an extra 10 days. And when I got the package finally, it didn't have one of the most important documents, my birth certificate.

Either my mom had lost it and forgot to send it or it was taken out of the package or fell out of the package when it got damaged.

Like everything kind of like got set back and I got a PDF copy of a new birth certificate in which took a little bit of time. Then I had to do all the translation and stuff.

And so I'm already late on... not really late, but getting really close to the deadline of having to submit all my documents. The last thing that I had to do was make a payment for all my test fee and entrance fee and everything.

I went to the post office because I don't have a bank account, I have a postal savings account, which is essentially the same thing. It's just at the post office and that's the closest to my apartment.

So that's what I use, but that the document that I was supposed to use had a place for a stamp and the post office doesn't do stamps because they're not a regular bank. They told me that they couldn't send the money and it's like, okay, I went to the bank. The bank was closed early. Banks already closed really early, they close at like 3pm.

3pm?

I went to the bank. There's actually one bank that's open later, but it's not even remotely close to my apartment. So I went to the bank, the bank was closed. I'm like, so what am I going to do? I contacted the school and they said well, try to pay at the convenience store. And I tried to do that at two different convenience stores, but because place for... there's no like a bar code, they can't scan it and pay it, like you could with other documents, but because they have a stamp.

It's like an endless nightmare.

The school said just try to make a payment at the ATM and you don't need the stamp necessarily, just send us the receipt.

I went to an ATM and I tried to make a payment, but the ATM requires you to have a special code that they don’t have, they don't use those codes. I couldn't make a payment at the ATM, okay, I really... and the time is ticking down, the post office is about to close. And so I don't have a way to make a payment and send off all the documents before the deadline.

Now I have to wait a whole another year.

That was horrendous. It's like everything that could go wrong, went wrong.

There were other things that went wrong in the process as well. But those were like the main things that kind of like moved everything back.

Who would have thought it's so difficult to pay for something, you got the money you wanted to pay.

Somethings are so easy like you just go to the I have my health insurance, my electricity bill. I just go to the convenience store and I give them the money, they scan it and they stamp it. Everything is good.

I mean it reminds me of my experience living in other countries as well, it’s just this endless nightmare, this endless cycle that put you in, especially dealing with banks, post office and all that, not like complaining in that sense, but this is just a... unfortunately, this is something most people go through, hopefully not very regularly when they're living in different countries.

If I would have had my documents earlier, I could have tried to make the payment...I would have made the payment earlier. If I would have ran into the problem, then I would have had like a few extra days to deal with it.

Just because like everything kind of pushed back everything every time I had an issue, the date that I could submit it by got pushed back and the fees are quite expensive, so I don't want to pay early and then not have the documents to send them.

True. Lesson learned.

Basically tried to do things earlier, leave more space, leave more wiggle room when you're getting closer to the deadline, right?

I actually started the documentation process back last October, I did the open campus tour. As soon as I did that, I was like okay I need to get copies of all my transcripts, so I ordered copies of my transcripts.

When I was at the school, I could get the transcripts after 3 days or even after 2 days, you could pay an extra fee. But because I'm not in the country, I had to go through a transfer company that they used to send the documents.

So I couldn't order directly from my school. I actually had to go through their intermediary, so their intermediary, it took them almost 2 months to even to like send the documents to my mom because they wouldn't send them to Japan, of course.

Yeah.

Everything becomes extremely difficult. A lot of these procedural things becomes so much more time consuming and difficult when you're doing it across borders, really.

Yeah.

But despite that you're in good spirit, you're in good mood.

Yeah, I got my driver's license earlier this week, which is like the thing I've been waiting for a long time.

So now I can go out and I can buy a car. I have a car already, but that's my race car and so it's not legal to drive it on the road.

So you race, is that what you plan to do in the future is that part of your future plan?

It is part of my future plan. I don't know if it'll be part of my career. If it all possible I would like to take my engineering and do something related to racing. If not, I wanna work for a company and develop like car parts for more like race applications. But whatever I can do is what I'll do and the racing is just gonna be kind of like my side hobby. If I could turn that into a more of a career, I'll definitely do that.

But I do, I still teach English and I do enjoy teaching and so I’m probably gonna keep doing that throughout the whole period.

It’s just a matter of... as long as I have the time, I'm probably going to do it. But if my other career takes off and I don't have the time, then it might not be something that I do at that point.

But I mean in the future you can share with us maybe some of the video contents of you racing or your experience in Japan that would be cool.

Yeah, I haven't done anything with like video online. I have started like an Instagram a kind of account to for some pictures and stuff that I have things that I do.

But just one of those things where like this first year has kind of been stressful getting everything set up.

But now that I'm here and I've gotten pretty much everything underway, I can really start focusing on those things.

Turning those future plans into reality. But meanwhile, brad is still gonna be here in the 酒馆 and talking with us about geeky stuff and talking... hopefully in the future, talking about more about life in Japan or racing even. I know it's not a topic that we hear very often. Most people probably know nothing about it. But that'll be cool.

The whole point of Global Village, the whole point of 酒馆 is to really see different lifestyles share different life experiences.

And on that note, I would like to thank you, Brad for coming to the show to do this mini series with us about your life in Japan.

No problem. It was great. A lot of fun.

Okay. I'll see you in the next Geek Time episode.

See you soon.

And all the luck in Japan.

Thank you.