I came to Japan in December of 2015. I was accepted as a college student at Lakeland University Japan Campus. In the prior month, I had to do all the prepping for living in Tokyo. I contacted a real estate company that helped with foreigners and could understand English. I worked with one of the biggest real estate company for foreigners and I will tell you that the experience was not the easiest or most pleasant. It was not that the company was bad to me but was really inconvenient. The english was not the best, and I would have to wait until the a.m to receive emails. After about 2 weeks, we had decided on a place and to be honest I had no idea where it was other than the name or what kind of apartment it was.

When I arrived in Japan, I had to go to the office to take care of the contract and pay. The experience was not easy, everything was in Japanese and I just had to put up with it. When traveling to my new home in a different town, I got lost because the map was in Japanese. I got stuck overnight outside a convenient store until I could contact someone at the office in the morning. This was by far not how I imagined the start of my new life in Japan would be. It took a lot of time to learn the knowledge of how to live in Japan from basic necessities to taking care of all the paper work required by foreigners. I had no clue how to go about these things or where to really go. After running into all these troubles adjusting to life abroad, I started thinking of how I could start making this process easier. The idea of Jump Start Abroad was created. I wanted to make the adjustment as easy as possible, and give everyone that warm welcoming to Japan. As most have dreamed of living here like myself, why not do it with a head start by someone who learned it all the hard way.