You can call me Obake. I was born and raised in the United States, and during my childhood I developed a fascination for Japan. As a kid I played a lot of Japanese games and I loved anime. At the time I wasn't aware that all the stuff I liked was Japanese, but I was able to recognize that it was very different from the other types of media around me.

Soon after starting junior high school I discovered anime and manga, and I came to the realization that all of the stuff I loved - everything that I had grown up on and considered an import part of my childhood up to that point - was from Japan. This led to me developing an interest in learning more about Japan and it's culture. I wanted to know more about the place where all of the things I loved came from. This interest stuck with me throughout my teenage years. When I was in high school, my school received an exchange student from Japan. I remember being so confused about why someone from Tokyo(!) would be at MY crummy little high school in the middle of nowhere. We didn't have classes together and I only got to speak with them a few times, but thanks to meeting with them I began to see Japan as a real place and not this abstract image from anime or games or something to read about on Wikipedia.

Towards the end of high school, our teachers began pressuring us to go to university. I didn't know what I wanted to do, all I really knew was that I didn't want to go into 10s-of-thousands-of-dollars of debt to get a crappy job and live in an American city. My English teacher encouraged me to "follow my dreams," and after a lot of reflection and researching online I came to the conclusion that I was absolutely going to move to Japan. At first everyone told me it wouldn't happen, but when I was 19 years old I made that dream a reality. Today I am 26 years old, and I am still living in Japan. Not just that, but I even became a Japanese citizen and I will remain in Japan for the rest of my life. I have a Japanese wife, kids, a home, friends, a great job... Japan is everything I hoped it would be, and so much more. It absolutely surpassed all of my hopes and expectations.

Japanification is a guide to Japan. This website is a love letter to Japan, drawing from my own personal experience and observations as someone who moved to Japan at a young age and was able to adapt.

I plan to write articles about learning Japanese, as well as assimilating and building a good life for yourself in Japan. There is a lot of misinformation about these topics (and even Japan as a whole) on the English side of the internet, so I hope to address these topics in order to provide the proper information to people who long for Japan just as I did all those years ago. I want to share the proper way to learn the Japanese language, I want to address why most foreigners run into trouble in Japan, and I want to talk about acculturation and how you can assimilate.

This guide should equip you with everything you need to know in order assimilate and have a good life in Japan. Essentially, I will teach you how to become Japanese. There are some individuals on the internet who make statements like "you will never be Japanese," and I'm here to say that's not true. And I know that from personal experience and I will address that topic directly on this website.

And for those who are interested in Japan but don't intend to move here, perhaps you will have some interest in learning more about what life in Japan is like, and you can see the reality as I pull back the curtain and take you beyond the Gaijin Bubble.

But of course, it will take time to properly address all of these topics so I ask for your patience and understanding as I work on this website off and on in my free time.

The word Japanification refers to the process of becoming or wishing to become a member of Japanese society.

If you need to get in touch with me in the meantime, I am active on Agora Road under the username Obake. Come find me there if you want to chat .

The theme of this website is using System.css, a CSS library that resembles Apple's System OS which ran from 1984-1991. I love all kinds of retro things so this was the perfect library to use for making this site.