Hi, I’m Kurita, Representative Director of Webharu Inc..
Going abroad long term — a working holiday, a sudden relocation — brings on far more episodes of poor mental health than an ordinary salaried life did. In my case it was loneliness and badly managed working hours. I have fully recovered since.
This article draws on what I went through to explain how to build a full life abroad. Mainly, how to cure loneliness overseas and how to collect interesting experiences.
To date I have circled Japan in 2022, toured Asia in 2023 and moved to Thailand in 2024. Earlier I lived in the Philippines and Australia for about a year in total. Back then it was a working holiday; these past two years I have traveled as a nomad worker.
(2026 update: this article collects experiences from my working holiday and nomad years. I am now based in Shiogama, Miyagi, running website production and AI development as Webharu Inc.)
This piece started out under the title “The nomad trip ends: how I solved my own mental problems over two years of travel”, scribbled down in a Starbucks in Rifu, Miyagi, in October 2023 when the trip finished. The content had drifted from the title, so I changed the title. At the same time I rewrote “The nomad trip ends: how I solved my own mental problems over two years of travel” as a new article aimed at nomads, so read that one as well.
The article you are reading now is the one to use when you are about to throw yourself into a long stay abroad — emigration, a working holiday. Here goes.
Key takeaways
- Beating loneliness abroad — what it means
- Beating loneliness abroad means making friends by setting up an environment that forces you to run into the same people again and again — a language school, a share house, local work, a Meetup every day. This is what the author did across roughly a year in the Philippines and Australia.
Contents
How to make friends and escape loneliness even without confidence in the language
Here is how I made friends abroad. These are ways of meeting people, of course, but meeting alone does not make a friend. The point is to set up an environment that forces you to run into the same people again and again.
- Go to a language school
- Live in a share house
- Get a local job
- Go to the same place regularly (a sauna, a restaurant, a basketball court, a bar, a cafe)
- Go to a Meetup event every day (free events are fine)
- Join the Japanese community
- Visit other share houses
Do these and friends appear almost immediately. The relationships start shallow, but time makes them real. Go in with the attitude that finding one or two people you genuinely click with is lucky. As an adult you get good at managing distance and everything stays on the surface, but in English you can worry about that far less, which makes it surprisingly easy.
Once you have friends, your English improves much faster too. All of this is what I actually did, and anyone can do it. A few notes on each item.
Go to a language school
“I don’t need to study English any more.” “School is expensive, I would rather not.” That was me. But going to a local school has big upsides and I recommend it.
What school gives you Friends
Knowing which parts of town are dangerous
Finding work
Finding a share house
School is generally a place to study, but abroad it doubles as an information source like that. And if you make friends at a similar language level, it becomes conversation practice.
Research language schools in Japan before you go. Mainly, visit a study-abroad agency and ask which schools they recommend. Then sign the contract after you arrive, by visiting the school in person, which comes out cheaper. (Some places require an application through their website in advance.)
Without the instinct to move first, nothing happens and the course simply ends. Be clear about why you are going to school, and act on it.
Live in a share house
Chatting people up on the street is hard work. Even at a guest house, striking up a friendly conversation out of nowhere is not my strength. So I chose a share house.
How you choose one matters, though. Here is what a sociable share house looks like.
- A clean, spacious living room (the important one)
- For making friends, a shared room rather than a private one
- Check whether you can have friends over
- Know the owner’s nationality
Roughly speaking, those are the conditions I search on. The living room in particular has a lot to do with how much contact there is. With no living room you cannot eat together in a shared space, so the chances to talk drop sharply.
Check whether you can have friends over, too. The place I was in before was strict, and friends were absolutely not allowed inside. But a friend of mine lived in a share house where guests were always welcome, so there were parties constantly, and that is where I made a lot of friends.
A house with a lot of strangers coming through can get worse for safety and comfort, though, so check carefully before you move in.
“Know the owner’s nationality” is not about discrimination; it is about understanding culture. In Japan and Korea, for instance, people generally do not walk through the house in their shoes, and many are particular about cleanliness.
In America and Europe, on the other hand, people walk around indoors in their shoes, and might shower every three days. It varies by person, of course, but those cultural differences can become a source of stress. Share houses tend to attract residents of the same nationality as the owner, so it is worth checking during your visit.
I once had a European housemate whose smell was fairly strong (body odor and perfume). Once we got close I could get English lessons out of him and say “go and shower!”, so it turned out to be a genuinely interesting experience.
Go to a Meetup event every day (free events are fine)
During my working holiday in Australia I went to Meetup events almost daily. At first I turned up terrified and could not talk to anyone. But going every day, you get used to the setting. Before long a regular crowd formed and we would go out together.
If one visit produces nothing, do not let it get to you; go every time and hold a conversation for just five minutes. Repeat that for a single month and you become something like a regular. Also, larger Meetup events are full of people standing on their own. They often talk to you first, so the bar is low.
Join the Japanese community
Join a Japanese community for nomads, or drop in on a Japanese share house. Abroad, Japanese friends come easily, and you can help each other out.
Deciding “I came all this way, so I am not going to talk to Japanese people” is fine, but on a long stay abroad you start wanting the pleasure of having Japanese friends. Knowing at least the outline of the local Japanese community, so that you can help each other when it counts, takes a weight off.
The remaining items need no explanation, so I will leave them there. The one that was best for me personally: the apartment block housing my share house had a sauna, and I went every day. (Simply because I like saunas.) The regulars grew into friends, local Australians taught me English, and we trained together. A wonderful time.
Those are the tactics for making friends abroad. You can make friends this way without ever having to start the conversation yourself. If being alone starts to feel dull, try them.
How to collect more experience than anyone else while you are there
Make a lot of friends and you get to experience everything from work to hobbies. But there is plenty you cannot experience by depending on other people. Start with these two.
- Get a local job
- Get hold of a bicycle, a motorbike or a car
Get a local job (nomad or not)
Get a job locally. It depends on your visa and how long you are staying, but local work delivers many times more experience than you expect. And you find friends. Frankly, it is the most important item here.
Being a digital nomad makes no difference. Take a local part-time job. If you work remotely full time, work a little in the gaps or at weekends. You pick up local friends, local values and the atmosphere of local working life. To me, a very important item.
In Australia, working people start early and finish early. And they are fairly cheerful on the way in. The mood differs from a Japanese commuter train in the morning, which told me “people in this country seem to enjoy work reasonably well, and a lot of them seem happy”. The mood of a country matters.
What kind of job should you take?
Any job is fine, but avoid a company that is Japanese-run, Japanese-only and has no customer contact. As long as there is service work, or at least some chance to talk to customers, it is fine. A warehouse staffed entirely by Japanese people frankly defeats the point of coming abroad.
I took exactly that job in Australia — Japanese-run, Japanese-only, no customer contact. I quit within a week; the whole place was Japan. Japan of the Showa era, at that. Simply quitting would have been a waste, though, so I went looking for the next job.
“Hello, I’m Masato Kurita, starting today. I have only just arrived, so I may have a lot of questions — thank you for having me.” Say that and a few kind people will answer “ask me anything if you get stuck”.
Leave it a while, then ask about the local scene and your colleagues’ futures: “Are there a lot of Japanese-run companies like this one?” “What are your plans from here?” That gets you information and grumbles — “Company X pays better than we do”, “Company Y is apparently really easy”. Then note the company names down and search them later. They advertise part-time roles, so apply on the spot.
The person who gave you the information is thinking “I have heard the rumors, but making the move is scary”, so tell them “I’ll go in first and scout it. If it is a good company, I’ll introduce you.” That way nobody thinks badly of you. I really did move a colleague to a new company that way, and we became close afterwards.
The upshot: in one week I moved from a Japanese-run, Japanese-only, no-customer-contact workplace to an Australian-run, English-first, customer-facing one, and my hourly rate went up by six dollars. The work was far easier, too — genuinely about a tenth as hard as the Japanese-run place. Easy and enjoyable.
Get hold of a bicycle, a motorbike or a car
A car means group trips and getting anywhere you like, which is convenient, but it is not that easy to arrange.
So my recommendation is a bicycle. It doubles as exercise and takes you a long way. It is exhausting at first, but feeling the exhaustion fade is its own sense of progress, and you get to enjoy the local countryside and scenery as you go. Australia was a happy country where everyone you passed was smiling.
So cycling to work in the morning becomes naturally enjoyable. And you naturally smile more. Roads abroad are often wider than in Japan, which gives a real sense of openness. Next time I go abroad, a bicycle is the first thing I get.
Incidentally, public transport abroad is inconvenient and bewildering. Trains simply fail to arrive on some days with no warning, running late is normal, and leaving early is normal too. To a Japanese person, honestly, it is unusable. It differs by country, of course, and I use it for longer trips, but as a daily habit it is a nuisance.
Am I Even Chasing the Right Goal? How I Deal With the Anxiety That Once Put Me in Bed for 3 Days
Apart from loneliness, there were also periods when I could no longer tell whether my own goals were right. Here is what I did then.
Hi — I’m Masato, and I have been through burnout twice.
Note: this piece is from my personal-blog years, written down exactly as I felt at the time, and the body is left as it was. (2026 update: I am now based in Shiogama, Miyagi, running website production and AI development as Webharu Inc..)
It is an old pattern of mine: a sudden hollow feeling of “wait, what am I supposed to be doing?” It is not sadness, and it is not depression, but every so often I lose my grip on my goals and on whatever I am working toward.
Yesterday I switched our company site over to a format that shows my own face; before that, client work. So — today? Thinking produces no answer. Left alone that curdles into anxiety, so I do the work of reorganizing my thinking and remembering the goal.
Having gone through burnout twice on my own and come out of both, here is my way of living and the way I resolve it. There must be plenty of solo freelancers with no colleagues around them, and I am writing this hoping it reaches even one of them who is struggling the way I did. (I decided to write exactly what I am feeling right now.)
If “I do not know what to do today” sounds familiar, please read on.
1. Think about what you love — what feels good
The first thing I do is think about what I love and what feels good.
If I skip it, an unnameable anxiety and impatience quietly demolish my mental state. I ask myself: lately, what am I doing when I am enjoying myself? What am I looking at when I feel happy?
——— (thinking) ———
Here is the list I actually thought through and noted down, verbatim.
- Achievement at work, and the moment I land a big project (say what you like, work is fun)
- Time with friends, and drinks
- Sitting on the terrace of the neighborhood café, thinking, looking at the grass and the trees
- Walking around the beautiful pool near home
- Watching my wife struggle with some strange video game (she is so bad at it that it is funny)
- Newsletter subscribers ticking up (a notification of a new sign-up makes me happy)
- Listening to UVERworld live recordings when TAKUYA∞’s MC is at its best
- Writing, and pouring myself out on the page (I used to hate writing, and now I love it)
- Wearing clothes I think are cool (I made and bought clothes in my university days. Nomad life reduced me to Uniqlo. Since renting a place in Thailand I have come back to it. I really do love clothes.)
That is roughly it. It is embarrassingly candid, but this is how I find what I love and what makes me happy.
Incidentally, lately I have started to feel a rush in my head when I feel happy. It is a little different from the win of gambling or a game and it is hard to put into words, but I have come to recognize the sensation of my brain being wrapped in pleasure. (Putting it that way makes it sound alarming.)
There is nothing odd about it: when I think something is enjoyable, my head clears and my thinking sharpens. In that state, focus, ideas and drive all rise, and my work gets more efficient. That is why I put this step — thinking about what you love and what feels good — first and treat it as important.
2. Remember the goal
Next I remember the goal. Until a little while ago my goals were vague — “what am I even working for, what do I want to do?” — and I suffered at this step, so I built proper goals.
- Build a team and gather colleagues for the web production business
- Find just ten fans
Building a team and gathering colleagues for the web production business
Right now I run a Webflow production business; I find colleagues, and then I move on to the next venture. That requires publishing in articles and in video, which means putting out more articles on Webflow × SEO and spreading them through video and social media.
Right now I have only two partners I trust. I have not been able to hire anyone yet, and my income is not stable. Put that way there is still plenty I have to do, and the road there excites me.
How to build a goal that excites you is covered here.
Find just ten fans
One day it struck me: being cheered on by someone is a genuinely wonderful thing. Become someone people cheer for. Stay the kind of person who deserves it. That is one of my goals now.
I will not do what I find uncool. Even if someone else calls it uncool, if I think it is cool then I should do it. Count only the number of people who love you. If even one person loves you, you are happy. I want to be a person of consistent principle. That is exactly why I set this goal.
But I do not want to be an influencer. I do not much like social media in the first place. In the article on how to build a goal, I gave a brief tour of my values, and in the course of it I found that I prefer narrow and deep — that I like small teams. So instead of one-to-many social media, I am building out newsletters and community work, which have the stance of a letter from me to you.
3. Work backward from the goal and lay out the tasks (and if the mood will not rise, rest today)
From here I work backward and make the tasks clear. And if even then the mood will not rise, I rest for the day. Making a task list while the mood is not there just ends with the tasks undone.
I choose rest precisely because I have forced my way through before. Push on when you are not in the mood and you stay out of the mood, and the heat drains away. That leads straight back to burnout, so I take my rest properly.
—— 3 days later ——
My focus broke, so I rested for three days. Friday to Sunday I played The Legend of Zelda with my wife. I gamed so much that I started wanting to work, so here I am. Now, back to the article.
I work backward from the goal and lay out the tasks.
In the case of turning the web production business into a business
Broadly, there are two things to do.
- Grow the project pipeline
- Find team members
The steps toward systematizing the business go in the following order.
- Grow the project pipeline
- Find (and grow) members
- Become the director myself
- Find a director from among the members
- Concentrate on sales and marketing, leaving most of the production to the director
- Put trusted colleagues in senior seats and open up a new business
It is extremely rough, but the steps above are what I am aiming at now.
I am currently around step 2, finding members, with a long way to go. Members I find often fall short on quality and skill, so lately I pay to commission the work, fix it myself, and then teach through feedback on why I fixed it — an awkward arrangement, but it is what works for now.
When I was starting out I got cut without a word, which is exactly why I find myself wanting to teach people things. Still, since I cannot take anyone on as an employee yet, I tell myself the approach above is the only way for now. (I am thinking of releasing a product before long that supports one or two people over the medium to long term with the knowledge to live as a freelancer.)
(2026 update: the plans above for building a team and for a support product are from the time of writing. I no longer offer that service.)
In summary: what I would do next time I go abroad
- Housing: live in a share house
- Transport: buy a bicycle (look for a used one)
- School: go to a language school for just one week (friends, job hunting)
- Work: start looking after two weeks; until then, ask the people I meet
- Habit: go to a shop near home every day (chat with the staff)
- Community: start a Japanese community, or join one that exists
- Go to the same sauna or basketball court every week or every day
- Attend Meetups every day
Next, if it is a long stay, I want to go to New Zealand. I mean that seriously, and have done since COVID arrived. But as an adult, once it is no longer just you, all sorts of things get complicated.
I will finish with something said at a show by UVERworld, a Japanese rock band.
Selected work
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FAQ
How do I beat loneliness while living abroad?
The trick is to create an environment that forces you to run into the same people again and again. What worked for me was a language school, a sociable share house, a local job, a Meetup event every day, and going to the same shop or sauna regularly.
How do I choose a share house where people actually mix?
Check four things: a clean, spacious living room; a shared room rather than a private one; whether you can have friends over; and the owner’s nationality (cultural differences). Whether there is a living room at all has a direct effect on how much contact there is.
Should I take a local job even if I work remotely?
I recommend it. You pick up local friends, local values and the atmosphere of local working life, so even the gaps in your week or the weekend are worth it. The trick is to avoid a workplace that is Japanese-run, Japanese-only and has no customer contact.
How do I find a local job abroad?
What worked was asking colleagues at my first workplace about other companies — pay, how easy they are to work at — then searching the company name and applying to their listings. That took me to an English-first workplace in one week, with a six-dollar rise in hourly rate.
What is the best way to get around while living abroad?
A bicycle. It doubles as exercise, takes you a long way, and lets you enjoy the local scenery as you go. Public transport abroad often fails to run on time, which makes it inconvenient for daily use, so get hold of a used bicycle early.
What do you do when you are no longer sure your own goals are right?
First I write down what I like and what feels good, then recall the original goal, then work backwards from it to what to do today. If the mood does not lift, I rest for the day. It is a routine I built after burning out twice.
