“Keep in touch. I don’t want you to move there and disappear in the inaka.”

Those were the words my friend said to me as I was about to leave Tokyo. A little more than a year ago I made the decision to take a chance and move to Sendai. It was daunting to say the least. I had only vistied here once prior to making the decision and that visit left me in a state of culture shock. I had been living in Tokyo for four years, and I had expected to enter a sprawling metropolis at least on the scale of Fukuoka, but coming out of Sendai station was like entering Omiya. The bus ride–bus!–to the middle of nowhere to my school had me on edge, but in the end, I felt I had to get out of Tokyo for the job and for something different. And, different is what I got.

Transportation
What I really liked about living in Tokyo was not needing a car. I lived in the area around Ueno for four years, and was able to move freely around the city (and country) relatively easily. Sendai, itself has much more public transportation compared with other cities in the Tohoku region; There are three JR lines that run through the city, but I don’t find them very useful. I still find it a little awkward when the train stops at a station and the doors do not open. JR does this because there are not always people at every door like in Kanto and Kansai. In addition to the JR, Sendai also has a subway line that runs from the southern part of the city to the northern part with another in the works, and the buses are very effiecient. What I was not prepared for was the need for a car, and what I have found is that outside of Tokyo and Osaka, a car is very useful.

Housing
Finding a place was a little stressful. Like the rest of Japan, I had to go through the process of the real estate company calling landlords to make sure that having a gaijin move in would be alright. Eventually I finally found a place that I am very happy with. Knowing what I know now, I would have taken a little more time in looking for a place and would have come up one or two more times to take a look around. After I got here, I found that there are some insanely reasonable places to live. I also found out that the size of a tatami mat is actually bigger here than in Tokyo.

Cost of Living
Most people could probably guess that the cost of living is lower here, but it is not as low as I had expected. Things like groceries and rent are lower, but so are salaries. Maybe what surprised me the most was that restaurants cost about the same as in Tokyo. The lower salaries make eating out more of an experience than I am used to. On the flip side, I have become a much better cook since the move.

Jobs
Jobs are scarce in Sendai, and jobs for foreigners are even fewer. There are several English conversation schools, but most of the foreigners up here are in the JET program or are ALTs outside of JET. I also know some people working in a university; there are several in Sendai. Outside of those jobs, there is not much. I have run into a few expats who have decided to abandon Sendai for the greener pastures of Tokyo.

Is it True?
After moving to Sendai, the first question a friend of mine (from Tokyo) asked me was, “So, what are the girls like?”

To which I replied, “Well, they the same as in Tokyo. Why don’t you come up and we’ll hang out?”

“No man, (he says man a lot) aren’t they ugly?”

There is a story behind this. In the Edo period, one of the Tokugawa shoguns’ decided that Edo needed an infusion of beautiful women. He liked the women from Sendai/Miyagi (Nagoya and Gunma ３大ブス) and took them south. Some people think that becuase of the loss of that DNA, the women in Sendai are still not very attractive. I am married, so I did not notice, but when writing about this I took a look around. I did not see much of a difference. Many of the women in Sendai are in their early twenties because of all the universities and colleges in the area. Like in other rural areas, people in the younger generation generally get married earlier if life here than in more urban areas.

Nightlife
Sendai has a pretty big nightlife scene. Off the main street of Ichibancho to the west there is another street called Kokubuncho. It sounds like Kabukicho, and resembles it in many ways. This is where most of the action happens after the sun goes down. It mostly consits of izakayas and hostess bars, but also has a few clubs.

I miss Tokyo sometimes, but now that I am a little older (and married) I am glad to be out of there. Even if I eventually end up moving back south, living here is giving me a different Japan experience from the one I had there.

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