Yakushima: Why we decided to make the move.

I don’t really have a special connection with Kyushu — growing up in the northern United States, I’m much more familiar with snow and the cold than I am with the tropical climate of southern Kyushu. Yakushima is between the southern island of Kyushu and the even more southern islands of Okinawa. However, I really fell in love with Yakushima, and this is the story of how we decided to make the move.

My wife’s parents live in Yakushima, and my first visit to Kyushu was to Kagoshima and Yakushima. The first time I came, I didn’t think about it that much. I’ve been to rural parts of Japan before, but this was the first time I visited a remote island. Compared to even rural Japan, Yakushima doesn’t have a single 24-hour convenience store (“konbini”) that so many Japanese people are used to having. Getting to the island is not that hard — there are multiple ferries and an airport — but if the weather is bad, especially during the typhoon season, the cargo ferries can’t dock, and stock at the supermarkets can get pretty thin.

After my first child was born, we went to Yakushima as a family many times during vacations. Every time we came, I always enjoyed the weather, nature, and compact environment. We gradually came to think about what living in Yakushima would be like, and started casually looking around for homes and land that would be good places to live.

My wife has been working completely remotely for over 10 years. In my case, I started working mostly remotely a little before the COVID-19 pandemic started, and completely remotely a few months after that. We continued to live in Tokyo, mainly because we lived in a convenient area near a daycare and elementary school, but didn’t really have a deep connection with the area.

A big bottleneck to living and working in Yakushima while keeping our jobs was the Internet connection. Up until a couple years ago, there was only ADSL and cellular connections. ADSL was really slow, so most people just used mobile Wi-Fi hotspots. Now, there’s fiber available throughout most of the island, and we were finally able to set up a working environment.

Then, during the summer vacation, my family and I decided to try living in Yakushima for one month. During that time, we visited the nursery school and elementary school to make sure the kids liked the environment. We also took a week off work, but the rest of the time we were working normally, doing the exact same work as we would have been doing in Tokyo. It went well, with no major problems.

After spending the month, we made our decision — we picked out a plot of land, and started talking with a builder.