We are Furusato Travel

 “We are moving to Japan!”  A phrase that many of you may want to say to friends and family but don’t know how to get there.  Youtube and social media are full of videos with these successes, but for a working family, that information is not so easy to find or they are missing crucial details on how you get there.  That’s where we want to help!

Matsumoto Castle

Welcome. My name is Matthew and we are a family of three—plus our cat, Disco—currently living in the US but getting ready to call Kameoka home.  To be clear, we are not relocation experts.  We are a family that is ready to call Japan our home with little to no knowledge of how to actually make that happen.  Our journey will not be yours, it may be wildly different, it may be very similar.  Our hope is to help shed the light on some of the things you may run into as you look into your own journey!

For the past fifteen years, my wife, daughter and I have been visiting Japan as tourists. But a couple of years ago our mindset shifted.  We stopped asking "when are we going back?" and started asking "how do we actually stay?"

This decision was not an overnight thing. It has taken years of internal debate and a slow burn of curiosity that started with our first trip in 2010. Back then, we were just two young tourists hitting the "Golden Route"—the neon of Tokyo, temples of Kyoto and modern city of Osaka. But every time we flew home, it always felt like a piece of us was left behind.

Between 2010 and 2023, our conversations slowly evolved from "That was a great trip" to "What would our life actually look like there?" We spent years what if’ing before we ever dared to call this an official goal. It meant weighing uprooting our teenage daughter from her world, our work situations, and everything in between. Over the years we’ve watched countless videos of people’s success, read blogs, and kept up with visa requirements long before the decision was made. We had to prove to ourselves that this was sustainable and practical, not just a permanent vacation.

Sapporo TV Tower 

By the time we headed to Sapporo and Aomori in 2023, our mindset had completely shifted. While we were mostly there to see the sights; we were also there to see if we could handle the mundane. We spent those weeks shopping at local neighborhood markets, navigating the daily commute, and trying to find a rhythm to see if the reality of living in Japan matched the mountain of research we’d been building for over a decade.

The real turning point was a road trip through Kyūshū in 2024. Driving through the mountains and exploring parts of the country that the trains didn't reach finally convinced us to stop asking "what if" and start figuring out "how."

But when we actually started looking for answers on how to pull off a permanent move, we realized pretty quickly that most of the information out there isn't really catered to families. It’s almost all for students, backpackers, young and single people, or people doing short-term solo moves like teaching English.

The few resources we did find for families usually skip over all of the "behind the scenes" work that it actually takes to make this happen. The logistics are completely different when you have a teenage daughter, a pet, and a career to move across the Pacific.

That’s exactly why we wanted to start this. Between the pet logistics, the visa applications, and the reality of moving an entire household, there is a mountain of paperwork that usually gets left out of travel blogs.  This channel is going to be the place where we share our journey to Japan and we hope you will join us along for the ride on our Furusato Firsthand! We’re going to get into the weeds of the visa process, house hunting in Kameoka, and even the quest to get a Japanese driver's license, and once the move has been completed, we will evolve into just daily life in Japan.  The realities, the struggles, and the wins.  
This blog, "Furusato Travel: From Cities to Countryside" will focus on our travel adventures from the bustling cities of Japan to the beauty of the natural countryside. It is here where we will share our experiences, pictures, and information that would be helpful to those wish to visit Japan and those common and off the beaten tracks locales that will make your own adventure one to remember.

So whether you’re interested in the actual how-to of moving to Japan and how we handle the chaos, or you are looking for those experiences to make your own vacation and itineraries, we hope you’ll follow along with us!

Togetsukyō Bridge - Arashiyama, Japan