Why I Chose America When Working Abroad

2022-08-18 original Startups

What first drew me to America was the market for the products I was working on at the time. Yamaha mainly develops, manufactures, and sells musical instruments and electronic equipment, but for most of its products, North America was the main market. Because of that, many trends tended to come from America, and I was always paying attention to it in that sense.

Looking back now, the thinking I had in my twenties was very naive — I probably felt something close to a longing, a sense of “I want to see that huge market with my own eyes!”

After that, I kept seeing off senior colleagues who were being posted to America, thinking “someday it’ll be my turn too,” but that timing never came. My wife, who spent a lot of time with expat dads in Silicon Valley, once said something about this. “If I were your boss, I wouldn’t send you overseas. Because if you were sent to America, you’d sprout wings and just up and quit the company.” I really had no comeback. Everyone involved made a wise call, I think.

In the end, various connections brought me to America, but at that point I hadn’t actually thought very deeply about the fact that it was America, or more specifically, Silicon Valley. What came first was the feeling that there was something I wanted to do. I think this was very lucky for me. It meant I could come to America without any strange sense of pressure or excessive expectations. As a result, Silicon Valley suited me very well, and it’s no exaggeration to say that the many experiences and encounters of that period shaped who I am today.

Here, with the benefit of hindsight, I’d like to look back and organize what was good about it.

One thing was being able to see up close the reality at the top of the startup scene. This confirmed that the “market” perspective I’d held since my twenties wasn’t far off the mark. Wherever the market is large and capital gathers, something exciting happens. In Silicon Valley, the speed of that was crazy fast.

Next was being able to witness true diversity firsthand, along with the inconsistencies it brings. America is a country of immigrants. But the simple interpretation that, since everyone’s ancestors were immigrants if you trace far enough back, the country must therefore be kind to immigrants, is extremely dangerous. After a few generations, immigrants stop thinking of themselves as immigrants and become the established residents instead. Diversity is accepted because it makes economic sense, and for any other reason, most people would honestly prefer that immigrants not come at all. The Chinese-American woman who managed the property we rented from told us she liked Japanese people. Being something of a Japanophile, she said all sorts of nice things, but near the end she let slip, almost as if her calculations had accidentally leaked out from behind her praise, “Japanese people don’t make a mess of the house” and “Japanese people who come to America are talented and well-paid, so the risk of them defaulting on rent is low.” To be clear, there’s no misunderstanding here — she was very friendly and treated us very kindly.

Also, witnessing something close to the finished form of the disparities that wealth inequality produces was an enormous takeaway. In America, it’s said that the assets held by the top 1% of wealthy people exceed the combined assets of the bottom 50%. It’s a forerunner of an extremely expanded society of inequality.

That said, this is ultimately just a statistical figure. I have no friends among the top 1%, and I don’t go around conscious of where exactly I rank, so there isn’t much I feel about it in daily life. Not in any clear-cut way, at least. But little by little, on various occasions, I would sense that something felt off. For example, in Silicon Valley, rental prices kept rising at an unbelievable pace.

But the hourly wages posted for part-time jobs at IN ‘n’ OUT clearly weren’t keeping up with that pace. Even Uber drivers, working as hard as they could, were only earning a bit more than what IN ‘n’ OUT paid.

“Who is actually managing to keep living in these rentals, and how?” In most cases, I think it’s “wealthy people newly moving into the area.”

In 2011, when I moved to Silicon Valley, you could rent a 2-bedroom (what’s called a 2LDK in Japan) around Santa Clara for about $1300 to $1500. I ended up living in Sunnyvale for about $1600, but over the two years I lived there, the rent rose to $2100. After that, I moved to Foster City, where the rent rose to $2400, then $2800, and finally $3000 — and this was actually quite reasonable compared to the surrounding area, because plenty of properties with similar layouts in the same area went for close to $4000. Why was I able to endure this? Simply because my salary kept rising.

When I moved to America, I had accepted a fairly low salary. That’s only natural, since I was a newcomer whose value hadn’t yet been proven (even so, by Japanese standards it was still quite a high salary). After that, my salary was raised almost as a matter of course each year, and after three years, my annual salary had gone up by more than $20,000. This is what allowed me to absorb the surging rent. But this only worked because I had just arrived in America and was steadily proving my worth, which let my salary keep rising smoothly.

At one point, I saw news that the average annual salary at a company operating streetcars in San Francisco was around $61,000, and that a strike had broken out demanding higher wages. From the perspective of someone living in Japan, this probably makes no sense at all, but if you actually lived in San Francisco earning $61,000 a year, you’d have to share a house with roommates, and if you were married with children, raising them would be difficult even with double income. The collapse had already, quietly, begun.

Looking back, while I had extremely exciting experiences (I won’t spend much space on that here since I’ve touched on it in other sections), I also feel I witnessed the fear that lies beyond that excitement, and the fragility of the ground supporting it all. It’s often said that Japan needs to stop aiming to become a “mini America,” and I fully agree. I think America is bound to change from here. It seems to me that Trump’s election was, in a sense, the drastic treatment serving as the entry point for that change. Japan doesn’t need to go out of its way to fall, a lap behind, into the same hole America has already fallen into. Simply knowing that as a felt reality feels to me like carrying one great asset.

The content of this post is an excerpt (original text) from the following book. If you’re interested, please pick up a copy.

The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/08/1091/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.