154 consecutive days of running. Rain, typhoons, sickness. 　　　　　　　　　　　　　

54 consecutive days of work. No breaks.

$15 a week to live.

3 years. 5 cities. 7 homes.

Fired three times. Rejected in Japan for my tattoos, elsewhere for my diploma. I don't fit where I'm from, and I'm still earning my place where I am. I'm not independent. I'm not accomplished. But I've learned from both scarcity and support, from falling and being caught.

This is a record of someone still learning to stand.

I did not grow up knowing what I wanted to be, but I understood early how I did not want to live.

At home, arguments filled the space more than silence. At school, I fought often until football taught me how people break and reconnect.

At twelve, I left school for six months to study at a juku and covered the high school mathematics curriculum, then failed the examination anyway. Japanese education operates on an age-based cohort system where ability does not move you forward; age does.

This was my first lesson in how institutions measure people: not by capacity but by category.

In my first year of high school, I left traditional school for an online programme. My father opposed me and threatened to cut ties, yet we reached accommodation. 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　So I worked at 7-Eleven by day, studied online by night. But the online programme allowed slack I could not afford. Without external pressure, I drifted. It was an intuition more than reasoning - I needed to push myself beyond comfort, to create conditions where failure meant consequences. 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　

I had privileges: educated parents, financial stability, options. That comfort felt unearned. Worse, it felt corrosive. The automatic doors at 7-Eleven opened and closed for customers who never saw me, and I understood: labour is not what you do. It is what renders you invisible.

On the month of my eighteenth birthday, I chose to abandon those privileges entirely. Not from courage but from guilt, and from an instinct that I would remain soft unless survival demanded otherwise. I left my father's house, moved to Okinawa, and became financially independent. I have not accepted a single yen from my family since that day.

That decision led to eight moves in two years: Okinawa, Fujisawa, Tokyo, Osaka, London. In Okinawa, I worked at a hotel restaurant for ten months, serving international guests. For the first time I could speak English freely—not as classroom exercise, but as living instrument. I got my first tattoos, all three on my right arm: Sartre's axiom l'existence précède l'essence, a small figure of my younger self climbing life's staircase, and the numbers 999. In Japan, 666 is considered the devil's number. I chose its inverse—999—to mark a commitment: to transform difficulty into growth. This was Sartre made literal. Humans exist first, then define themselves through action. My body became where I inscribed this: each tattoo a choice, each choice a definition of self. I was nineteen, working minimum wage, choosing—deliberately, permanently—who I would become. In Japan, tattoos are stigmatised, associated with yakuza; corporations refuse to hire anyone with visible ink. I knew this. I foreclosed normative pathways anyway. But Judith Butler's insight lingered: if the body is a site of power's inscription, how do we distinguish resistance from self-harm? My tattoos were my attempt to write on my body before society could. After nine months in Okinawa, I left for Tokyo, then backpacked across Southeast Asia—Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam—watching how far limited money could stretch. I returned to Japan with little more than debt. I applied to over thirty jobs, but my tattoos meant silent rejection. At six interviews, they dismissed me before I could speak. I sold my iPhone and Apple Watch. I started day labour: sorting mail, cleaning hoarder apartments, hauling furniture up narrow staircases. The work taught me what Foucault meant about disciplinary power. Foucault wrote that modern power operates through surveillance: you internalize the gaze, discipline yourself. Supervisors tracked our minutes, our movements. We became machines. My tattoos were supposed to resist this—but instead, they made me unemployable, more vulnerable.

I lived with foreign housemates in Tokyo. When one began running daily, I joined. On day forty-three, my grandmother messaged me. My grandfather had passed away while I was in Okinawa. They had not told me until now. While I had been serving tables, sending applications, he was buried without me. That evening, I ran until my legs burned. Then the next day, and the next. I ran for 157 consecutive days because consistency teaches discipline, and because some griefs cannot be spoken—only carried, one step at a time. In June, I found a call centre job handling inquiries in English and Japanese. On weekends, I worked at Marriott Tokyo until September. Every evening after work, I went to bars—not for pleasure but for escape. Cheap bars packed like rush-hour trains, mostly foreign workers. I would order Red Bull vodka, feel the chemical buzz, feel nothing. But those nights sharpened my English. Language became survival tool and social passport. Then an opportunity appeared in Vietnam—a teaching position that seemed certain. I submitted my resignation to both jobs, cancelled my apartment lease, worked fifty-four consecutive days to save money. I packed everything into two suitcases. Then I learned the visa would not be approved—at nineteen, I was too young. The position dissolved before I could apply. I was unemployed, homeless, carrying debt. I had already decided: Osaka—cheaper than Tokyo, far enough to feel like forward motion. I moved there with direction. I found hotel work within a week, then lost it within a month when my tattoos were discovered during uniform inspection. I resigned before they could dismiss me. This was the third time my tattoos had cost me employment—twice in Tokyo, now Osaka. The pattern was clear. Some weeks I had only 2,000 yen—twenty dollars for food, transport, everything. Every yen went to debt repayment, the basic arithmetic of precarity. I opened another credit card. Then another. The numbers grew. I worked more. The numbers grew faster.

I had not abandoned the intention to study abroad, but I stopped pursuing it with clarity. Osaka became escape: I worked enough to cover rent, then spent what remained on oblivion. Bars every night—cheap places where drinks were affordable and questions were few. Nightclubs on weekends where the music drowned thought. Pills whose names I did not ask, swallowed without question. Red Bull vodka that kept me awake and numb. Convenience store food at 3 AM—onigiri, instant noodles, anything to fill the emptiness. Sometimes, numbness sufficed. Some nights I drank until I vomited. I told anyone who would listen: "Life is brutal." Friends gave advice. Some offered to lend me money. Their concern was genuine. But I carried 400,000 yen in debt, had no stable job, no plan forward. Their advice—however sincere—changed nothing. Addiction is not always dramatic collapse; sometimes it is simply the path of least resistance. I told myself I was waiting for the right moment, but waiting without building is just surrender. Two years of saving stood between me and university abroad—years that would become three, then four, then never. That calculation, running through my mind during a night shift, nearly broke me. I left Osaka and returned to Tokyo. I had learnt: intention without discipline is merely wish, and wishes do not compound.

Then my father sent 50,000 yen with a message: "Buy something good to eat." I read it three times on the train home, watching my reflection in the dark window. What I chose in that moment was not rebellion; it was authorship. Two weeks later, in January, my father messaged: "If you are still serious about studying abroad, your grandmother and I want to help." I had sworn to do everything alone. But numbers are real. Calculating wages against tuition and debt, I realised pride is expensive, and I could not afford it. I chose strategy over pride and said yes. This, too, was authorship: recognising when principle becomes obstacle. Over the next two months, my family sent monthly support—approximately $1,000 each month—to cover living expenses while I prepared applications. In total, I received over $8,000 before departure. I was thankful but uneasy. This was not money I earned. To me, integrity means carrying what I receive, not pretending it was mine to begin with. On April 10, I flew to London.

The first months tested calibration. I lived in a hotel with no kitchen, eating sandwiches daily. London was expensive—more expensive than Tokyo—and by July, I had exhausted my father's monthly support, which he had continued for three months. When I left home at eighteen, I had committed to supporting myself. I held a work visa; I could have asked for more, but that would have contradicted the contract I had made. So when my father called, I said I was fine. I was not fine. I went into debt: groceries, transport, rent. I sold my iPad. For three months from July to September, I carried that debt with no income, applying to jobs daily. Something shifted during those months. In April, my confidence came from external markers. By July, unemployed and in debt, my confidence had to migrate inward. I started training at the gym in April, uncertain of my body. Each month brought small changes: posture, strength, how I carried myself. By October, I saw someone different in the mirror—not transformed, but refined. The instability had forced me to ask: who am I when nothing external validates me?

In July, I found work at a British restaurant chain where Italian chefs made sushi and Eastern Europeans explained tempura. They hired me as a back waiter, then reassigned me as a runner. I carried food, changed bins, cleaned toilets, working six days weekly alongside people from India and Bangladesh—men who had crossed continents for the same reason I had, though under different conditions. Some treated me with contempt. The irony was sharp: they looked down on me, but what they did not know was this. My family's monthly support alone exceeded what many of them earned in weeks. The gap was not marginal—it was structural. My family could afford to send me abroad for education while theirs sent remittances home for survival. I never mentioned this. Not from superiority but from understanding that class operates in multiple dimensions simultaneously. Michael Sandel asks what we owe each other. In that multinational kitchen I found one answer: we owe each other dignity not from morality but because indignity corrodes everyone it touches. Every shift, I arrived in Ralph Lauren with a briefcase, then changed into uniform. During the day, I attended a language school filled with students from Switzerland and France. Young people who had never worked, whose families funded London as extended holiday, who treated education as leisure. In the afternoon, I worked with men from developing countries funding survival—fathers sending money home, people for whom education was impossible luxury and work was necessity.

London was not one city but two. I inhabited both. The gap between them—the briefcase in my locker, the uniform on my back—was not irony. It was education. This is what cosmopolitanism looks like from below: not the view from business class, but the view from the kitchen that serves it.

I created rituals to mark boundaries. After each shift, I walked to the Thames and watched the water for five minutes. Work was what I did, not who I was—it took six months to internalise that distinction.

Last year, one person believed in who I could become: she was my partner, from the Netherlands. For months, she anchored me while I rebuilt. But I leant too hard. What began as love became dependence. She did not leave because she stopped loving me—she left to protect herself. The night she told me, I sat in my room and looked at my three tattoos: Sartre's words, the small figure climbing stairs, the numbers 999. I had chosen these marks thinking they made me free. But freedom is not refusal of constraint. It is the capacity to carry what you choose. She saw this before I did. If I want to honour what she saw in me, I must become someone I have not yet met, someone who carries his own weight, someone whose integrity does not depend on another's faith.

Vision: Foundations and Forward Motion

I sometimes ask myself:
What if I had no money?
No parents?
Had I not been born in Japan?

Where does personal choice end—and structure begin?
How much of what we call effort depends on scaffolds we didn’t build: luck, birth, geography?

The boundary is thinner than we admit.

And with quiet clarity, I know:
Had those supports not been there, there would have been no chapter called Awakening.
No second chance.
No rebuilding.

What feels ordinary to me now could easily have been out of reach.
That realisation doesn’t breed guilt. It creates responsibility.
Once you’ve seen the hidden structure behind your progress, it’s harder to pretend it was all merit.

I don’t write to dramatise pain or posture success.
I write to hold onto one truth:
No nation, no system, no memory is final.
Even foundations can be questioned—and sometimes, must be.

What I’ve learned is simple but difficult:
Those who’ve never tried often laugh at those who do.
But the builder, the founder, the runner—they recognise beginnings.
That mindset saved me.

I believe in constrained determinism:
That we are shaped by circumstance.
But also in free will:
That within limits, intention still matters.

That’s not a philosophy—it’s lived experience.
The freedom I’ve used came from scaffolds I didn’t build.
That makes me ask: what do we preserve? What do we rebuild?

That’s why I turn first to finance—not for profit, but for perspective.
Investment banking reveals how systems move.
How capital becomes policy.
How decisions cross borders.

If I want to remake institutions, I need to understand them from within.

Japan still prizes seniority over initiative.
But some firms—like Uniqlo and Mercari—have tried age-neutral titles and flattened teams.
The change is there, but shallow.
Culture resists quiet revolution.

Finance, though, is not my end point.
Politics is where structure meets intention.
I want to study governance, behavioural economics, and institutional design—
Not to theorise, but to build systems that serve human capacity, not suppress it.

This begins with study.
Is tested in action.
And is measured not in words, but in what I construct—with clarity, care, and consequence.

Systems should not exist to be obeyed—but to serve.
Structures should not protect power—but protect what is human.

Before I knew how to shape experience into essays, there was this.
A text I wrote at eighteen, alone in a small room in Okinawa—not to impress, not to explain, but simply to place a marker in time. I posted it on Instagram, not from confidence, but from a need to say: I’m here. I’m trying.

It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t complete. But it was honest.
And in its rawness, something began.

It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t complete. But it was true.
This was the first time I tried to write not just what happened—but what I felt unfolding.　Now, I include it not because it's finished, but because it began something.

”I came to Okinawa. For many reasons.

One reason is that I thought it was cool that people were making an effort without anyone's help. If I get sloppy, I will lose my future. I am taking a huge risk. There is No way out. No money, No way to buy anything? No money to go to university?No good working conditions at work? I don't think it matters. I think it's cool that people make an effort without using lack of money as an excuse and without complaining to society. I think you should improve yourself.

I don't know why I live my life. My parents definitely get in the way of my life, using words like common sense. He has used words like common sense to oppose me leaving high school and going to Okinawa, he has crushed my potential and denied me that I can decide my own life. I think that he is dumb and bad person. At the same time I have caused a lot of problems for my family. But I know that he brought me up and taught me many important things. He told me that if I wanted to study or study abroad, he would give me all the money. But for many reason, I refused all financial support from my parents. And I would not let other person interfere in my life. I decided to take care of myself.　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　I ignored what my family said, quit high school and came to Okinawa. That is why my family disowned me3/6 I was conflicted about whether to prioritise my life or my family. I don't know which is right, but I quit high school or came to Okinawa.

I don't think now that family, owning things, being admired, etc. are my happiness. So I'm not myself and I don't know what makes me happy. So I don't want to think about such weird things and I don't think I can say that I don't know the purpose of life when I'm not trying, when I'm not achieving anything.

Another thing, I think people in all professions should be respected. That was influenced by Professor Michael Sandel. How can rich people understand how poor people feel? I don't think I can understand the feelings and hardships of poor people if I haven't experienced them. I would have liked to have experienced the kind of work that the world looks down on cleaners, dishwashers, that kind of work. We must not forget that they are the reason we are able 14/6 live. I would probably go to university, which is my dream, and contribute to society by doing a job that I like, something to do with economics, philosophy, politics, etc. A lot of people look down on dishwashers and cleaners, but I've been in those jobs, so I wouldn't look down on them.

One last thing, I just love Okinawa. The food in Okinawa, the nature in Okinawa, the sea, the people in Okinawa, the atmosphere, the diversity, everything is great. When I look back on my life in the future, I will be proud to have lived here.

I feel like I am loved by so many people here, people who talk to me about life, who are kind to me like I am their child, who are always cracking jokes with me. I have had the chance to talk to people of many nationalities, people born and raised. And I have heard so much of life here. I have learnt so much here.

Okinawa is like home for me.

I have many people at work and people I have met who support my dreams and I will do my best not to worry them and to grow myself. I hope one day I will be able to meet family members, friends, teachers and important person. I hope in the future I can help people in real need, because I have struggled. Of course I can help people in all professions. Of course I prefer being the child of poor parents to the child of rich parents. That's why I refused financial support from my rich grandparents and parents. I would rather be poor than spend my parents' money, not work hard and not struggle. But some people can't help themselves. So particularly I would like to help that kind of person in the future. And I think education is responsible for the bad aspects of today's society. I hope I can improve that aspect too.

I think the reason why I have good relationships in every environment is because of my humility and my communication skills and humanity. I don't want people to think I'm smart and I don't think I am. Nobody in the real world knows this side of me. On the other hand, I don't think I am as good person with a lot of people as I am now if I talk about dreams all the time or if I talk about stuffy things. So I would never say any of these things in real life, but I thought I would write here how I feel now.

So that one day when I look back at the past, or when I lose more of myself, I can remember.”

I can now read this without flinching.
I don’t try to edit what I felt, or how I tried to express it. I see someone uncertain but sincere—trying to grow before even knowing what growth meant.

That, too, is part of the path.
Not clarity. Not certainty.
But showing up anyway.