What I Chose to Carry

I grew up in Japan with educated parents and financial stability. The comfort was real. So was a question I could not resolve within it: whether I was capable of anything I had not been handed.

At fifteen, I transferred from a traditional high school to an online programme—uncommon in Japan, where education follows age-based cohorts along standardised paths. My father opposed the transfer. We reached accommodation: I would work part-time while completing coursework remotely.

For two years, I worked at a convenience store and studied at night, reading philosophy in the gaps—Sartre, Descartes, Camus. My grades improved.

But graduation felt like another station on a track I had not chosen. I wanted to test what I could build without the structures that had carried me. Two weeks after turning eighteen, I left.

In Okinawa, I worked at a hotel restaurant for ten months—the first time I used English as a working language.

During this period, I got a tattoo on my forearm—L'existence précède l'essence, Sartre's claim that existence precedes essence. In Japan, visible tattoos carry professional consequences. I understood this. I thought I was marking autonomy. In retrospect, I was also marking a constraint. I do not regret the decision. But I have learned what it costs.

Back in Tokyo, I applied to dozens of jobs. Several interviews ended when employers saw my arms. I took what remained: day labour, sorting mail, cleaning apartments, moving furniture.

I lived in a shared house with international housemates. One ran every morning. I joined him. The habit became discipline.

I held two jobs simultaneously. Then an opportunity appeared: a teaching position in South East Asia. I quit both jobs, ended my lease, worked fifty-four consecutive days to save. The visa was denied. At nineteen, I was too young to qualify.

I had committed fully to a path that turned out to be closed.

I moved to Osaka and found hotel work within a week. I lost it within a month when my tattoos were discovered. A second position ended the same way. Then a third.

The words I had chosen to mark self-determination were being used to exclude me from the chance to determine anything.

Money was tight. I accumulated debt. I had no plan to call home. I was working my way through this alone.

I turned to what offered relief: alcohol, nightclubs, pornography, junk food, other self-destructive patterns. For a year, I tried to stop and could not. The habits had become the structure.

Between sixteen and twenty, choosing a path no one else understood took a toll I had not anticipated. Twice during these four years, I experienced periods of depression—weeks when getting out of bed required more effort than I had.

In January, my father sent money with a short message. Two weeks later: if I was serious about studying abroad, he and my grandmother wanted to help.

I had wanted to do this alone. The arithmetic did not support it. I accepted.

Over two months, my family supported my preparation. I carry that support not as shame, but as responsibility—the kind repaid through what you build, not what you return.

On April 10, 2025, I flew to London.

London required recalibration.

I found work at a restaurant. Long hours, modest pay, real education. My colleagues came from many countries. Some held degrees that carried no weight in the UK. Engineers did the same work because their credentials had not transferred.

I became aware of what separated me from them. I had educated parents. I held a passport that opened doors others could not access. I had family support available. These differences were not personal. They were structural—built into systems I did not design but benefited from.

Two colleagues—one with a UK passport, one without—performing identical work would face different futures determined years before they entered that kitchen. Not because of merit. Because of systems designed in their absence, for purposes that did not include them.

During the day, I attended school with students from wealthier families. In the afternoon, I worked beside people for whom London was necessity, not experience. I moved between both spaces, belonging fully to neither.

The same individual—holding the same skills, exercising the same effort—can be integrated in one system and excluded in another. The difference is often not merit. It is design.

In late 2025, I left the restaurant to focus on university preparation.

I speak with my father regularly. Distance clarified what proximity had obscured. What fractured at eighteen has mended at twenty.

My tattoos remain. In professional contexts, they will need to be addressed. I chose permanence at eighteen. At twenty, I choose pragmatism.

I spent the first months of 2026 breaking patterns I had relied on for too long. By March, I had stopped.

On March 31, the University of British Columbia sent their decision.

For two years, while friends attended university, I had worked to cover rent. I had lived through poverty in Japan, dismissals over tattoos, dependence on habits that solved nothing, uncertainty about reaching university at twenty-one when others had started at eighteen.

The notification resolved it.

In September 2026, I will begin studying economics at the University of British Columbia. During my time there, I plan to study abroad in France.

What I want to understand is how institutions distribute opportunity—and how individual effort operates within those structures. Both matter: systems constrain, choices remain real within those constraints.

My plan: study economics and finance to understand how capital and policy shape outcomes. Work in finance to see how these systems function from inside. Eventually, politics. Lord Heseltine said in a lecture that he entered politics because everyone else was getting it wrong. I understood that—not from arrogance, but from watching systems fail people who didn't design them.