I’m ready to tell the world about my Reiwa 7 Resolutions–like New Year’s Resolutions, but quirkier because they start on April 1st. Although it’s almost the end of April by now… Just like last year, the past couple months have been rough to my schedule. As you may have noticed.
I have three Reiwa 7 resolutions this year, starting from April 2025 and ending in March 2026. Three resolutions that could change the course of my life, because holy crap my life has to change.
It’s been a year, so let’s check back on the final result for my Reiwa 6 Resolutions–remember those? I sure do. I even made a halfway report last November.
I’ll briefly sum up these three resolutions…
- Become a real-deal employee in Japan.
- I didn’t accomplish this at all. In fact, pretty quickly into the year, I pivoted directly into Yuri Kissaten and never looked back. I got pretty close to a life-changing tenure-trackteaching position, but after two rounds of interview I started to realize that I just don’t want that kind of a life long-term. I could do five more years of teaching with a stable income, but not ten, not twenty.
- Sadly, I failed the JLPT N2 yet again–the reading section is the only thing preventing me, because I don’t read fast enough. I hope to take it in December 2025, pending my game stuff.
- I even spent a month looking into moving to other countries, like Taiwan or Thailand which have better conditions for English teaching and better for LGBTQ+ life, or countries with remote work visas or 12-month tourist visas. But nothing measured up.
- At my current job, we tried extremely hard to improve our working conditions, but nothing has come of it so far. Our conditions actually got worse.
- Trying for this goal did more to make me realize my own life ambitions than anything else. I want to level up my professional skills in so many areas, but all those areas are ones that I hope will help me in art and business–all roads end there in my heart.
- Become a more well-known author.
- I got my first article published!
- I published my first professional game!
- I finished my first game jam game!
- I read quite a few books on my awesome Kobo! Although not enough to become the voracious reader I know lurks inside my heart.
- Basically, I accomplished all my goals for becoming a better writer in Reiwa 6. And I didn’t even have to write that Really Big Story I was threatening last year.
- Get a social life.
- This one is kind of a wash…
- I didn’t pick up any new social hobbies, and I didn’t get into any relationship, but I did significantly flesh out my time in Kyoto. Made friends at lesbian bars, went to cool events, organized meetups… I don’t have a ton of friends in the Kansai area still, and very few Japanese friends I talk to on a weekly basis, but it’s not the pits of loneliness at all.
- Plus, I traveled the U.S. for six weeks and got to meet up with so many families and friends and met lots of cool queer people especially in New York.
I think I did a pretty good job in Reiwa 6, although I wish I did better at each individual one. I think I qualify, in an absolute sense, of being “awesome as hell” last year.
But for Reiwa 7 resolutions…
This is the year where my life must change.
My current job is bad, bad, bad. Despite some incredible effort to improve our working conditions, things have only gotten worse, because private dispatch English teaching is a collapsing industry and the wider world is not yet aware of just how far it’s gone. After peaking in Reiwa 4 (2021-2022), my salary has decreased for the third consecutive year, despite great work evaluations, despite vastly increased experience, despite moving across the country twice at my own expense and falling deep, deep into debt as a result.
I have to get out of this. To the best of my ability, I am going to make Yuri Kissaten a full-time endeavor by March 2026. I’ll keep fighting for my rights and for the rights of future English teachers in Japan, but I am going in assuming that this is the end for me. I talked about this in greater detail in the latest Yuri Kissaten bonus update.
Yuri Kissaten WILL succeed. It’s just a matter of how far we can make it happen by March 2026. Will I eke out an existence and struggle with work visa stuff, or can I actually pull off this major life shift in a nice way?
I don’t know, so that’s not part of my Reiwa 7 resolutions. Instead, my three resolutions will play a supporting role in helping to make that happen.
Reiwa 7 Resolutions 1: Live a healthy year.
My physical and mental health seem mostly fine compared to a year ago, but I suspect they have both declined a little bit, and they weren’t great to begin with. I’m not getting sick especially frequently, and I’m not lying in bed depressed, but I’ve been bombarded with stress, and I’ve definitely gained noticeable weight since last year.
So I really need to change my lifestyle. Luckily, I just moved to a great part of Kyoto where walking is easy, where the local 24/7 gym is very close, where cheap groceries are plentiful, and I’ve gotten a nice system down with my Instant Pot for slow cooking and pressure cooking healthy meals. Unluckily, my walk home from the station goes across over fifty restaurants, convenience stores, yummy sweets shops, and izakayas/bars, and I have to constantly ignore all of that.
My overall tangible goal is this: lose weight and reach below 80 kg (176 lbs), a weight I haven’t been since high school. Obviously, weight itself isn’t the most important thing, but it’s the concrete goal where “live a healthier lifestyle overall” is frustratingly vague and “go to the gym 5 times a week” is an inevitable failure.
I’m going to reach this by:
- Going to the gym much more often–I used to go very frequently but lost the plot after job switching nonsense, and I just moved so I haven’t been able to get back into a new groove. a gym is now so close to my house that I have no real excuse! In winter, taking showers at the gym will even save me a bunch of money on my electric bill. I want to rebuild the habit.
- Get good at meal prep and tracking my nutrition–I’ve done calorie counting for months at a time, but I always inevitably fall off after getting way too obsessive about the exact amounts and fudging numbers a little bit to stay under the calorie goal. Then when I inevitably forget about it for a day or two, I end up fully falling off.
- How do I fix that last part? I don’t know yet. But I want to at least get so good at meal prepping quality stuff that I don’t have to specifically write it all down.
- Eat out just once a week (aside from dates.)
- Last year I ate fast food a good 3 times a week, and ate convenience store snacks about as often. That was expensive, unhealthy, and not even particularly tasty, honestly. But it became a habit. Since I moved to a new home and new working location in April, I’ve actually mostly avoided fast food or any restaurants, but with so many restaurants around me, I’ll have to keep up that shield.
- Once a week is because I do WANT to eat food in this area of Kyoto around me, to experience the town and try a bunch of new places. If I totally avoid it the whole year, that’ll just be sad.
Reiwa 7 Resolutions 2: Live a cheap life.
My salary has been cut by 30,000 yen a month, starting with my May paycheck. I’m not shy about that fact. I really enjoy my job; it’s rewarding work that isn’t particularly challenging, but I definitely cannot survive a full year like this at my 2024 living rate.
I’m saddled with crippling debt back in the U.S. Being forced to move cross-country twice in six months at my own expense ruined me. Moving again at the end of March also ruined me–I did it because I thought I could be closer to my working location, but then I was suddenly moved to a different working location and my old place would have been much cheaper :’) All this while the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and Japanese yen has been horrible since spring 2022. It’s rebalanced rapidly since a certain event happened in January 2025, but it’s still at 140 yen to $1.00, compared to 105 yen to $1.00 in January 2022.
I haven’t been able to pay off my U.S. debts these past three years, and… I’m not actually sure if I can make a huge dent this year, either. Sigh. Yuri Kissaten takes precedence. I’m not maxing out all my credit cards or anything, so it’s not the end of the world yet. But it will get that way if I don’t be careful.
After my take-home pay and after rent/bills, I’ll have around $800-850 USD a month… or around $10,000 USD in a year–not counting Yuri Kissaten at all, because I have no idea how that will go yet. So across debt, food, non-work transit, entertainment, and other life expenses, I got about that much to spend…
So I’d at least like to pay down net $6000 USD in debt–a net decrease, so that’s after the inevitable spending I’ll have to do for Yuri Kissaten I know is coming up. That means I have to be VERY CHEAP THESE NEXT TWELVE MONTHS. My food expenses alone in Reiwa 6 probably exceeded $4000 USD, after all.
I’ll accomplish this by:
- Stop eating out except once a week.
- We just discussed that. Don’t be spending 5000 yen on a single afternoon with lunch and dinner and snacks. Try not to even spend 3000 yen on a date. Probably don’t even go out on many dates…
- Avoid money sinks.
- Cancel subscriptions–I don’t have many. Don’t buy new tech–especially not the Switch 2. If anything important breaks like my smartphone or desktop PC or Kobo e-reader, that’s tough; replace it with the cheapest possible option, rather than my usual method of buying the absolute newest longest-lasting thing (which is usually the best method by far, but I don’t have the money for that this year).
- Track expenses.
- I am not good with money. Obviously. But just taking a photo of every receipt I get and then filing it somewhere is going to massively help me in the long run. It’s at least good training for when Yuri Kissaten business expenses become an actual thing I care about.
Again, this is all ignoring Yuri Kissaten, because any money I get there is basically going right back into the company, and into my path to getting a full-time business manager visa in Japan next year. Lawyers aren’t cheap, and neither is making 5+ games simultaneously. (2026 is gonna be amazing though)
Reiwa 7 Resolutions 3: Finish 60 incomplete things.
I have this large undercurrent of anxiety in my life about all the endless things I’ve left unfinished. So many TV shows I didn’t get through, so many recommendations from friends stuck on a media queue I forget to look at, so many stories I wanted to make. I want to embrace positive productivity in everything, not just writing, so that’s where this one comes in.
This winter vacation, I ended up finishing Seinfeld, Dragon Ball (original), and the Famidaily Youtube series, three extremely long series that took me 7 years, 3 years, and 4 months to get through, respectively. It felt great to finally finish these! I have this horrible guilt and anxiety about leaving stuff in the middle–it’s silly and I’m sure it’s a part of my brain I need to expel through mindfulness, but it’s also a feeling I can help expel by actually finishing stuff!
So, I want to finish 60 things, just over one thing a week, for the most difficult of my Reiwa 7 resolutions. That includes…
- TV shows I didn’t finish.
- Comic runs I didn’t finish.
- Director filmographies I got most of the way through.
- Short stories I haven’t completed.
- PC megafolders I haven’t organized in years.
- Online courses I bought and never started.
- All those hundreds of Steam games I bought and never touched.
- All those heavy recommendations from friends I never got around to.
- All my friends’ books I didn’t get all the way through.
There’s so, so, so, so much to do.
Reiwa 7 feels like a door that’s rapidly closing. The past eight years of my life since I returned from study abroad, since I finished university, since I started Quinlan Circle, since I moved to Japan permanently, since I transitioned to many different stages of life… This story arc is concluding, and we’re approaching the season finale. So before that door closes, I’d like to go back and tie up as many loose ends as I can.
I actually think it’d be fun to blog about this stuff. Every time I finish a thing, I’ll do a short write-up about it. Potentially I’ll do it on Bluesky first and post here later, but I may write it all here first instead. We’ll see. Big or small, though, I want to finish more things.
Conclusion
For the seventh year of the new Emperor, I’m going to improve my strength as a no-longer-young adult.
