TimTime JP

When I told people I was moving to Tokyo they got excited. When I told them I’d found a place in Omiya they nodded politely in a way that made it very clear they had no idea where that was. Neither did I really. It was affordable, it was on the train map, and the photos looked fine. How different could it be?

Pretty different as it turns out.

Omiya is in Saitama Prefecture which for context is not Tokyo. It is near Tokyo in the same way that being near the ocean means you can technically smell it on a good day. It has its own energy, its own rhythm, and its own very large train station that I got lost in no fewer than four times in the first two weeks. The Omiya station is one of those Japanese train stations that feels less like a transit hub and more like a small city that someone happened to put a roof over. Multiple floors, multiple exits, multiple times I walked out the wrong side and stood on an unfamiliar street wondering where my life had gone.

The thing about living in Saitama when you’ve told everyone you’re living in Tokyo is that every time you take the train into the city you feel like a bit of a fraud. You’re commuting into Tokyo. You’re visiting Tokyo. But you go home to Saitama at the end of the day like a secret you haven’t quite figured out how to tell people.

That said Omiya had things going for it that I genuinely didn’t expect. It was quieter in a way that actually helped during those first disorientating weeks when everything was new and overstimulating. The local shotengai — the covered shopping street near the station — had everything I needed within walking distance. My neighbourhood konbini staff started recognising me within about ten days which felt like a genuine social win given my Japanese at that point was limited to thank you, excuse me and the numbers one through ten with varying levels of confidence.

The food situation in Omiya was also considerably better than I expected from somewhere I’d mentally filed under not quite Tokyo. There was a ramen spot about eight minutes walk from my apartment that I went to so regularly in the first month that the owner started having my order ready before I sat down. I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or a sign that I had no idea how to cook in a Japanese kitchen yet. Probably both.

What first month living in a new country actually feels like — at least in my experience across several of them — is a strange mix of exhilarating and deeply mundane at the same time. You’re doing something most people don’t do, living somewhere genuinely foreign, navigating a completely different system. And then you also need to figure out which bin is for burnables and which is for non-burnables and what exactly counts as a burnable and whether you’ve been doing it wrong for three weeks and if your neighbours have noticed and are just too polite to say anything. Which in Japan they absolutely are.

The bin system was genuinely one of the more stressful parts of the first month and I say that as someone who moved internationally with two suitcases and a one way ticket. The colour coded bags, the specific collection days, the neighbourhood notice board with the schedule written entirely in kanji I couldn’t read yet — it was a whole thing. I photocopied the schedule, ran it through Google Translate, made a calendar reminder and still managed to put the wrong bag out twice. Nobody said anything. Japan is incredibly polite about the ways you are failing quietly in public.

By the end of that first month I had a functioning routine, a ramen spot, a konbini team who knew my face, and a slowly improving relationship with the bin schedule. I still wasn’t living in Tokyo exactly but I was living somewhere real, which turned out to be exactly what I needed before the city was ready to take me seriously.

Tokyo came later. Omiya was the warm up act and honestly a pretty good one.