Hong Kong Started Me. Singapore Radicalised Me. Tokyo Completed Me.
Hong Kong started me. Singapore radicalised me. Tokyo completed me.
That’s the short version. Here’s the longer one.
How It Started
I was a kid in Hong Kong. Learned the MTR quickly, the way kids do when the system is actually intuitive. Something clicked that I didn’t have a name for yet.
Years later, as an adult, I went to Singapore. I looked into moving there seriously. Good tech scene, clean city, English-speaking, genuinely excellent transit.
Tokyo kept calling in a way Singapore never did. I can’t fully explain that. I’ve tried. The best I can say is that Singapore felt like a great place to live, and Tokyo felt like a place I needed to understand.
There’s a difference.
Why Tokyo Transit Specifically
JR East publishes an annual punctuality report. In 2023, average delays across their urban network were 0.9 minutes.
Melbourne defines “on time” as anything within 5.5 minutes of schedule.
That’s not a culture gap. That’s a policy and investment outcome. And I’ve spent about 14 years now trying to understand how you get from one to the other.
I wrote 4,000 words about Melbourne’s West Gate Tunnel while everyone else was enjoying the Discovery Day event. Not because I was angry (I was a bit angry), but because that’s genuinely just how I process cities.
The data side matters too. Suica and PASMO generate origin-destination matrices that Melbourne’s Myki can only dream about. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government actually publishes usable open transit data. I’ve been doing transit analysis in Melbourne working around what’s publicly available. In Tokyo, the data infrastructure exists to do it properly.
I want to be where the problem is actually tractable.
The Language, Which Is Complicated
Japanese wasn’t my first choice. It was circumstance.
My first secondary school offered Chinese and Russian. Halfway through Year 7 the school closed (yes, that happened) and I was transferred to a school in another town. That school offered Japanese and Italian. I joined in Semester 2, which meant I only got Japanese. Never did Italian.
It was love at first あ.
I studied through to Year 10. Straight 100s the entire time, not because I’m particularly gifted at languages but because I cared about it a lot. Year 11 I moved to a school that didn’t offer languages at all and I fell out of it. Not because I hated it. Just circumstances again.
I picked it back up a few years ago.
My Japanese is a bit weird. No formal JLPT certification. I can read hiragana and katakana fluently and handle a fair amount of kanji. Conversations are harder. I’d put myself at around N4.75 by my own honest assessment (N5 on a bad day, somewhere in the low N4 range when I’m in the zone). I know exactly what I don’t know, which is most of the useful stuff.
The culture, food, anime, urbanism. I’ve always wanted to go. That changes in September.
What I’m Doing About It
My Findy Skills Share profile is there because Japanese recruiters use Findy. It shows actual code, actual contributions, actual technical level, verified by their platform. That’s more honest than a resume line.
If you’re a Japanese recruiter reading this: I’m not pretending to be fluent. I’m telling you exactly where I am and why the motivation is real, not opportunistic.
14 years of caring about this stuff is a real thing. September is a real thing.
東京で働きたいです。
Reach out at mail@finneh.xyz or check the Findy profile.