Redesigning a life at fifty

Two countries before Japan

I was born in Poland and moved to Britain in my twenties. Nearly thirty years later, Britain is home — it's where I built my career and my life. So when people ask whether moving between countries is daunting, my honest answer is that I've already done it once. Building a life somewhere new isn't a theory to me; it's how my adult life began.

The first redesign

For years I worked as an IT manager and software developer for a British engineering company. Good career, secure, sensible. And just before I turned forty, I walked away from it. Not in crisis — in curiosity. I'd started asking a question that wouldn't leave me alone: if a life can be designed rather than defaulted into, what would I actually design?

The next decade was the research phase, although I didn't call it that at the time. I travelled — properly travelled. Around forty major trips: a month crossing Japan in a campervan, Route 66 across America twice, a dozen trips to Hawaii, and dozens of countries in between. I spent on experiences what others put into pensions. I won't pretend that was a flawless financial strategy, but I've also watched people save diligently for a retirement they never got to enjoy. There's a balance, and I chose my side of it early.

Japan, slowly

Of everywhere I went, Japan was the country that kept pulling me back. Not the neon Tokyo of the travel shows — the quiet Japan. Rural roads, small towns, onsen at night, the extraordinary ordinariness of daily life. That month in the campervan planted something: the realisation that I didn't want to keep visiting Japan. I wanted a door there with my name behind it.

The house on the hill

So at fifty, I bought one: an older house on a hillside in Kitakyushu, in the south of Japan, mortgage-free. From the bedroom window there's a view across the valley that I still stop for every single morning — if you've seen the channel, you've seen it; it's been the face of Japan House Diary since the first video.

England is home. A few times a year I make the journey out to Japan and stay for a month or two, and between visits the house waits on its hillside. Each stay it comes a little more back to life — roof, garden, rooms, and the slow pleasure of getting to know a Japanese neighbourhood one visit at a time.

What this is really about

It was never just about a cheap house. It's about whether an ordinary person, without a fortune, can deliberately design a richer life across countries — lower costs, more seasons, more texture — and what that actually takes in paperwork, money, language, and nerve. The next chapter may be Korea: the plan is to go and view properties there, and if the numbers and the feeling are right, a Korean house could join the map in the next year or two. It's a plan, not a promise — but then, that's exactly how the Japanese house started. The channel and this site are the unpolished record of the whole experiment: the numbers, the mistakes, the small victories.

I'm not doing this as an expert with it all worked out — I'm doing it in real time, and getting plenty wrong along the way. That's why the most useful part of this site isn't me: it's the forum, where people chasing the same kind of life compare notes and answer each other's questions — on buying, renovating, the paperwork, the money, and everything in between. The more of us share what we've learned, the better the map gets for whoever comes next.

If you're somewhere in the middle of your own life wondering whether the second half could be shaped differently — that's exactly who I make this for.