• Mori Nishimura, 34, grew up in New Zealand and moved to Japan at 16.
• After graduation, he began his career at real estate companies in Tokyo.
• Last year, he started his own company, which provides nature-based stays in mobile cabins in Japan.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Mori Nishimura, 34, the CEO of A Cabin Company in Japan. It's been edited for length and clarity.

I felt lost growing up. As a kid in New Zealand, I never questioned where I belonged. But as I got older, I became more aware of how different I was from my peers, which sparked my curiosity about Japan and my father's decision to leave it behind.

My father moved our family to Auckland because he wanted us to grow up surrounded by nature and away from the pressures of city life in Japan.

There weren't many Japanese families around, and I often felt caught between two cultures.

At 16, I moved to Japan by myself and enrolled in a boarding school in Kyoto. Life there was the opposite of New Zealand: Suddenly, I had curfews instead of the freedom to roam.

For the first time, I wasn't the odd one out. Two-thirds of the students were returnees — kids who had grown up abroad and come back to Japan — and they understood.

Exploring the countryside

Later, at university, I started exploring Japan. In the morning, before school started, I'd often drive out to different places and go surfing. I became fascinated with the Japanese countryside.

It reminded me of my childhood in New Zealand, when I used to escape into the woods near our house and build huts.

After graduating in 2015, I felt lost again and considered returning to New Zealand. Instead, I stayed in Tokyo and worked in real estate. A few years later, I started posting on LinkedIn about Japan's real estate market, the countryside, hospitality, and other interests. Eventually, I decided to strike out on my own.

During the pandemic, I traveled through rural Japan and reflected on what I wanted next. I came across a US company building tiny cabins on trailer chassis and saw an opportunity in Japan: fully operational accommodations that could bypass building permits and zoning laws because they were legally classified as vehicles.

I adapted the concept.

Starting a company from scratch

In 2024, I shared the idea on LinkedIn and wasn't targeting investors. Over time, though, the posts began attracting people who wanted to be part of what I was building.

A year later, when I launched a pre-seed fundraiser, investors reached out to back the business. My two full-time employees also found me through LinkedIn — the platform became an unexpected way to build both a team and a network of supporters.

The money raised from the fundraiser was used to open the first cabin in a national park in Chiba — about a two-hour train ride from central Tokyo — in August that year.

The 16-square-meter cabin is made from Japanese sugi and hinoki cedar and centered around a large picture window overlooking nature. Guests get complimentary firewood, coffee, and tea, plus bikes for rides to a nearby supermarket. It reached full occupancy within three months and has stayed booked ever since.

My second cabin opened in May, and my third will open in September.

Since the cabins are built on trailers, they are legally classified as vehicles rather than buildings.

Running a startup in Japan has been challenging because the ecosystem is still relatively new compared to those in other countries. There aren't many venture capital firms, so there aren't a lot of funding options.

The cabin costs about 30,000 Japanese yen for two guests, or about $190, a night.

So far, around 70% of our guests have been women. That came as a surprise, as I thought we'd get more solo male travelers, but we haven't had any.

Living up to my name

I didn't tell my parents when I started the business; they probably would have stopped me. When they found out, they were surprised but supportive.

My father was my biggest inspiration. About five years ago, he moved back to Japan and started looking for affordable land in the countryside where he could build a small cabin himself. But after being diagnosed with a terminal illness, he never got to see it completed. That experience gave me an even stronger sense of purpose in building the company.

He also gave me the name "Mori," which simply means "forest" in Japanese. It felt like I was born to do this.

Rebuilding my relationship with nature

My company focuses on nature, but I don't get to go out as much these days, except when I bring in guests. I work every day of the week.

Resting in Tokyo or any other big city is different because you never really switch off. I like doing campfires and having barbecues when I have the chance.

I want to enjoy my own cabin, but I can't because it's booked out.

• Laura Pollacco was struggling with depression and moved to Japan for two years to teach English.
• After returning home, she realized her career prospects and professional network were stronger in Tokyo, so she moved back.
• Now 31, working as a freelancer, and engaged, she's torn over where to build her future.

At 22, heartbroken, depressed, and unsure about my future, I craved novelty and adventure, so I packed up my life in England and moved to Japan.

Now, 31, living in Tokyo, and more secure than I've ever felt in my adult life, I can't help but feel that creeping depression, pushing me to pack my bags once more.

In my early 20s, upending my life felt exciting. Now, in my 30s, it just feels indecisive.

In 2016, I'd graduated with a degree in fashion photography and was working three part-time jobs in my university town to scrape by while simultaneously trying (and failing) to get over intense heartbreak. I was struggling.

Hobbies like theater and kung fu had lost their shine, my future felt vast and uncertain. I wanted a fresh slate.

During my personally elected studies into Japanese fashion and aesthetics, I fell in love with Japan. My dissertation was titled "The rise of gender neutrality and its origins in Japanese design." I even visited a friend studying abroad there in 2015, and that brief but fantastic sojourn left me thinking — somewhat naively — "I could live here."

A year later, in my depressed state, that thought resurfaced. Then it became all I could focus on.

I needed to move to Japan

The move wasn't completely off the cuff ー I'm not spontaneous enough for that. I applied to and was accepted into the JET Program, an organization that recruits thousands of graduates to teach English.

Rather than a traditional school placement, I was based at an education center in Kanagawa, about an hour from Tokyo, with occasional assignments at local high schools.

I threw myself into adapting: learning the rhythms of a new culture, working on my basic Japanese skills, and exploring my new environment. With every mountain climb, temple visit, and ramen bowl, I felt the blanket of depression start to fall from my shoulders.

I put myself out there once again, starting new hobbies such as MMA, kendo, and ikebana while reviving my old passions like drama. These led to new connections and opportunities. I felt reborn.

Japan had rekindled my passion for life. Feeling I'd gotten all I could from my teaching role, I decided to leave Japan with the goal of picking up where I was prior to my depressive episode.

Life back in Europe

I returned to the UK only for the pandemic to cut right across all my well-laid plans. Like most of the country, I was trapped inside, questioning my life decisions, especially about leaving Japan.

I was better connected in Tokyo's creative circles than in the UK, I had support in Japan, and the cost of living was considerably lower. I decided to move back, this time not out of depression, but out of hope and ambition.

In 2022, I returned on a working holiday visa, juggling remote freelance writing gigs with pitching to local publications. I pushed hard until, when my working holiday visa came to an end, I had enough work behind me to switch to the journalism visa in 2023.

Despite expanding my client list and gaining experience, my original fire began to flicker, then sputter, and more recently, it's felt like I'm helplessly blowing on the embers to keep them from going out. I was burned out.

Depression was setting in again. I experienced fatigue, a lack of interest in my hobbies, a desire to be left alone, all while self-flagellating my lack of ambition and for "settling" in my career.

My loving fiancé — whom I met here in Japan — was starting to worry to the point where he offered to cover the cost of online therapy. During these sessions, I realized that, for the first time since moving back to Japan, I was starting to feel homesick.

Living in a foreign country is tough

For starters, while I speak enough to get by, not speaking fluent Japanese is exhausting. As a multifaceted freelancer, immigration's restrictive boxes feel like a choking dog collar yanking me back from new opportunities, not to mention the new gray hairs I gain with every annual visa renewal.

On top of that, I've felt a rise of anti-foreigner sentiment, and Tokyo's concrete jungle is starting to feel claustrophobic and repressive.

In recent months, my brain has been flooded with ideas of returning back to the pastoral days of my youth. Stone cottages with actual gardens, walks down country paths with a dog by my side, fully understanding what's being said to me at a doctor's visit.

But I can't tell if I'm truly wanting to return to England or if I'm trying to escape back into a childhood where responsibilities were minimal.

I've worked so hard to get to and stay in Japan, I don't know whether to push through what could simply be a low period and wait to get to the other side, or whether my gut, my instinct, is trying to tell me something.

When it comes to big life choices like these, I realize I'll only find out if it was the right decision after the fact. I just hope that, whatever my partner and I choose to do, we make the best of that decision.

"H

ow long have you been living in Singapore?"

It's a question taxi drivers have been asking me since I arrived from New York nearly 20 years ago.

In the beginning, the answer was small, just a year, then two.

My husband and I had come with a two-year plan. Freshly married, we told ourselves it was an exciting chapter in our new life together. We left boxes in the basement of my sister's Brooklyn apartment, assuming we'd be back for them soon.

But as the number crept past that deadline — five years, then 10 — those boxes slowly made their way over.

These days, it's not just taxi drivers asking how long we plan to stay.

My mom comments on how far away we live, now that it includes her two grandchildren. My in-laws gently remind us of the advantages of being closer. Everyone seems to assume there's a logical next stop, a final destination that will eventually make sense of everything.

But somewhere along the way, Singapore stopped feeling like a chapter and started feeling like muscle memory. I've lost my tolerance for cold weather after years in the tropics. Back in New York, walking into someone's apartment without taking off my shoes feels strange.

Still, there are reminders that my life is split across borders. As an American, I file US taxes every year — the US is one of the few countries that require it of citizens abroad — a constant reminder that I'm living between places.

My two kids look genuinely confused when someone asks them, "Where are you from?"

As more families build lives abroad, we're not the only ones being asked that question.

In 2024, about 3.3 million Americans were living overseas — a 15% increase since 2010 — according to a Federal Voting Assistance Program estimate that pieces together tax records, Social Security data, and foreign census figures. Because Americans don't have to register when they move abroad, there's no official count.

In this series, you'll hear from others who have made homes overseas, at different ages, for different reasons, and at different stages of staying, all answering the same question in their own way: Where is home, really?