When reality bites

Unqualified, unemployable, and TOO OLD?!

September/October 2024

I was on a mission: get a job!

With our prayers answered, Shujin was now released from his managerial role at the aged-care centre. He had left it in the very capable hands of his business-minded cousin, but it had not come without hardship. Shujin had originally offered to stay on for 2 months to help out, but he barely lasted one.

During these times it’s easy to question God, Why did you let that happen to me?

Why couldn’t God have given us smooth sailing?!

I mean, You miraculously provided the much needed solution to our seemingly impossible-to-solve problem, surely it could have been delivered without tears?!

We didn’t get an answer to the unspoken questions, but one thing was for certain, the storm really cemented the fact that Shujin would never return to the aged-care centre. The cousin had hoped that, once the finances were on track and he had the place running well, that he could hand the reigns back over to Shujin. But the bridge had been well and truly burnt. Shujin would never return. And I felt that that was somehow part of the plan. God was re-directing him onto other things. It was time for a new path.

And I thought that path might be switching roles. Shujin needed a good break. It was time for me to be the breadwinner and let Shujin be a househusband for awhile.

Not being able to speak Japanese, and living in rural Japan made it very difficult for me to get work locally. So I had started applying for remote positions in Australia. I spent several weeks diligently writing cover letters, tweaking my resume for each new position, and applying for jobs. My inbox was regularly assaulted with emails from Seek:

“Your job application was successful—”

The subject line was cut off and I had to open the email to read the rest:

“—successfully submitted.”

Oh. Thanks.

The “Successfully Submitted” emails flowed in and then one day there was a different one.

“Hi Debbie, the job you applied for has closed.”

The email continued on with reassurance that my application was received by the employer and I may hear back from them. After a sales-pitch to encourage me to apply for more jobs, the email then provided some facts about the job I’d applied for.

• Role

• Employer

• Location

• Salary

• Date I applied

• Application Insights

The Application Insights provided the number of candidates who applied for the job: 1,492.

One Thousand, four hundred and ninety two people applied for this ONE position! I’m not even kidding. See the screenshot above! (Pity the poor person scanning all those applications!)

And that’s when reality hit.

I had no job and I would not be getting a job.

For this one job alone, I was competing against 1,491 applicants. (All the other positions I applied for weren’t so popular, but most still had hundreds of applicants. For ONE position!)

Yes, reality really hit and I realised that getting an online job bookkeeping for an Australian business was almost impossible when I had outdated experience (20yrs old!), wasn’t even properly qualified for bookkeeping (ouch) AND I wasn’t even living in the same country! Of course I was at the bottom of their list of candidates!

It was a nice dream with good intentions, but unless God provided a miracle, I knew it was not gonna happen! I stopped wasting my time applying for jobs.

When Shujin and I had both lost our jobs during covid, we had simultaneously been thrown into limbo. What to do? I felt like we had come to the end of the road with no fork, just the end, and there before us stood a vast open field. We could go anywhere we wanted!

Once again, we stood at the end of the road facing the vast open field. What to do?

Perhaps we should take the opportunity to return to Australia… Having gone through the whole visa process for myself and Missy to enter Japan, we discovered there’s more ways of acquiring a visa than immigrating up-front. One of the reasons we moved to Japan was because of the difficultly of getting Okasan to Australia. But perhaps it would be possible to take Okasan to Australia with us after all… We’d had our fun in Japan (well, at least the kids and I had!), maybe it was time to go home…?

I had been dreaming of remote work but that didn’t look like it was going to lead anywhere.

Shujin had, however, started dreaming his own dreams of opening some sort of cafe. He’d almost lived that dream in Australia but it was snatched away when his father died unexpectedly and we moved to Japan to care for his mum, Okasan. Shujin was still passionate about cooking and hospitality and perhaps this could be a good opportunity to pursue the dream once more.

We started talking locations, menus, decor, opening times, and all sorts of possibilities. Nothing happens quickly of course and so, in the meantime, Shujin had put in a claim for income protection insurance at Hellowork.

Hellowork, from what I understood, was a really great scheme to help people get back into the workforce. By signing up with Hellowork, Shujin would get up to three months of payments at 80% of his previous wage. (So it is anticipated that you’ll be able to find another job within three months). But in order to claim the payments, one had to register into their system and jump through their hoops. Part of that was providing your resume, having an interview with one of their recruitment agents, applying for jobs, AND accepting a job offer when it was made to you. Fair enough.

There were incentives too. Bonuses. The sooner you got a new job, the larger the bonus would be. And after completing a certain amount of time in your new job, you received another bonus.

This sounded like such a great system, Australia could really take a page or two from Japan’s books!

The morning came for Shujin to have a Zoom interview with the recruitment agent. Wearing a nice business shirt and fixing his hair, Shujin looked great from the waist up!

The interview, however, didn’t leave Shujin feeling hopeful at all. He was told he was too old. Already in his forties, companies wanted young people they could train and mould. He was too old to get a job with the sort of pay he was looking for.

He had a double degree from Australia, but these qualifications meant next to nothing in Japan. The only asset he had was his English skills. But we weren’t in Tokyo or any of the other large international cities. We lived in rural Japan. The demand for English was virtually non-existent.

And just like that, we both found ourselves (in a foreign country), unqualified and unemployable. And too old!

Australia was looking even more attractive now!

If Shujin had low self-confidence from failing to save the financially crumbling aged-care centre, and then the intense verbal put-downs from his cousin, that would have been bad enough. But now his (un)employable reality added insult to injury.

While Shujin wanted to wallow in depression, I refused to believe it.

“It doesn’t matter what the agent says. If God got you out of the aged-care centre, then He has other plans for you. He’ll give you another job or opportunity.”

Not leaving us with much hope, Shujin did a little job hunting and applied for some jobs, but rather than put energy into that, we set our focus on a cafe.

We had visited a local michinoeki (road station — think “artisan farmer’s market”) several months back and for the first time, I’d gone upstairs and had noticed some vacant space. I’d kept the knowledge in the back of my mind and now was the time to share the info with Shujin.

If we could rent out this abandoned cafe, it would be a perfect location! Located on a main road, the michinoeki was very popular and attracted many customers. We could not only sell to customers that came into our cafe, but we could also make and package goods and sell them downstairs in the michinoeki. And if there was a plandemic part II, we could continue to do online business, making goods in the commercially approved kitchen and sell them online!

The michinoeki was only open during business hours, meaning that we would be closing shop by 5pm. This just added to the list of pro’s for me as it would help to curb my husband’s workaholic tendencies!

The whole scenario just felt so perfect!

The more we discussed and thought about it, the more excited we became. It was time to get serious. We checked our busy schedules (tomorrow: free; the next day: free; the day after tomorrow: free; …for the rest of eternity: currently free!) and made plans to visit the michinoeki to set our dreams in motion!

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It’s confession time. I made a mistake about the Bible story and the man from Macedonia. Peter isn’t in that story at all. It was actually Paul. Sorry for misleading anyone! And thanks to my faithful reader who picked up my error: Shujin xoxo. Love you Babe!