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People with disabilities are not often visible in Japanese society for a variety of reasons. It’s extremely rare to meet people with deafness in a workplace.
I once asked my doctor at a major Japanese hospital how many of his patients over the decades have been able to join a mainstream workplace and lead successful, independent lives. His answer was a sigh—he couldn’t think of any.
I would be surprised if you found ten long-term international residents with deafness all in the same place, but if you gathered us and asked us what it’s like to be deaf in Japan, you’d likely get ten different answers.
This is my experience.
- I am deaf, not Deaf
- How did I make it to Japan?
- Living and working in Japan while deaf
- Choosing a silent daily life for myself
I am deaf, not Deaf
I want to make it clear that I am not Deaf. People who identify as capital-D “Deaf” come from a culture and community that is often based around sign language and a shared experience that I have never been a part of.
However, I am a small-D “deaf” person who has had a “mainstreamed” experience in the hearing world from birth. This was generally by my own choice and is why I do not consider myself to be Deaf.
Mechanically, what does this mean? I have profound hearing loss. If I’m out and about without my cochlear implant processor, and a car honks its horn immediately behind me, I will not be able to hear it. However, I’ll still react to it, because at that distance, I can feel those loud sounds on the hairs of my arms and inside my body.
What about legally? In Japan, I have a Type 1 disability certificate, which recognizes that I have a disability that significantly impacts my life and interactions.
How did I make it to Japan?
You may be wondering, “If you’re that deaf, how did you manage to learn Japanese and move to Japan?”
Short answer
Short answer: It was tough! People remark on how fluent my Japanese is, but I’ve been here for 20 years.
I also have mechanical assistance, a lot of rehabilitation, and a plethora of excellent coping and masking behaviors, to the point where people will often say things like “I had no idea you were deaf,” or “I thought that thing on your head was just a Bluetooth thing!”
Long answer
The long answer is more complex. I was lucky that my hearing loss suddenly started with no discernible cause when I was about two; it was late enough that I had already started to pick up speech, which is why I can generally speak without the stereotypical tone associated with deafness.
By the time I was five, I relied completely on hearing aids to be able to hear anything at all. I wore hearing aids on both ears and thought I got along fine, but in hindsight, it was a struggle. Things like movies and TV were useless to me since neither closed captioning nor subtitles were as ubiquitous then as they are now. This actually influenced what I grew up watching. Some popular shows, such as Friends, didn’t consistently have closed captions, but other shows, like Star Trek: The Next Generation, were all but guaranteed to have closed captions.
I also didn’t get into music culture when I was a kid. A lot of kids immersed themselves in music via tapes, CDs, or radio. Since I couldn’t hear well enough to distinguish voices or lyrics, my go-to as a kid was music without vocals, like classical music, orchestral soundtracks (the Return of the Jedi Special Edition soundtrack was almost always on loop), techno like Orbital, or even Kenny G.
I was shocked when I found out much later that Kenny G is not very popular!
Before the internet, people relied on telephones to reach each other, chat, and coordinate things. This meant that I would often miss out on talking to friends outside of school unless they were online (which was rare back then, as most people didn’t have home internet!) and I often wasn’t invited to parties or other activities. I couldn’t hear well enough to use a telephone at all; the most I could pick up was some vague noise and murmurs.
My school district required everyone to take at least two years of a foreign language, and I opted for Latin out of necessity because it is a dead language that largely goes unspoken outside of most settings. In other words, my lack of hearing was a non-issue.
My cochlear implant: not perfect, but it helps
The winter before I turned 16, I opted for a cochlear implant in my left ear. This completely replaced my hearing aid with two parts: an inner part with electrodes to directly stimulate my auditory nerve, and an outer part called the “processor,” which contains a microphone, a processor to process audio from the microphone, and a transmitter to send the signal to the inner part.
The implant lets me hear lots of small sounds that I never knew existed, like the rumbles of my stomach or my shirt rubbing on my skin. Because I didn’t grow up hearing, I often can’t distinguish what those sounds are. Sometimes I actually think noise is someone talking to me, or vice versa. Another situation I often find myself in is that I hear a sound, but I don’t know how to describe it in order to ask other people about it.
One of the great ironies of my life is that I have tinnitus, but never knew what it was. Audiologists would ask if I had “ringing” in my ears, but I would think, “Hmm, no phones or bells in my head,” and say I was fine. It was only when I was well into my 30s, while talking to a friend, that I learned that the humming, beeping, and whining I hear is tinnitus.
The cochlear implant also gave me the opportunity to do things that hearing people take for granted, like study Japanese—a living language that people actually speak every day.
Living and working in Japan while deaf
Communicating
There are a lot of aspects to communicating in Japan, but it’s still mostly speech-based, whether that’s in person, on the phone, or in video calls.
Phone calls and their alternatives
Many lines of business support are exclusively available via phone calls. Ironically, when I first arrived in Japan, the fax machine—which many international residents complain is an outdated holdover from a previous century—had been helpful to me, as people would happily fax me forms and explanations.
The contractor I rely on heavily for house renovations and repairs has a manager who is willing to do all contact with me through LINE. I have chosen all of my dog trimmers on a similar basis. I almost always choose Amazon over other stores (even when it doesn’t have the best value) because they have text-based chat support that is simple to access. I’ve refused to use banks because of bad teller or manager experiences where they would insist that I make phone calls in front of them. I choose restaurants and hotels based on whether I can make reservations or requests online, and avoid ones that have only phone support.
Incoming phone calls are another problem: if I’m not expecting one, then I have to scramble to get my processor, put it on, wait around 15 seconds for it to boot, and find a quiet space. By the time I’ve done that, the caller has often already given up. This can be quite stressful when I look up the number and realize it was something like a hospital or a tax office calling me, and frustrating when it’s a delivery driver calling to say they’re coming later in the day when I had already scheduled the delivery.
In person
In-person communication is often tough nowadays as well. I rely a lot on my ability to combine context, lip cues and lip reading, and the sounds I can hear. However, post-Covid Japan has especially become a world of masks in professional settings. Add in the post-Covid plastic barriers everywhere, and I have no visual cues and also two layers blocking sound. At that point, I’m relying almost wholly on context and lucky guesses, so there’s almost no point to having my processor on at all.
This can result in some awkward situations, such as when dining with friends who speak less Japanese than I. Waiters will often gravitate toward me as the most Japanese-looking person, but in reality, the odds are that I can’t hear them clearly. This means I have to redirect the waiter to my companion, who can actually hear the waiter, even though they may speak less Japanese. Or perhaps the waiter insists on approaching me from my right side, where I’m completely deaf and can’t hear a thing at all—I’ve occasionally been taken by surprise and scared out of my wits by suddenly realizing there was someone leaning over right by my shoulder!
It’s my responsibility to be persistent (sometimes to the point where the other person thinks I’m annoying or rude) and get the details I need to feel comfortable that I understand something. Some interactions are great, but you will always be your own best advocate.
Accommodations in the workplace
What I have found firsthand and heard from others is that Western companies and newer Japanese companies are both aware of and more comfortable with workplace accommodations and related laws. This does not mean that you cannot get accommodations in a more traditional Japanese small or medium business, but it does mean that you will likely be more responsible for providing facts and options while collaboratively advocating for your own needs.
Professional communications can be another issue; some workplaces are very phone-heavy, and others are very meeting-heavy. Additionally, some companies in Japan operate largely via email, which can be a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because everything is in writing to begin with, but a curse because you now have 5,000 emails to read every day.
Online meetings
For online meetings, I try to redirect everything to a meeting software I can control. My personal preference is Google Meet, since it’s browser-based and I know it has relatively stable support for live captions in Japanese.
Some companies will insist on Zoom or some other software, even if I point out that the captioning feature isn’t good enough for me to follow along well. This happened to me when I was looking for mortgages, and in several cases resulted in the immediate dismissal of my application, due to the bank agent not feeling comfortable with their ability to communicate with me. It has also happened to me with external contractors at work with their own requirements, and in those cases I just have to do the best I can.
A workaround, if you’re on Windows, is to use the built-in closed captioning. In many ways, the quality is better than Google Meet, so I would often use the two at the same time to get two streams of text that I could look at and decipher along with the audio to build a better “best guess” of what people were saying. However, it captions all audio from the OS and thus cannot distinguish between speakers, so it’s less helpful in a multi-person meeting where you’d want to know who said something.
These are generally simple solutions as they don’t require any action on the part of the other parties, which means they’re much more willing to accept them.
I currently work in a macOS environment and cannot use the Windows live captioning, but I make do with other solutions:
- Macwhisper has been in continuous development for years and is always improving; they recently released low-latency live captioning. It’s not currently fast enough for my purposes, but often helps in a pinch when combined with other captioning options. Its main feature is transcription, which can be amazing when you need to catch up on recordings. It runs entirely locally and is invisible to other people.
- Caption.ed does not have Japanese support, but has excellent English support, especially across different accents. Google struggles with accents and Caption.ed has been an excellent secondary resource for me. The downside is that its most useful feature requires you to add it to a meeting, which your workplace or coworkers may not want to allow.
In-person meetings
In-person meetings are also very common in Japan, and can be extremely difficult to deal with. I prefer online meetings as much as possible since I can use closed captioning tools, but in-person meetings have their own charm and many people prefer to meet in person when possible. These are some common accommodations I have been successful in asking for and receiving.
- Quiet, isolated meeting rooms: I specifically ask for this every time, as some people may assume that a cafe atmosphere is more relaxing for everyone, or that we’d be ok having one at a table in the middle of the office.
- Changing seating position: I can only hear on my left side, which means that it’s better for me to be seated on the rightmost side. I also want to sit in a place where I can view everyone’s faces for lip reading and lip cues.
Below are some accommodations that I often ask for, but without reasonable expectation that they will be granted.
- Mask removal: There are clear health and hygiene reasons why people will not want to remove their masks, and that’s absolutely fine. I only ask that people remove their masks if they feel comfortable doing so and I make it clear that it will absolutely help me understand them better.
- Hand-raising: In multi-person meetings especially, it can be difficult to know who’s speaking when the speaker suddenly changes. Hand-raising also tends to curtail interruptions, which helps me follow conversation changes. However, it’s not a common practice in Japan and invites questions of moderation and hierarchy, which can be uncomfortable in some contexts.
- Rooms without echoes: This is just a difficult one to figure out if you don’t have a set of meeting rooms that everyone’s familiar with. It’s often a case of “best effort,” and I’m absolutely fine with that.
Social life
My social life has often relied on me finding people who are comfortable meeting me on my terms, in relatively quiet places where I can hear them. For the longest time, I was extremely uncomfortable going to karaoke because—despite every song being effectively “subtitled”—it was a primarily “hearing” experience. This closed off a lot of social life options in my early 20s.
I also veer away from more physical activities as well, as I risk my processor falling off or getting damaged. While I did kendo for a number of years, I chose to do it completely deaf because I had to take off the processor to participate.
The best way for me to have a social life has been to find people who are comfortable having quiet meals together, who are willing to type stuff out and send me messages on LINE in the worst situations even if we’re sitting side by side, and who are good natured about repeating things or understanding when I’ve completely misheard something.
Dating can be tough, especially if you add in the need to explain your disability upfront. The reality is that anyone you’d want to date long-term is going to “find out” anyway, so you might as well just let them know in advance.
In terms of activities, non-Japanese movies are surprisingly good, as the English audio ones have Japanese subtitles. If you can read Japanese quickly enough, then it’s very effective for understanding what’s going on, especially in combination with views of people’s mouths, the existing audio, and context clues.
I’ve also had a lot of success in smaller organized activity groups, such as those for card or board games, which I find through social networks like Twitter and occasionally sites like Meetup.
A lot of my current Japanese social life comes from online groups, where the text-first format means my hearing is effectively never a barrier to entry. This won’t always scratch the itch for everyone though, since there’s often no face-to-face contact in Japanese online groups, and you may go years without ever learning anyone’s real name.
Finances
There’s an unseen financial aspect to my hearing that has driven my career choices my whole life. To put it bluntly, I spend around:
- 50,000 yen per year on replacement parts (cables, headpieces, etc.)
- 200,000 yen per year on special batteries that need to be replaced annually
- 200,000 yen per year in savings to replace the processor every five years or so
The company that produces my cochlear implant processor has a very strong lock-in effect: I cannot easily switch makers because of the piece that’s surgically implanted in my ear. So when the company decides to change prices, or stop producing hardware, I need to have the money to be ready.
The major cochlear implant makers, including mine, are based out of the US, so everything is imported through a Japanese pass-through company that handles customer support and proxy orders. In fact, as of the time of this writing, the lead time on me ordering a replacement battery is two to three months!
The processors do eventually break down (especially in the humidity of Japanese summers) and need repairs, so that’s something I have to budget for. However, the company itself may stop producing parts for the current processor model, so repairs or replacements have to be sourced through an unreliable stock of used devices. This clearly isn’t a great option when hearing is critical for my work.
So every five years or so, I have to upgrade to a new processor. It’s much easier to save a bit every year than it is to try to produce a million yen out of thin air.
There are also expenses for the medical care itself. Other countries often have laxer standards, but Japan differs significantly in that:
- Adjustments to the program that runs on the processor can only be applied by a doctor, in person
- Patients are required to visit the doctor for a checkup every six months
Any procedures or checkups have to be done at a hospital affiliated with the company that makes your cochlear implant hardware. For me, the best option is about a three-hour trip into Tokyo to a major hospital; this represents significant time and money spent. I only have to go twice a year if nothing goes wrong, but it is something to keep in mind if you’re thinking about moving to Japan.
Fortunately, payments for all of these things can be applied to the medical deduction on your income tax return, which can result in some savings on your taxes or some amount of money back. Every little bit helps.
Advocating for yourself
Nobody knows your situation as well as you, and nobody knows what you need as well as you do.
Often, advocating for yourself means going the extra mile and explaining your deafness time after time after time. It’s an old, tired topic to you, but new to almost everyone you’ll meet and interact with. If you can establish that context and explanation up front, it can make the interaction less frustrating for the other person: rather than “This person is annoyingly specific,” they can hopefully frame it as “This person can’t hear me and needs this kind of help.”
I find that this is very important to me as a non-Japanese person, as the other party may have assumptions that I don’t have.
Advocating for yourself also means sometimes knowing that it’s ok to be uncomfortable and asking for an accommodation, such as if a contact can reach out to you via email or text message. Often the answer will be “No,” but sometimes it will be “Yes,” and that chance of making my life easier is what pushes me to ask.
Anyone with a disability in Japan should know that Japanese law since 2016 has promoted the elimination of discrimination against people with disabilities (unofficial English translation).
Choosing a silent daily life for myself
On the face of it, having the cochlear implant seems like a miracle: hearing where there previously was none. However, it comes with tradeoffs, so many that I often choose to live life here completely deaf without using the processor, unless I know I have hearing interactions coming up, such as meetings at work or someone coming to visit.
Constantly being conscious of ambient noise and trying to understand which ones “matter” to me is very tiring. The processor itself has weight and makes my ear hurt over time when combined with my glasses, and it falls off easily—especially if I’m lying down, leaning my head back, or moving suddenly.
The headpiece of the processor sticks to the side of my head with a magnet that’s paired with the implant itself. Hair thickness, hairstyle, body fat, skull thickness, and implantation location all affect the strength of this connection. For me, this means that if my head isn’t completely shaved at that paired point, sometimes simply going down stairs makes the headpiece wobble precariously!
I can tell you that on sleepy mornings, nothing has woken me up faster than the times I’ve thought I’ve broken or lost a 1,000,000 yen medical device.
So I often find it easier and more relaxing for myself to go about my daily life deaf.
At home
I miss all kinds of auditory cues that many people take for granted!
Doorbells are an obvious one. If there’s a delivery and they want to talk to me rather than just leaving the package, then I have to rely on my dogs’ reactions to know that something happened that needs my attention. Luckily, in the last few years, smart doorbells have gotten more ubiquitous and I can keep an eye on my phone for alerts. There are also options for flashing lights, but they’re less than practical for me due to the wiring requirements, and also I would have to place the lights in multiple rooms. So I mostly rely on my phone and my dogs.
Another embarrassing issue is just missing the sheer number of beeps and melodies that come out of Japanese appliances. Once I spoiled a freezer full of food because the door was jammed slightly ajar, but I never heard it beeping.
Another time, my oven had an error that frustrated me for days until a friend pointed out that it was beeping in a specific pattern that was listed in the manual. Even if I had had my processor on, I doubt I would have picked that up.
And still many, many more times, I’ve forgotten about something in my microwave, rice cooker, or washing machine because I never heard the repeated beeps and it just slipped my mind.
Outside the house
Going about my life completely deaf can cause problems outside the house, too. Sometimes I’ll run some errands completely deaf and people will mention later that they had tried to talk to me, only to think that I was purposefully ignoring them!
This can seem doubly intentional to them since I “mask” well and they may have no awareness of me as a deaf person, or even awareness of what it means to be deaf. There’s no simple way for people to tell that I can’t hear them; even if they’re aware that I can’t hear without the cochlear implant processor, they may not know to look for it. And even if I do have it on, there’s still a high chance that I simply didn’t hear them—especially if they weren’t on my left side, where I have the processor!
I’ve had interactions where people assure me that “You can just call the help line and ask!” or assume I heard an announcement in a station, or a crucial comment in a fast-moving conversation. Those are just fundamental elements of their daily lives that they can’t imagine not existing for someone else.
When I interact with staff, such as in busy restaurants or convenience stores, it’s not much of a change for me to do so without my processor, because the background noise would have still made it extremely difficult to understand anything. At places where I’m a regular, some of the staff even remember me and have paper on hand to write down things for me.
One of the reasons it can be simple to get away without hearing is because I know Japanese, and the culture of Japanese language means it is often very formulaic.
Most convenience store interactions are scripted. I know that if I’m shipping a package, the first question is usually about what day/time I want to set the package’s arrival for. If I’m buying food, I know they’ll ask if I want to heat it, if I want chopsticks, and so on.
If I were speaking English in America, it would be much more likely that someone would ask how I’m doing, or try to make conversation, etc. I would definitely look rude, or someone could get angry at me for not responding. That’s less likely in Japan.
Weather concerns
Another reason I often choose not to wear the processor is the weather.
This also makes me avoid events such as festivals where water could be thrown around, and environments like the beach or the pool. Unless I explain everything, this can seem overblown to other people. They’ll often say things like, “What if you put it in a bag?” (then it’s safe, but I can’t hear) or “I’m sure it won’t happen!” (easy to say when you’re not gambling with your own hearing) or “Even if you can’t hear, we’ll still have fun!” (not so fun for the person who can’t participate in conversations).
Conclusion
This is my deaf experience.
I advocate for myself strongly and make a lot of choices based on how accessible something is, or how much friction my presence could cause for other parties. It’s a balancing act I have to face almost every single day here, but I would be looking at making many of the same compromises no matter where I lived.
If you’re deaf and are thinking about living in Japan, these are some good questions to consider:
- How good is my Japanese?
- Am I comfortable being uncomfortable?
- Will I advocate for myself?
Even if you answer “No” to any of these questions, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Perhaps you can learn more Japanese before coming here, or maybe there is coaching available to help you navigate difficult situations and advocate for yourself more. Maybe a good intermediary step is to visit Japan for a few weeks and see how it feels to be here. There are many ways to adapt, and accommodations you can ask for.
If you have a disability, I hope you’ve learned that things will be difficult, but not impossible.
If you do not have a disability, I hope this article has revealed aspects of daily life that you may not have thought about for people with disabilities. Many of us have to put tremendous effort into “normal” activities.
It’s definitely possible to settle in Japan with deafness—I’ve been in Japan for almost two decades at this point, and I now own a house in the countryside where I have a nice, quiet life with my two dogs.
