We’re Dako and Jay — a Japanese-American couple living in the United States and building toward financial independence. The honest truth about our plan? We don’t know yet where home will be after FIRE — Japan, the U.S., some mix of both — or what we want our lives to look like when work becomes optional.
This blog is where we work through those questions in public — the taxes, the paperwork, the money, and the family decisions — so that other cross-border couples don’t have to start from zero the way we did.
Who we are
Dako grew up in Japan and moved to the U.S. as an adult. She handles the research-heavy side of this blog: U.S. and Japanese tax rules, investing as a foreign national, and the fine print of systems like the exit tax and Japan’s inheritance tax. Being a native Japanese speaker means she reads the Japanese primary sources — not someone’s summary of them.
Jay is the American half of the marriage. He writes from the perspective every non-Japanese spouse eventually discovers: marrying into a Japanese family, navigating Japanese bureaucracy without the language, and figuring out what any cross-border life would mean for his own career, identity, and 401(k).
We’re raising kids between two cultures and two languages, which raises the stakes of every decision we write about. (You’ll notice we don’t share their names, faces, or details — that’s deliberate. Our privacy rule for our kids is simple: nothing they’d be unhappy to find here in ten years.)
The plan we’re still writing
Here’s where we stand: we’re roughly ten years from our FIRE target. Between now and then, every choice — which accounts we fund, whether we keep a green card, how we save for the kids — depends on questions we haven’t answered: where we’ll live, how we’ll split our time between two countries we both love, and what we actually want from the decades after full-time work. Rather than lock in an answer now, we’re preparing so that every door stays open.
Rather than pretend we have it figured out, we’re documenting the decision itself: the trade-offs, the research, the places where the two of us disagree. If you’re weighing anything similar, our working notes are yours.
What you’ll find here
- Our FIRE Journey — our decision log, in the open
- For Spouses — Jay’s guides for the non-Japanese partner
- Exit Tax & Green Card — what leaving the U.S. actually costs
- Portable Wealth — building wealth that works in both countries
- Family & Kids — money, kids, and two cultures
How we handle facts
We cite primary sources (IRS, USCIS, Japan’s National Tax Agency), date every figure that can change, and review our tax and money articles annually. We’re not professionals, and nothing on this site is personalized advice — please read our Disclaimer. Cross-border money questions almost always depend on your specific facts, so treat everything here as a starting point for a conversation with your own CPA, attorney, or advisor. That’s exactly how we use this research ourselves: when the stakes are high, we pay for professional advice.
New here? Start with our Start Here page, or say hello — we read every message.