My Deaf Experience in Japan | TokyoDev

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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<br>Communicating

Accommodations in the workplace

Social life

Finances

Advocating for yourself

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.

In fact, the main reason I got interested in Japan and Japanese was because a friend pointed out that Japanese anime and TV shows basically had a 100% chance of having subtitles.

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.

Deafness is not only about volume. There are many aspects to sound and auditory processing that determine whether speech is intelligible. The obvious answer to many people is “Just make it louder!” Unfortunately, that often doesn’t help, as many people may be missing hearing in specific frequencies, or may not have the ability to process those sounds into speech. This was the case for me.

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...