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Do you think that her parents might have the contact info for her doctors? Could you try them? How is your relationship with them... could you all get together and have an intervention of sorts?
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We have a pretty good relationship despite the language difficulties. They've been really great to us. Like I said in the last post, I'm going to talk to them tomorrow if she stays the same, see if they can help me set up a meeting with the doctor.
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Are you American, is that why you're looking at coming to America in a few years (and don't write Japanese well)? I'm having trouble imagining that moving to America would improve your wife's condition... she'd be far from her family (that it seems like she depends on) and home. It seems like she could get worse? (And good mental health care isn't a given... I'm still struggling to find a good therapist for myself... it's not easy, and not cheap!)
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Yes, I'm American. Better mental health care is just one of the reasons I want to take her to America. There are other reasons as well. At the moment, I'm working a number of part-time jobs, many of them I do not enjoy doing at all. My income from online work is slowly starting to grow. I'm a self-published author and that money paid through Amazon is reported to the IRS as taxable income. And being an American citizen, I get taxed regardless of where in the world I live. This is starting to create an increasingly confusing taxation system since I also have to pay taxes in Japan and am now starting to run the risk of being double-taxed. Moving to the States would give me more opportunities to expand my business as well as find new avenues for work.
As the taxation becomes more and more complicated, there's also the question of how we deal with that. My mother-in-law basically does all our tax returns for us but she won't be around forever and once she dies, my wife has no idea how to do it and my Japanese isn't good enough to navigate these extremely difficult documents.
There's also just the stress of daily life. My wife is fluent in Japanese and English but my Japanese is basically just conversational. It really restricts my ability to advance in employment and as I'm pretty much working around the clock right now, I have very little time to improve my Japanese ability.
Another concern is retirement. Japanese pension plans are a total joke and it's only going to get worse with the aging population. The Japanese Supreme Court also recently ruled that an elderly foreign permanent resident who had paid taxes all her life wasn't eligible for welfare services. As the population ages and more strain is put on the pension system, I'm afraid of a very likely possibility where that precedent will be applied to pension payouts as well.
At least in the States, I speak the language, I know how the systems work (and if not, I can easily learn), I have better opportunities to make more money, and I can take care of things. Here, I'm dependent on my wife who is not really in a position to be depended on.
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How does she feel about the time that she spent in the hospital? Have you tried talking to her about going back voluntarily? Does she recognize how bad it's gotten?
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It wasn't something she wants to repeat. She recognizes how bad it's gotten, she just doesn't care. She refuses to lift a finger to do anything. Whenever I ask her about doing anything to help herself, she just says she's tired of trying, nothing will ever change, and she just wants to die.