Redesigning a life at fifty

Two countries before Japan

I was born in Poland and moved to Britain in my twenties. Nearly thirty years later, Britain is home — it's where I built my career and my life. So when people ask whether moving between countries is daunting, my honest answer is that I've already done it once. Building a life somewhere new isn't a theory to me; it's how my adult life began.

The first redesign

For years I worked as an IT manager and software developer for a British engineering company. Good career, secure, sensible. And just before I turned forty, I walked away from it. Not in crisis — in curiosity. I'd started asking a question that wouldn't leave me alone: if a life can be designed rather than defaulted into, what would I actually design?

The next decade was the research phase, although I didn't call it that at the time. I travelled — properly travelled. Around forty major trips: a month crossing Japan in a campervan, Route 66 across America twice, a dozen trips to Hawaii, and dozens of countries in between. I spent on experiences what others put into pensions. I won't pretend that was a flawless financial strategy, but I've also watched people save diligently for a retirement they never got to enjoy. There's a balance, and I chose my side of it early.

Japan, slowly

Of everywhere I went, Japan was the country that kept pulling me back. Not the neon Tokyo of the travel shows — the quiet Japan. Rural roads, small towns, onsen at night, the extraordinary ordinariness of daily life. That month in the campervan planted something: the realisation that I didn't want to keep visiting Japan. I wanted a door there with my name behind it.

The house on the hill

So at fifty, I bought one: an older house on a hillside in Kitakyushu, in the south of Japan, mortgage-free. From the bedroom window there's a view across the valley that I still stop for every single morning — if you've seen the channel, you've seen it; it's been the face of Japan House Diary since the first video.

England is home. A few times a year I make the journey out to Japan and stay for a month or two, and between visits the house waits on its hillside. Each stay it comes a little more back to life — roof, garden, rooms, and the slow pleasure of getting to know a Japanese neighbourhood one visit at a time.

What this is really about

It was never just about a cheap house. It's about whether an ordinary person, without a fortune, can deliberately design a richer life across countries — lower costs, more seasons, more texture — and what that actually takes in paperwork, money, language, and nerve. The next chapter may be Korea: the plan is to go and view properties there, and if the numbers and the feeling are right, a Korean house could join the map in the next year or two. It's a plan, not a promise — but then, that's exactly how the Japanese house started. The channel and this site are the unpolished record of the whole experiment: the numbers, the mistakes, the small victories.

If you're somewhere in the middle of your own life wondering whether the second half could be shaped differently — that's exactly who I make this for.