What it’s like being Japanese in Luxembourg

Luxembourg and Japan are like night and day in many ways, and the quiet streets and shop opening hours surprised many expats when they first arrived in the Grand Duchy, the country they have since made home.

Kazuhiro Kitayama, 78, came to Luxembourg in the early ‘70s as part of a one-year-long mission for the Japanese company Honda. Following his first few months, Kitayama asked if he could stay longer.

“Yes, I was a foreigner, but I was taken in very well,” he said, including by his wife’s family who are from Luxembourg.

After working for Arcelor for a few years, he joined Goodyear, where he stayed for 32 years until his retirement in 2012.

Decades into his move to Luxembourg, Kitayama said he feels “half-Japanese and half-Luxembourger, but I don’t feel homesick. I even dream in Luxembourgish,” he laughed.

“Before living in Luxembourg, I believed that big cities and countries were important, and that small ones were not. But my time in Luxembourg showed me that being small can mean strength,” said Sota Suzuki, who lived in Luxembourg from 2017 to 2020.

Suzuki, who was the country CEO of Mitsubishi UFJ Investor Services and Banking in Luxembourg, said the fact that he was able to meet and talk to former ministers Etienne Schneider and Pierre Gramegna “shows how open and friendly Luxembourg is.”

Also read:What it’s like being a Luxembourger in Japan

Quiet first impression

While the Japanese people that talked to the Luxembourg Times had heard of the country prior to moving, they were often surprised by how quiet it can be and how early the shops close.

“When I first arrived at the central train station [in 2006], there was nobody. No lift either. I was completely lost,” said Harumi Hayashi, who lives in the country with her French husband and their daughter.

“I arrived in November, so it was really dark, and I come from somewhere close to Tokyo, so going from being somewhere where there are many people to somewhere where there are barely any, took some getting used to,” said Keiko Kojima, who has been living in Luxembourg for 25 years, after being transferred to the country for work.

Harumi Hayashi arrived in Luxembourg in 2006 and was surprised by how quiet the city was.  © Photo credit: Harumi Hayashi

“After 7pm, the city is quiet, whereas in Japan and Hong Kong it’s still very much alive,” Makiko Gräfin von Oberndorff said. However, having lived in Germany prior to moving to Luxembourg 13 years ago, she said the culture shock was not too big.

“People in Luxembourg are generally speaking nice – in Germany, how warm people were depended on which part of the country you were in. People also don’t demand that you adopt the Luxembourg lifestyle all the way,” she said, adding that “in Luxembourg, I can be as I am.”

Warm welcomes

People in Luxembourg tend to show their emotions more than in Japan, said Makiko Gräfin von Oberndorff. But they are similarly reliable, she said. “When people here say they will do something, they do.”

Kojima agreed: “For the Japanese, if we know we’re not going to do something, we won’t promise to do it. I think people here are similar, though they tend to just say that they won’t do it and why. It’s a bit different, but I felt aligned with that kind of mentality.”

With some of these similarities in mind, Luxembourg’s small size can bring quick familiarity.

“At the beginning, I was a foreigner and, in my mind, I thought I’d never be able to integrate but once people accepted me, they wholeheartedly accepted me,” said Kojima.

Married to a Luxembourg national, Kojima said “my parents-in-law are from the south of Luxembourg and, when they met me, didn’t show any prejudice. They just accepted me.”

The close quarters also keep people in line, said Suzuki: “People know each other and so they can trust each other. If someone does something wrong – everybody will know – so that’s a kind of governance that’s possible because of the size of the country.”

Tomomi Kato, a craftsman who builds trumpets, and has been living in Luxembourg since 1994, joined a local brass band (known as fanfare in Luxembourg) soon after his arrival. “I’ve become part of the Mertert family,” he said, adding that “Luxembourg is my home. I don’t want to go back. I will die in Luxembourg.”

For some people Kato knows, it was difficult to integrate into Luxembourg’s social circles but “I didn’t feel like that.”

“Xenophobia is often politically abused. But in Luxembourg and the surrounding area, we can study very well that the border is not based on nationality, skin colour, etc, but on the behaviour of individual people in society. Origin plays little role here,” Kato said.

Tomomi Kato moved to Germany to perfect his craft, before finding  © Photo credit: Tomomi Kato

The language thing

While Japan is vastly monolingual, Luxembourg is known for its many languages.

“It was difficult at first,” Kojima remembered. She learned Luxembourgish after meeting her husband, “which wasn’t easy because not everyone spoke it and so I couldn’t fully immerse in the language. Luxembourgers are so happy to switch to your language when you struggle.”

Hayashi said her child “was immediately accepted, people are open and there’s no fear of other languages.”

Luxembourg’s multilingualism impressed her friends back home too, she said. “They couldn’t believe that some people spoke three to four languages.”

Also read:Expats beware: 2 in 3 jobs in Luxembourg require French

Kato said he learned German, and the kind of Luxembourgish spoken in the Moselle region. He said he is still impressed by the ease with which people switch languages and fascinated with the multilingual side of education and media in the country.

When Hayashi moved to Luxembourg, she found that there were few good museums and places to have fun. “That has evolved since then,” she said, though she still enjoys going home to Japan regularly and loves the seasonality found in her home country’s cuisine.

“At the time, the difficult part about being an expat was that most of my colleagues were French and Belgian and so left the country at the end of the day. So it was difficult to socialise then. But now, there are many non-Luxembourgers who stay in the country,” said Kojima.

Women’s position

For Japanese expat women, Luxembourg has offered new opportunities compared to Japan.

The country has a 21.3% gender pay gap, according to the OECD and time spent by women on unpaid and domestic work is among the highest among OECD countries. A “significant share” of women leaves regular work after childbirth, a report by the organisation says.

“A woman’s position is quite peculiar in Japan because mothers have a very trying role: they’re very involved in their child’s education so it’s difficult for them to work at the same time,” said Hayashi, who founded her own specialised travel agency and imports Japanese sake into the country.

Makiko Gräfin von Oberndorff (right) feels she can be herself in Luxembourg, and has even started her own business. © Photo credit: Gerry Huberty

“When I started working [in Japan], I realised there were many hidden rules, because women don’t have a high status in the workforce,” Kojima said. “I chose my company because they explicitly sent women abroad. I do wonder how much my life would’ve changed if I’d stayed. While I think I would’ve managed to work my way up to a certain level, I don’t know if I would’ve found a partner who was supportive of that.”

Though she acknowledged that there are glass ceilings for women also in Luxembourg, she said she didn’t experience them as strongly.

For Makiko, who founded import company House of Japan (Global Link) and the Japanese Luxembourg Association, “there are many unseen rules and expectations in Japan, whereas I wanted to be free, which I can be here.”