Ikuto Between Kyoto Nights and Vancouver Backends

Ikuto does not sell overseas life as pure sunshine. Soft-spoken in interview, he tells active stories—and refuses the script that Japan was simply worse. After a physics bachelor’s he nearly chased photojournalism or film work before noticing that physics majors sometimes become systems engineers. He joined an SIer, spent about three years mostly on upstream specs and client meetings, and coded roughly thirty percent of the time. A C++ assignment once left him drowning. Social-year two misery made him fantasize about a working-holiday “moratorium”; Frog blogs and a talk with Senna reframed the trip as IT study toward hire instead of café espresso dreams.

Before leaving he built a one-year buffer: self-taught Ruby and a failed Rails site, then about ten months full-time as a programmer at a mobile-game company—the skills he still credits most. University-era TOEIC sat around four hundred; commute textbook review was his main English prep. He arrived in Vancouver around December 2015, took three months of ESL, and started a specialty programming course in April 2016. By early March 2017, in the last academic month, he already had an offer—half class, half work—then moved into full-time co-op that April. Roughly ten months into that co-op when interviewed, he was eyeing a post-graduation work permit with working holiday as a timing fallback.

He treated school largely as a visa ticket and used free hours to build a vocabulary app spanning backend, web, and mobile—proof he could do it all. About six months in he also began remote Angular work for a Japan company launched by a former boss, staying open with his Vancouver employer. He briefly taught Japanese language and math at Kumon. Rails from the game studio and Angular from that remote help became his search filters; he wanted in-house product work over pure client SIer life.

Job hunt ran roughly January through early March: twenty to thirty applications via Indeed, AngelList, LinkedIn, and Ruby meetups; two progressed; one hired him after a fast same-week loop of coding tests and a two-on-one Rails/JavaScript interview that also bargained salary and visa length. He once met the very company he was phone-screening at a meetup the night before—and still lost that track, a reminder that visibility is not destiny.

Day to day he builds backend pieces of an HR web suite—attendance, payroll, money flows—sometimes owning a new fingerprint-attendance app alone among a small developer split. Kitchen snacks, short hours, dogs in the office, and Friday beer after three delight him; he still admits the mobile-game shop’s flexible hours and Cebu trip had charms Vancouver does not erase. English improved through a self-imposed Japanese ban, meetups, and drama, yet small talk still stings and belonging to local community feels unfinished.

Kyoto—guest houses, deep bars, a drinking circle that once made him want a less ordinary life—remains the magnetic north. Blockchain curiosity and a Tai chi resolution sit beside that pull. Attributes clock the Canada path at about fifteen months to offer; his story insists the offer is only one chapter in a longer negotiation with place.