Grumbling in Japan

Working in the Japanese IT Industry

What happens when a rural Thai village understands your “work” better than the Japanese IT industry? This chapter traces my journey from being dismissed as a Linux-obsessed oddball in 2009 to discovering that, even in 2025, Japan still treats technical curiosity as a crime. If you’ve ever been told that your skills are “just playing around,” this one will resonate.

When I was in a rural area in Northeast Thailand, I spent endless hours facing the computer to learn how to use Ubuntu 9.04. Even when someone asked, “What are you doing?” and I answered “Work,” it somehow didn’t land right, and they just thought I was playing around.

So after a while, I asked, “Why is there so much pushback against this?!” The response was, “Well, from the perspective of the people here, real work means getting your hands pitch-black and covered in mud, so what you’re doing looks just like playing around… It’s not surprising they’d think that.” And I was like, yeah… I get it.

I was living in the countryside because I admired farming, so I don’t mean to belittle agriculture at all, but let’s be honest—the rural areas aren’t exactly prosperous, and learning how to use Linux probably had a higher chance of making money. But to the locals, it was like, “Ubuntu? Can you eat that?” Still, that’s that, and I was living in the countryside anyway. This was back in 2009.

In 2009, using Linux for work made you a madman, and just bringing it up marked you as a weirdo. But now it’s 2025. Times have changed. Knowing your way around Linux is a huge advantage these days. So yeah, that’s my win… or so you’d think.

Even now, bringing up Linux still gets you treated like a freak. If I ask, “Do you know what powers the backend of AWS?” they just go ???

A country that dismisses what I was doing in 2009 as “just killing time” is essentially no different from the old ladies in Thai villages. That’s Japan’s IT industry for you.

Think about how risky it was to switch to Ubuntu back in 2009. Even in 2025, just using Ubuntu on the desktop gets you labeled a pervert. Anything that can’t be measured by existing values is all just “killing time,” huh.