Where You Work, Where You Live,
Where You Raise Your Children

The three places used to go together

Until now, where you live, where you work and where you raise your children were usually the same town. You looked for a home within commuting distance and chose it by school catchment. Japanese even has a word for living close to work. The three places were a holy trinity, tied to one town.

An old Chinese story tells of Mencius’s mother moving house three times for her son’s education. Near a graveyard, he played at funerals. Near a market, he played at trading. Only near a school did he start to study. The original education migrant. But she only moved within the same town. Parents today, who can choose a whole country, are a little luckier than she was. Had she owned an AI alter ego, her fourth move might have crossed a border.

What the story really teaches, though, is not the number of moves. It is that a place makes a child. By the graveyard he copied funerals; by the market, trading; by the school, study. Children copy not what they are told but what surrounds them. Choosing where to live is choosing what your children will grow up copying.

The alter ego untied the three

With an alter ego on the desk, work can happen anywhere. It runs over the network, and the alter ego takes care of the small stuff. Then you can choose where to live and where to raise children in whichever country you like. The trinity comes untied.

Bashō opened The Narrow Road to the Deep North by calling the months and days eternal travellers, a line borrowed from Li Bai. He went on: every day a journey, the journey itself my home. More than three hundred years ago, Bashō had already separated where he lived from where he worked. His alter ego, admittedly, was his disciple Sora.

Crossing borders with your alter ego

Working across borders, a powerful AI running on your own machine is more useful than you might think.

First, you can work without a connection. The alter ego lives not behind the cloud but in the MacBook Pro in your bag. A seven-and-a-half-hour flight or a hotel with weak Wi-Fi becomes an office. Planes used to be for watching films; now they are for meetings with the alter ego. I do still check the in-flight menu before it does.

Second, you can carry confidential material with you. You can read, summarise and draft from a client’s documents without handing them to a foreign server. You cross the border; your data does not. Your legal duty of confidentiality, of course, follows you everywhere.

Third, the language barrier drops. Summarise a Japanese contract in English, skim a Chinese email in Japanese, check what a Malay government form means. In a country where English is nobody’s mother tongue, the alter ego reads everybody’s.

Fourth, the time difference works for you. While I sleep, the alter ego sorts yesterday’s papers and drafts the first replies of the morning. Between Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur, one hour apart, work barely sleeps.

Finally, you are less exposed to outside events. Cloud AI can suddenly become unavailable through regulation, outages or price changes. The alter ego on your own machine keeps working as long as there is power. Just remember to encrypt the disk: it goes through customs with you, and I would rather not explain its contents at immigration.

Why Malaysia?

Once the three are untied, where do you live? For Japanese people, the answer has long been settled. In the Long Stay Foundation’s survey of where Japanese people would most like to stay long-term, Malaysia was No. 1 for 18 years in a row to 2024, and again in 2025. Then the foundation itself closed in March 2026. The ranking retired before its champion did.

There are plenty of reasons.

First, the time difference with Japan is just one hour. 9am in Tokyo is 8am in Kuala Lumpur. Nobody has to get up early or stay up late to meet. The alter ego never sleeps, but humans do. A one-hour time difference is an employee benefit for humans.

Next, English works. As I wrote in No. 16, this is a country where English, nobody’s mother tongue, is everyone’s common language.

Next, there are few major natural disasters: almost no earthquakes or typhoons. There is monsoon flooding, but at least you are not jolted awake at night. For someone from earthquake country, that alone deepens your sleep.

Healthcare is good. Kuala Lumpur’s private hospitals draw patients from abroad. Safety is relatively good by Asian standards too, though you should watch for bag snatchers.

There are as many cuisines as ethnic groups: Malay, Chinese, Indian, almost every Asian ingredient, and Japanese ones too. Even someone like me, with no great interest in sushi, struggles to choose lunch every day. Being able to struggle is a blessing.

And many people are well disposed towards Japan. In the early 1980s, Prime Minister Mahathir launched the Look East Policy, “learn from Japan”, and sent many young people to study there. That generation is now at the heart of society. Saying you are Japanese gets you a small advantage.

Besides, it is summer all year, so no winter clothes. There are many international schools to choose from. Direct flights to Japan run every day.

And for those who earn abroad, tax matters. Foreign-sourced income received by Malaysian residents is exempt in Malaysia until 2036, provided it has been taxed where it arose.

The awkward parts of Malaysia

Not everything is rosy. For one thing, by Asian standards it is quite far from Japan. Where Taipei or Seoul take a few hours, Kuala Lumpur takes about seven. No popping home for the weekend.

Put it on a chart, though, and something stands out: for the distance, there is almost no time difference. Fly seven and a half hours and the clock goes back only one. Your body travels far, but your working hours stay on Tokyo time.

As a Muslim-majority country, daily rules differ. Alcohol is heavily taxed and not available everywhere. Drinkers may turn pale at their household accounts. I do not drink, so on this point I watch from the gallery. Pork is not sold in halal shops or sections; you buy it at Chinese shops or the separate counters in supermarkets.

And it is hot. Hot all year. In the dry season, smoke from fires in neighbouring countries can turn the sky white with haze. No need for winter clothes, but you will want a parasol.

Borders still follow you

Even if work can happen anywhere, borders do not disappear.

First, visas. To be honest, many more people want to live in Malaysia than can. The numbers show it. It has been the No. 1 place to move to for 18 years, yet the number of Japanese actually living there fell from a peak of about 31,000 in 2020 to about 20,000 in 2024. Covid played a part, but being No. 1 to move to and No. 1 actually lived in are two different things.

There are many kinds of visa, and none is easy.

The long-stay MM2H requires a fixed deposit of $150,000 even for the five-year Silver tier, and $1 million for the 20-year Platinum, and only Platinum lets you work or run a business. The PVIP (Premium Visa), which allows 20 years’ residence and work, requires offshore income of at least RM40,000 a month and a RM1 million fixed deposit, plus participation fees of RM200,000 for the principal and RM100,000 per dependant. For a couple with two children, that is RM500,000, about ¥19 million. The deposit remains your money; the participation fee does not come back. The moment you pay, it becomes a sunk cost: the most painful kind of money, as every business owner knows. MDEC’s MTEP for entrepreneurs is limited to tech, and new entrepreneurs renew year by year. DE Rantau for digital nomads is easier to get, but basically lasts up to about two years, which is thin ground to settle on. Every door has its own heavy lock, and the key is usually in a bank vault.

The guardian visa attached to a child’s student pass has moved on a little since I wrote No. 15: there is now a route for both parents. But few schools handle it yet, and the second guardian’s visa can take so long that some parents are worn down by the wait. I will write about visas properly another time.

Even if you do get to live there, your tax depends on where you are deemed resident. Where the boss works can also blur which country the company belongs to. Consult specialists in both Japan and Malaysia early. This is the one thing not to leave to the alter ego.

And children are bound less by borders than by school calendars. As I wrote in No. 14, Malaysian school holidays stretch with every festival. A parent’s alter ego can cross time zones, but not school holidays.

My own case

I usually live in Malaysia or Singapore and go back to Japan about once every six weeks. Home is Malaysia, the children’s school is in Malaysia, the company’s head office is in Ginza, Tokyo, and the work is all over the world. Not three places but four.

To be self-deprecating, the place I spend most time may be neither home nor office but an aircraft seat. At the very least, I learned my regular flight numbers and three-letter airport codes before my own postcode. KUL, SIN, HND. Practically an incantation.

The poet Murō Saisei wrote that home is something to think of from afar. Living in Malaysia, Japan is exactly that far away. Oddly, from a distance I see both Japan’s virtues and its constraints more clearly. Separating the three places is perhaps also gaining the distance to see your own country from a little way off.

A business view

Three lessons. First, choose how to work before choosing where to live: build a way of working that runs on alter egos and colleagues first. Second, check the border trio of visa, tax and company location before you move; afterwards, not even an alter ego can fix it. Third, put the school calendar above the company calendar. In the end, the family’s year is decided by school holidays.

Gaspard: Up in the Air

In Up in the Air, George Clooney’s Ryan spends most of the year on the move, living in airports and hotels. His set piece is a talk in which he asks: “What’s in your backpack?” Home, furniture, relationships: put down everything heavy, he says. And at the end of the film, the man who travelled so light stands before the departures board, not knowing where to go. Having put everything down, he had nowhere left to return to.

An owner with an alter ego can do the opposite. One 13-inch MacBook Air in the backpack is enough. The alter ego on the desk carries the weight of the work. So you never have to put down the heaviest thing of all: your family.

Bashō made the road his home. Ryan made the airport his home. I leave my alter ego on the desk and go home to the country where my family lives. A journey with a set destination is not a journey but a way home. Air miles are not for hoarding; they are for getting back to your family.