About Komichi

Long before I moved to Japan, I'd visited a couple of times on short work trips — and each time, I fell a little harder for the place. So in 2008, already five years into my career, I decided to make it home. I arrived with a job and a couple of suitcases, and no one in my family who had ever lived abroad. Everything, from renting an apartment to opening a bank account to working out which bin the garbage went in, was a puzzle I had to solve on my own.

My path since hasn't been a straight line: after those first years in Japan I lived in another country, then back in India — but Japan kept pulling me back, and in 2024 I returned, this time with my family. Across those chapters I've now spent more than seven years building a life here — and along the way I became the person friends and relatives called when they wanted to move to Japan. I helped a cousin get into a language school. I walked a friend through the work visa process. I explained pension refunds to colleagues who were leaving. I became, without meaning to, an informal guide to Japan for Indians.

But every time I looked for information to share, I found the same problem: generic "move to Japan" sites that skipped the India-specific parts, recruitment agencies pushing expensive training packages, or scattered forum posts with conflicting advice. The good information was out there, but it was buried in Japanese government PDFs or spread across dozens of sources.

Komichi is what I wished existed when I first moved here. One place that brings together everything Indians need to know about working, studying, and living in Japan — checked against official sources, written honestly, and kept free.

Komichi (小道) means "a small path." Moving to a new country rarely happens in one leap. It's a series of small, concrete steps: understanding a visa, passing a language test, finding a job, renting an apartment, opening a bank account, filing taxes, settling in.

We're building the clearest, most practical guide for each of those steps — and the tools to help you actually complete them. Our salary calculator shows your real take-home in ₹. Our scholarship finder flags which programmes Indians can actually apply to. Our guides are checked against official sources and updated when things change.

We're not trying to be everything to everyone. We focus on one corridor — India to Japan — and cover it properly.

Komichi is built specifically for Indians moving to Japan — to work, study, run a business, or build a life there.

That means guidance built around your starting point: the visa route that fits (SSW, work, or student), salaries compared in ₹, the eMigrate and NSDC steps, education loans, sending money home, and the everyday realities — from vegetarian living to finding your community — that generic sites skip.

Being India-specific isn't a niche for us. It's the whole point.

We keep it free.No paywalls on our guides, no "premium" tier for the information you actually need. (Here's how we sustain that.)

We show our sources. Immigration, tax, and salary information affects real decisions, so we check what we publish against official Japanese government and primary sources, cite them, and show when each page was last updated. When something is uncertain or still changing, we say so rather than guessing.

We prioritise real experience over rewritten government pages. Anyone can paraphrase an official website. Where we can, we show the actual thing — real (anonymised) payslips, real test-day accounts, real costs, real timelines — so you know what to actually expect, not just what the rules say.

We build tools, not just articles. Calculators, checkers, and planners that do the work for you — because a practical answer beats a wall of text.

Questions, corrections, or a Japan story worth sharing? Get in touch. We read everything.

Interested in partnering with us? Let's talk.