RResidents in Japan

Weekly Complaint Thread – 19 February 2026

  • February 18, 2026

It's the weekly complaint thread! Time to get anything off your chest that's been bugging you or pissing you off.

Remain civil and be nice to other commenters (even try to help).

  • No politics
  • No complaints about users of JapanLife

by AutoModerator

38 comments

  2. This whole week has been real bad and negative all at once.

    Going in today to the clinic for my wife’s surgery after the miscarriage. I took the day off today and going to take off tomorrow. I heard my dad had the worst symptoms of COVID but thankful he is recovering now. At his age it could have been fatal. My brother has it now and also recovering. But I can’t immediately be with them because of distance, and that frustrated and upset me. On Valentine’s Day my best friend told me his mother passed away after battling cancer. I just don’t feel like myself right now.

    I took a few days away from Reddit and I’m starting to realize just how I am wasting my time here. I used to come here as a diversion during my early stages of sobriety but this site just isn’t what I need now after almost a year of sobriety. I’ve found goals and motivation for things I want to work on. It helped at first but I think I need to move on.

  3. My wife has the flu, my son has the flu and he threw up on me three times now. It’s his first birthday today too. I’m fine. Perfectly healthy. How’s your day going?

  5. The enshittification of Line continues as the other day I got a new type of ad on their platform, one inside the chat, to let me know of a deal on Netflix. So, not long now and it’s going to turn into a constant banner ad of thirst traps.

  6. Changing my internet provider to Nuro was the biggest mistake, all of sudden wifi ssid disappears making all the devices disconnected suddenly middle of nowhere and their customer support sucks with only suggestion is to restart the router

  8. Gym woes. I usually go to the gym at 6ish in the morning. Had an encounter with a regular goer on two separate occasions/days. Day 1 – I was working out on one of the 4 benches at the free weights area. Guy comes and plops himself on the one right beside me despite there being 2 other unused ones further away. Proceeds to ego lift, throwing down his dumbbells after every set. Come next morning – I was deadlifting at 1 of the 3 power racks. Same guy again comes right next to me and starts deadlifting as well, dropping the bar every rep he did.

    MInutes later this young chap comes in, decked in a lifting belt and wrist wraps, and proceeds to lift baby weights. I was finishing up my workout in the corner of the free weight area using the bench, and he comes to the bench right next to mine, again despite the other 3 being unused. To top it off he takes off his sweater and started flexing/ego lifting in his tank top.

    Do these people require validation that much,,,?

  9. Two things this week:

    1) Foreigners who have deluded themselves into thinking that they’re ‘one of the good ones’ and that to the extent that there’s any anti-immigrant sentiment in Japan, it just doesn’t apply to them. There’s nothing sadder than that, imo.

    This in reference to comments (written by foreigners) I saw under a story about a new piece of legislation that may affect the ability of Indian/Nepalese people to open restaurants, ostensibly to prevent alleged visa abuse. Some foreigners seem to just fkng hate non-white immigrants and blame them for anti-immigrant sentiment in Japan. But Nationalists are xenophobic by design and it doesn’t matter where you’re from originally, no amount of listening to J-pop is going to change their mind about you if you weren’t born here.

    2) A growing trend I’m seeing of people taking little videos of litter in places like Shibuya and Kabukicho and claiming that there’s litter all over Japan now. The inference being that foreign people are ruining Japan (Shibuya of course being a place with a higher than average concentration of foreign people and tourists). Just because there’s litter in night spots where people get hammered and don’t have access to trash cans, doesn’t mean that all of Japan is covered in trash. It’s still basically a nice, relatively clean, lovely country. Shibuya and Kabukicho have always been like that. In fact, Kabukicho is a lot nicer now than it was when I first arrived.

    I’ll tell you what there is and always has been a lot of though – in and around every train station from the city centre to the suburbs: puke puddles. Platform pizzas. Just piles of vomit every morning. Also the not infrequent site of p*ssheads acting in ways on trains that would have social media clutching their pearls if a foreigner did it.

    To be clear, I’m not complaining about Japan itself – I love it, platform pizzas and all! I’m annoyed that foreigners, particularly non-white foreigners, are being blamed for every little thing by other racist/attention-grabbing foreigners. Not only is that lack of self-awareness (or perhaps level of self-aggrandizement) deeply crass, it ignores the reality of the situation; which is that xenophobes are gonna xenophobe, and that even if you removed every non-Japanese person from the country, it still wouldn’t become magically free of detritus and anti-social behaviour.

  10. I feel like everything is devolving into chaos right now. Like other people, there’s the flu causing problems at work. I was also very very sick (still have a cough almost 3 weeks later) but it apparently wasn’t the flu. Then, the ojisans at my workplace are disgusting and open mouth coughing and clearing their throats in the most disgusting way. It happens all the time but right now it’s especially bad and I can’t wear earphones at work so I have to hear it and feel disgusted. AND the boys in my grade are just going batshit insane and causing SO MANY problems that are actually beyond awful. Including bullying me, their teacher. I finally snapped at my school’s management and told them to take action because it was deeply affecting my mental health and their reaction has been to say sorry to me and “ask the boys in question if they did anything”. What’s that gonna do???! It’s the same shit as what happened last time – they’ll say they don’t know anything or deny it, be forced to give me a shitty half assed apology while rolling their eyes, and things will continue and nothing will change.

    I didn’t believe in the 3 year gaijin deciding filter until now but next month it’s 3 years for me in Japan and damn, am I sick of this shit. The constant victim blaming and fake apologies and nothing ever fucking changing and how inefficient and ridiculous everything is… It’s reallyyyyy getting to me lately. I don’t want to leave because I actually really enjoy my personal life outside of work but fuck… Work steals so many days and hours of my life that it’s impossible to ignore.

  11. The human climate has me so depressed I can’t focus on all the work I need to do over my “vacation.”

    I had to cut off family and friends for being nutters during the Pandemic. I’ve had to cut off more family and friends for being nutters during current US issues. I’ve had to cut off Japanese acquaintances for being nutters over current anti-gaijin bullshit. Tired of having to deal with the myopic and illogical idiocy of my colleagues. Tired of the constant dystopian developments that hit the news on a near daily basis, which everyone dismisses because “it doesn’t / won’t affect me.”

    I feel incredibly alone despite being surrounded by people because I’m the only one who doesn’t have their head up their own ass.

    Edit: Wow the copium in the replies. Yeah it’s *my* fault for not conforming to toxic mindsets. I’m the trouble-maker for having principles and standing up for them. How dare I think logically. How dare I have empathy for people other than myself. It’s like a bunch of chain smokers telling me it’s my problem that they all stink, and that I should pick up smoking too.

  12. What’s the best way to team write/edit a paper, do you think? Maybe shared tools like Google Docs, or the MS version provided by our workplace with collaborative tools, comments, real-time viewing? Or maybe version control on git?

    NAH FAM WE GONNA EMAIL A NEW VERSION EVERY EDIT.

    Fucking kill me.

  13. Lost a small project and one of my main ones will only be about half as big as expected – not good timing for spending money on a new hobby.

    And my most recent electrical bill? Yikes..

  14. Kerosene heaters at the clinic I go to. It smells like car exhaust. This shit gotta be bad for your health, especially the people working there everyday.

    My boss asking me every week if I’m gonna quit. Yes I’m gonna quit but I’m not telling you until I got my visa status fixed and can give my 1 month.

    Talking about visa application. I am switching HSP to HSP. The new company wouldn’t give me the 2 documents I need from them and insisted to use a lawyer/scrivener instead. It took them 6 weeks to prepare the application and apply to immigration. 6 weeks… I’ve never taken more than 3 days to gather docs, get the form from employer, and go to immigration. I really wonder what could have taken them so much time.

  15. Did not see my crow bro for a week. All I see recently are these fucking pigeons.

    They really don’t look as clever as the corvids. I still give them food cause I don’t want to discriminate, but boy, they dumb.

    And they shit everywhere, and carry diseases. They are basically flying rats with good PR.

  16. supposed to be planning a trip back home soon, but there’s a bajillion reasons making it too difficult

  17. I think I got banned from Mercari? I did the ID confirmation months ago and have bought lots of stuff since, always paying immediately and not having any issues. Now I get an error message when I try to buy something that says メルペイの利用制限が行われているため、購入完了できませんでした。It says to go to My Page but nothing there helps. Some Googling makes it seem like it’s a ban. Kind of weird since I’ve had no disputes at all and haven’t broken any rules.

  18. Another of my favourite disappeared from the shelves of the supermarket and I foolishly hoped it will be back, that this one was safe after seeing it for months but no… Another seasonal product loss.

  20. The amount of pee on the floor around a standing toilet in the guys toilet is absolutely insane. Are people peeing from a mile away? Disgusting

  21. There’s this cafe/bar my circle of friends regularly goes to because we know the owner and he plays the same game as us. My only complaint about the bar is that it’s allowed to smoke inside and I. Fucking. Despise. Cigarette. Smoke. Smell. I love hanging out with my friends but I hate it when we stay there for even just an hour and somebody’s smoking, cause by the time I come out everything I own and my whole body will smell like cigarette smoke. Fuck. Just happened last night and my backpack and sweaters smell like smoke. Those deodorizing sprays help but only to some extent.

    I can’t understand how people (i.e. smokers) can live with that smell permanently attached to their body and everything they own.

  23. Nearly froze my debit card because Amazon is a goddamn stupid service made by goddamn stupid people. Got a notification for an AMAZON RETAIL payment that I didn’t recognize and that didn’t match any of my activity on Amazon. It was small too and came late at night so it looked exactly like a scammer trying out stolen credentials.
    So I went to put a freeze on the card when I had a lightbulb moment and had my wife check her Amazon account. Voila! We’re subscribed to a third-party channel on her Prime Video account and her primary payment method just happened to have 0 balance when it tried to bill her. Any reasonable person would think the payment would then either fail or perhaps prompt the user to pick an alternative payment method. What solution did the genius Amazon developers implement? Why, it just picks a payment method out of the registered ones at random, and never even tells the user. So this time it picked my card which is also saved as a payment method on my wife’s account.
    Sincerely, fuck Amazon.

  24. i bought a new thing of hair wax from an online store that promises “very quick” deliveries. i get extra points on my credit card when using their app, so that’s why i got it there as opposed to amazon. when i bought it, they had said the shipping costs were “undetermined” so i had no clue how much i was actually gonna be paying. i figured it was fine since i would get the wax quickly and it would save me a trip to the store.

    i thought the shipping would be like ¥200 or so. nope! the shipping was like ¥1400 and the hair wax was ¥600. i paid over double what the hair wax is worth in just shipping costs alone. and the shop refuses cancellations or refunds after 30 minutes from you placing the order! nowhere on the purchase screen was there information about shipping costs! it was on an entirely separate page that you have to actually look HARD to seek it out!

    im pissed and will NEVER buy a thing from them again. feels like i got scammed. now every time i use that stupid wax, im gonna remember the whole thing and get mad all over again.

  25. Some people at my company can’t move unless there is a 指示 from someone from IT

    Brother, the computer is telling you to restart, just fucking do it.

  26. went to the dentist after discussing that we will do a cleaning and fix a cavity- get to appt- CLEANING ONLY 😫 whyyyyy do dentists in japan insist on splitting up tasks through multiple appts???

  27. Could some habitual driver tell me why drivers don’t use turn signals until two meters before the turn?

  29. My bosses daughter’s boyfriend joined the company (blue collar work) 3 months ago and he’s now in training to be in charge of me when we work small sites together. So my boss is having him write me work related emails and telling me to take my breaks. Meanwhile when we work he’s half the speed of me and I need to tell him what to do, otherwise he’s too slow or kinda just stands there. Yesterday we also worked a site together with my boss supervising and at the end of the work I used the restroom and noticed finger marks and shoe marks in the now dry floor wax. Pointed it out to him and he told the boss. And then my boss had me fix it while he just watched. It would have gone unnoticed by us if I never pointed it out. So now I don’t even have the willpower to even want to stick it out with the company. The work is not difficult but the mental strain is just a pain.

  31. I could rant about the trains and public transport culture all day.

    Some people get angry with the train packed and I can’t count how many times I have been pushed back into the crowd by someone standing behind me. Like I get it, you don’t want to be pushed back but its not like I want my body to be pressed into yours I am being compressed too.

    Also why do some people LOVE to stand in the middle of the door absolutely refusing to get off for a second or move away when others are trying to exit?

    When we line up waiting for the train and then when the door opens people from behind you will race to cut in front of you to get on faster, sometimes even when people are still exiting.

    Aggressively pushing me off the train just because you (like all of us btw) are in a hurry in the morning?

    Shoulder checking me with full force in the station out of the blue for seemingly no reason other than stress relief.

  32. Sometimes I wonder the reason why people get sick so easily in winter is because of the huge temperature difference between indoors and outdoors.

    Like it can be cold outside but feel like a sauna when you go inside a train/bus or stores. So many places blast their heat so much that at times it’s uncomfortable when I’m covered up with winter clothes.

  33. Of course I’ve been washing my hands, eating healthy, gym, and getting good sleep the last few weeks since everyone is getting sick. I definitely don’t want to since I’m going to a concert soon. Lady who sits next to me has been coughing for a week and refused to wear a mask for a lot of it…

    Boom day before a sore throat. Not this time yall sorry. I’m that sick person in a crowded event. Sorry not sorry.

  34. GU has an upcoming Kirby collab so I checked the designs on the app.

    Women’s Tees are a cotton/poly mix while the men’s are 100% cotton? What the hell is up with that bullshit? And they are the same price too. Why do women have to suffer more? Yeah I can buy a men’s shirt instead but it misses the point and makes me sort of angry.

  35. I’m sick of my internet apartment . Everyday there will be a time it’s go disconnecting and I need to restart again and again and again

  37. Finally ran out of the ibuprofen I brought when I moved here and I’m blown away by how expensive it is in Japan.

    I just bought a 36 count of 200mg ibuprofen (Ringl brand) for 2800 yen, when you can get a generic pack of 500 count 200 mg ibuprofen for less than $10 about anywhere in America.

    Anyone know of a way to get cheaper here? Seems like no one online will ship American brands here, and Costco Japan is sold out of their 200 count 200mg variation for 1300 yen.

  38. From the very beginning, I always told myself I will go back to the USA after language school.

    6 months left on my visa, and I have to say, the reality of that is now making me very uneasy.

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