If I can be like a Japanese person, I can move forward, but I can’t, it’s impossible.

This may sound like me complaining, but well, I can speak Japanese, to a certain extent. So when I work with those around me, and speak like I am now, they tell me that I am “Japanese.” I can understand Japanese perfectly and read Japanese perfectly, and so therefore must be able to do perfect work with complete flawless understanding of Japanese culture. And so they tell me that they’ll evaluate me based on the same standards as Japanese people. But then, based on those standards, I’m not perfect. Because I’m unable to fully become a Japanese person, they tell me they’ll delay my progress.

However, I wasn’t raised in Japan, so I understood this was what I was getting into. I work harder than the Japanese people around me in order to deal with all the pros and cons of my situation. And sometimes that demotivates me. There are so many people around me who can use the language properly, that’s the problem. It’s not that I’m blaming Japanese people, but the way the system’s set up acts as a bottleneck. On one hand, they want to increase workers, but on the other, there’s no efficient way of actually incorporating the people who’ve learned the language into the system, which makes everything terribly inefficient.