"What Will You Do When They Get Sick?" I Was Rejected Again and Again.
In the interview, they asked how old my children were.
When I told them, the response was always the same.
“That’s young.”
And then, without fail:
“What will you do when they get sick?”
We have no relatives nearby. I answered honestly.
“I’d have to take time off, or use sick-child daycare.”
Rejected.
Again and again, the same sequence.
This is the article we needed back then.
The short version
- Part-time within the dependent threshold, weekends off. Almost no job in Japan is posted like that.
- Every interview asked what I’d do when a child ran a fever. I answered honestly and lost the job.
- Fevers came weekly. Monthly at minimum. With two boys it simply cycles and never ends.
- To get a daycare place you need to be working. To work you need a daycare place.
- But: job seekers also qualify for the childcare-need certification. I didn’t know that at the time.
- What we chose in the end wasn’t more income. It was lower fixed costs.
“I want to work but I can’t” is not a foreigner problem
Let me be clear up front.
This isn’t specific to international families. Mothers all over Japan — probably all over the world — are stuck in exactly this.
What was specific to us was having nobody nearby to call on. My husband’s family is in America. Mine is far away. And this was during COVID.
Nobody to ask for help, and a child running a fever. That was our starting position.
Two years as a full-time mother, carried by that apartment
I had our first son, stayed on my husband’s insurance as a dependent, then had our second. Through all of it I was home full time. We had to live on his salary alone.
That’s when it truly hit home.
Choosing the half-price apartment was the right call.
Had we taken a place our budget couldn’t carry, I would have had to work immediately — during the exact years when working wasn’t possible. That would have broken us.
(The story of choosing that apartment is here.)
And I realized something else.
That rental threshold that rejected us — monthly income of four times the rent. At the time it felt like an arbitrary wall.
It wasn’t. We genuinely were a household that could afford that apartment and not much more. The rule was right about us.
The daycare catch-22
Then I tried to actually get a job, and found this:
To enroll your child in daycare, you need to be working. To work, you need daycare.
The same circular structure as the guarantor problem in the last post.
But here’s what I didn’t know then: being in an active job search also qualifies you for childcare-need certification.
Also, the minimum working hours that qualify as “needing childcare” are set by each municipality within a range of 48–64 hours per month. Meaning the bar differs depending on where you live — so checking your own city’s rules is genuinely step one.
(As of August 2026. Certification criteria vary by municipality; always confirm with your own city.)
Jobs with “dependent-range hours and weekends off” barely exist
I knew what I needed: hours within the dependent threshold, weekends and holidays off. While the kids were small, I wanted that family time protected.
Almost nothing was posted like that. Saturday shifts were essentially mandatory everywhere.
And when I did get an interview, the exchange at the top of this post was waiting.
I understand the employers now. They’re short-staffed; a sudden absence hurts. I don’t hold it against them.
But at the time, I just kept getting turned down.
What decided it wasn’t policy. It was the room.
Eventually I found part-time work within the threshold and started.
The fevers were exactly as expected. About once a week. At least once a month, guaranteed. With two boys it cycles endlessly.
And sometimes my husband would go down with it too. Genuine chaos.
Once, the preschool called minutes after I’d clocked in.
My coworker’s response:
“Go get them. Right now.”
Nearly everyone in that workplace was a part-timer with kids the same age. That’s why the room was kind.
And this is the part I most want to say.
If that room had felt any other way, that phone call would have been the reason I quit.
However good the policy framework is, whether you can keep working often comes down to the atmosphere of the room you work in. That doesn’t appear in any government document.
The day I became a demon
My husband had a fever. So did one of the kids.
I left both of them at home and went to work.
He looked miserable. I said this on my way out:
“Women do this the whole time — you stay with the kids even when you’re the one with the fever!”
…I was a demon.
But that day, I had to be.
The wall: work more, take home less
Even part-time, the work and the responsibility grow. Which produces the obvious thought:
Then let me work properly and get paid properly.
That’s where the “income wall” appears.
Raise your income by a middling amount and you fall out of dependent status. Then you pay your own health insurance and pension premiums, and your tax bill rises. Net result: you work more hours and take home less.
That loop was the brake.
But this is actively changing right now.
- The ¥1.06M wall: under the 2025 pension reform law, the wage requirement (¥88,000/month) is set to be abolished within three years starting June 2025, with the company-size requirement phased down and out as well.
- The ¥1.3M wall: if you temporarily exceed ¥1.3M due to staff shortages, an employer’s certification lets you stay a dependent for up to two consecutive years.
The wall I agonized over is being rebuilt. If you’re planning your work life now, don’t decide based on the old rules.
(As of August 2026. These reforms are ongoing — check MHLW for current details.)
We didn’t choose more income
This is the center of how we think.
We didn’t choose the work arrangement that maximizes income. We prioritized time together as a family.
Which meant we had to lower our fixed costs.
The cheap apartment, and the fact that we still haven’t bought a house — those come as a set with that choice. Instead of increasing what comes in, we reduced what goes out. Our whole life sits on that calculation.
Neither path is the right one. Plenty of people choose to maximize income, and plenty of families have no choice but to. We simply landed here.
Why my husband does the housework, honestly
My husband does a lot — housework, childcare, all of it.
But I don’t want to file that under “he’s a kind man.” That’s too clean.
We had no family nearby. And COVID cut off contact with everyone else.
There was no version of this where the two of us didn’t do it all. What we have was built out of that, gradually. Maybe partly because he’s American. Maybe because we started married life far from both sets of parents.
There’s one more reason, and it’s mine.
I’m older than he is. Statistically, I’ll go first. So I wanted him to build the ability to live in Japan on his own, without me. Whatever he can do himself, he should be able to do himself.
He probably doesn’t see it that way. He probably thinks I’m a tyrant.
Meanwhile, his family asked why I wasn’t working
The Japanese “spouse as a dependent” system amused him.
His company paid a dependent allowance and covered the insurance. He thought that’s not bad at all.
Meanwhile, his family in America asked why I wasn’t working. Dual income is simply the norm there, so it was a fair question.
His own position:
“Do whatever you want.”
…On a salary that didn’t really support saying things that cool.
If you’re in this right now
Recently, I came off dependent status. The kids are older, we moved, the situation changed.
The calculation that said “staying a dependent is optimal” was not a permanent truth. Situations change.
With that said, two things for anyone stuck in “I want to work but I can’t.”
One: start by lowering your fixed costs.
If you force yourself into a job and then your child can’t attend school, you’ll have to quit anyway. Before raising income, reduce what goes out — that’s the part you can actually control.
Two: but if you need to work, work.
Especially if working is how you decompress. Use everything available to you, sick-child daycare included.
When you spend all your time at home with only your family, no outside input reaches you, and your world narrows to just the people in it. Being connected to society is its own kind of relief. I felt that myself.
It really is case by case. There is no single right answer here.
Your choice was the right one
If I could say one thing to the woman being rejected in those interviews:
Your choice was the right one.
P.S. This series covers the walls that international families hit after arriving in Japan. Part one, on not being able to rent an apartment, is here.
As of August 2026. Childcare certification varies by municipality and the income-wall rules are mid-reform. Please confirm current official information.
This is our personal experience, not financial, tax, or employment advice.
Official references