About
Mark Hosak
Lived, not researched. I didn't write this site from a desk — I built a life here first.
The short version
From fascination to a front door of my own.
Like a lot of people, Japan first reached me from a distance — a feeling that something there was real and worth crossing the world for. I didn't leave it as a daydream. I studied the language and culture to doctoral level, moved to Kyoto for three years of research, and kept coming back for decades. Eventually I did the thing most people only talk about over a second drink: I bought an old house in rural Japan and made it mine.
What stands behind the words
The track record.
Doctorate in Japanese Studies
PhD from Heidelberg University, plus three years of on-the-ground research living in the temples and streets of Kyoto in the 1990s — and many long stays since.
Shikoku, twice on foot
I walked the full 88-temple Shikoku pilgrimage — all of it, on foot — not once but twice. That's where you stop being a visitor to Japan and start belonging to it.
My own akiya in Takamatsu
I bought, navigated and now live with a real Japanese house in Kagawa. The paperwork, the septic tank, the neighbours, the costs nobody warns you about — I've done it myself.
Why I built this
Because the help I needed didn't exist.
When you decide to make Japan more than a holiday, you hit a wall. Listing sites show you houses but not whether to buy them. Travel blogs show you sights but not how to stay. Investor forums treat a home as a spreadsheet. None of them walk beside you from the first nervous arrival to the day the key turns in your own door — with someone who has actually lived every step in Japanese, on Japanese terms.
That's the gap Homecoming Japan fills. Not breadth — depth. Not listings — decisions. Not visiting — belonging.