Howdy, welcome to SakuraSlav, a blog dedicated to sharing my life and adventures in Japan. In July of 2025, I am moving from America to Japan in order to attend Japanese language school. Over time as friends, family, and colleagues learned of my plans they inevitably would ask some version of “why are you doing this” or “why Japan”? While I always did my best to convey my goals, hopes, and past experiences in Japan to illustrate why I needed to do this, I often felt like I could never express my feelings with justice. So in many ways, the genesis of this blog was a desire to show and tell why I believe my future and happiness could be in Japan. Hang around if you’re curious what I conclude.
A little about me – my name is Vlad, at the time of writing this I am 27 and living in San Antonio, Texas, USA. I work as an emergency medicine physician associate (PA), and I like my job a lot for the most part. I was born in Donetsk, Ukraine, and moved to San Antonio when I was young. I pretty much spent most of my life in Texas, minus a brief period of schooling which took place in Orlando, Florida. I am a type one diabetic, which I think in many ways spurred my interest in the medical field. It will also surely provide interesting posts in the future about healthcare in Japan. I have a lot of hobbies and interests: a cinephile (esepecially for horror), I am a gamer, I love playing all kinds of sports, and I’m a bookworm as well as a hobby polyglot (now Japanese language school is starting to make sense, right?). Along with JLPT N4 level Japanese (more on the JLPT later) I also speak conversational Russian, and am fluent in American Sign Language (ASL). While studying in Tokyo I’d also like to pick up basic Japanese Sign Language (JSL), and perhaps write about my ASL/JSL experiences and observations more formally. I hope this blog will serve as a creative outlet for me, and that many years into the future I can look back at these posts and reminisce fondly.
In case you want to chat and share about our hobbies/favorites, here are more of mine:
- Sports: basketball (Huge NBA nerd), volleyball, pickleball, hiking, weightlifting (love and hate, maybe more on this later)
- Anime/manga: Frieren, Grand Blue, Kaguya-sama: Love is War, Konosuba, Your Lie in April, Your Name, I want to eat your pancreas, JJK, Naruto, Spy x Family, Call of the Night.
- Shows: Lost, Arcane, Mike Flanagan horror (Haunting of Hill house, etc.), Ghost Adventures, Halloween Baking Championship, Wednesday, Scooby-Doo.
- Movies: Scream franchise, Jim Carey’s Grinch,
- Books: A Thousand Splendid Suns, anything by Crichton but especially Rising Sun, Jurassic Park and The Great Train Robbery; Harry Potter, George RR Martin novels.
Sakura Slav 