By Terumi Kai (甲斐輝美) — Founder of Japan Language Factory (JLF), creator of the Terumi Method.
In 2014, I gave up everything I had built.
I was 28 years old.
I had a successful cooking school in Tokyo. I had published a book. I had a name. I had a network — politicians, artists, musicians, business owners.
I had built something from nothing.
And I walked away from all of it.
Most people would have stayed.
But I want to tell you why I left. Because it’s the same reason JLF exists today.
I grew up in the countryside of Japan.
Yamanashi. Then Kumamoto. Then Niigata.
My father worked night shifts. My mother had mental illness. As a child, I was passed from family to family, place to place.
I never really had a home.
When you grow up like that… you start asking different questions than other children.
Not “what do I want to be when I grow up?”
But —
What does my life actually mean?
Where am I supposed to live?
What is the life worth choosing?
Those questions never left me.
At 22, I made my first big decision.
I left the countryside. I did not go to university. I went to Tokyo to start a business.
I had nothing. No degree. No money. No connections.
But I had two things.
I loved cooking. And I loved talking to people.
So in Tokyo, I went to small bars and restaurants alone, every night. I met everyone. Politicians. Artists. Entrepreneurs.
I networked relentlessly.
And from that, I built a cooking school. I published a book. I became someone in Tokyo.
By 28, I had what most people in Tokyo dream of.
And then one day, I sat down and asked myself a question.
Is this it?
Tokyo is one of the greatest cities in the world.
But it is one city. In one country.
There are 200 countries on this planet.
If I could do in the world what I had done in Tokyo… that small success would become enormous.
But I hit a wall.
The wall was language.
I didn’t speak English.
My communication skills — the only real skill I had — only worked in Japanese. Only in Japan. Only with Japanese people.
In the rest of the world, my voice didn’t exist.
So I made the second big decision of my life.
I closed the cooking school. I closed everything.
A few months later, I moved to Europe. Alone. No English. No friends. No plan.
And I had to learn two languages at the same time — Greek and English — from absolute zero.
I was someone who hated studying. Who was bad at studying.
Textbooks made me sleepy. Grammar drills made me angry.
So I had a choice.
Do it the way everyone else does it — and fail.
Or invent my own way.
I became my own experiment.
I threw away the textbooks. I stopped reading. I stopped writing.
I focused on one thing only.
Speaking. Listening. Reacting. Real human language.
And I built a method for myself. A method designed for someone who hates studying… but desperately needs to communicate.
It worked.
In a few years, I wasn’t just speaking Greek and English.
I was running a YouTube channel — getting real views — in both languages.
That method became what I now call the Terumi Method.
And that is the moment JLF was born.
Because I realized something.
I was not the only one stuck behind that wall.
Across the world, there are millions of people — smart, ambitious, successful in their own languages — whose lives stop at the border of English. Or Japanese. Or whatever language stands between them and the world they actually want.
They have studied. They have memorized. They have passed exams.
But they cannot speak.
And so their life stays small.
I know exactly how that feels.
Because I lived it.
JLF exists for one reason.
To help the people who refuse to live a small life.
The people who, like me, look at their successful, comfortable existence one day and ask — is this it?
The people who are willing to do the uncomfortable thing.
To leave the textbook behind. To stop hiding behind translation. To actually open their mouth and speak.
The people who understand that language is not a subject.
It is a door.
And on the other side of that door is everything — every relationship, every conversation, every business deal, every laugh, every connection — that you cannot have today.
That door doesn’t open with grammar.
It opens with your voice.
So that’s the story.
A girl who grew up with no home, in three different prefectures of Japan, asking the wrong questions for her age — became the woman who walked away from Tokyo at 28 to find out how big her life could become.
I’m still finding out.
The question I want to leave you with today is simple.
How big do you want yours to be?
— Terumi
The Founder Letters — a 9-part series by Terumi Kai (甲斐輝美), founder of Japan Language Factory.
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About the author
Terumi Kai (甲斐輝美) is the founder of Japan Language Factory (JLF) and the creator of the Terumi Method — a speaking-first approach to Japanese that has graduated over 5,000 students worldwide, including learners from Amazon, Google, ANA, Mitsubishi, Lufthansa, and the U.S. military. Japanese by birth, Terumi Kai has lived and worked across three continents, and writes about language, culture, and identity at terumikai.com.