If you've lived and worked in Japan for any length of time, there's a chance you've at least daydreamed about how great it would be to run your own restaurant or bar.
The idea seems so much more exciting than a standard office job, so much more interesting than another year of teaching English.
Establishment owners can set their own hours and don't need to deal with nagging bosses, so the thinking goes. They can make money just by providing a place for their friends to come and hang out. It's like an expat's dream — and in March of 2015, I fulfilled that dream when my wife and I opened a restaurant in Tokyo's Aoyama district. Then, in June of the same year, I became part of a statistic: the nearly 60 percent of restaurants that fail before their first anniversary, according to an Ohio State University study.
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