Introduction

My name is Keita Kuroki. I was born and raised in Brazil by Japanese parents.
I'm an early millenial, 35 as of February 2021.

My parents immigrated to Brazil in the 60s, but haven't met each other at this time. They had me in their 40s after 3 years of my brother, ​which made me feel some age gap when being raised.
I could barely speak Portuguese when I started kindergarden and I remember my first days of primary school having to repeat words in front of the class because I couldn't pronunciate Ls and Rs correctly. My handwriting was and is still scratchy, gladly I chose to work with computers, no penmanship required.
My mother taught us Japanese, some math and soroban (abbacus, she was certified with some degree). From our early age we were put in kendo and piano classes.

Our family was financially stable, from my naive POV, though I suspect we had few crisis. I was lucky we had a computer when I was around 10 yo. Was introduced to the dial-up internet world, BASIC programming, switching jumpers on motherboard, burning up some RAM memory cards, opening CD-ROM drives remotly using some sketchy programs.

My teenage started by questioning why I was practicing kendo and piano. Quit piano lessons and reduced kendo because of "study".
One bad thing I learned from my math teacher in highschool was an example he gave in Tautology. If there's an exam, you can either study for it or not, and the result being a high or low score. If you study and get a high score, outcome is neutral, you studied to get a high score. You study, low score, negative. You don't study, high score, positive. You don't study, low score, neutral. Therefore, if you don't study there's no dissapointment.

Didn't know what I wanted to study at university so picked music, architecture and something else, maybe engineering. No success there, best I got was 5th in waiting line for a 35 seats in music university. A year later my brother asked if I'd attend IT college with him, and we took the entrance exam, I got in in 1st and my brother in 3rd, that and being a sibling attending same college gave us quite some discount.
In my second semester in college I had top scores in some subject, and the well reputed IT college somehow lost my scores in their IT system. I had the written test in my hand as a proof of my score but they couldn't sort out their IT system to put my points back. So I quit this all-so-well-known IT college that couldn't fix my score, formerly known as IBTA - Instituto Brasileiro de Tecnologia Avançada.

My work carrer started a bit before college, in my father's company fixing computers and wrote some scripts to take inventory of machine specs in the network. Later joined the Japanese commerce chamber in Brazil as a "webmaster" which I was mostly doing commerce research and translation for the member companies. Kreanto was a small family-owned production company, the name was in Esperanto meaning creator / creativity. Aciòn was closer to advertising industry where I learned Macromedia Flash. Grafikonstruct had some Brazilian talents in the developers community. 

At some point I started hearing many of my colleagues talking about working abroad, but most didn't take any action. I wasn't interested at first but as they talked more about it made me want to work abroad, and not just speculate about it. Got some interviews over the phone, scary, and got a job in a company in New York, The 7th Art. They worked with advertising for high-end real estate and luxury hotels. But I wasn't feeling I was doing my best there, but didn't want to go back to Brazil after such short time, so I quickly started looking for job in Japan. Got some interviews and was accepted at IMG SRC co.. They embraced my warmly tough working hours was crazy, it was aounr 2007 still a workaholic era in ad-industry. Some projects I worked was awarded in international ad awards. Got married with a girl I knew from Brazil. We figured it was hard for her adapting in Japan because of the language barrier. So next move was to the UK where her brother was living.

Started at Lessrain from the Tokyo office until I got my UK visa sorted. Moved to London. Started working to shape up my portfolio so I got a chance to speak at a developer community conference. That put me on a small spotlight and was hired at unit9. Few years passed and we were having some health issues in both mine and my wife's family, so decided to move back to Brazil. Initially I was trying to open a Brazillian branch of unit9, but with some burocracy issues opened my own company Slikland.

Projects, new company partner, awards, employees, broke my ankle trying to get back to Kendo, divorce, and 6 years passed. Was tired of owning a company, having all loads of responsibility with your company, employees, clients. So I started my gap year wich became 2. Got back into piano in the meantime.
Covid-19 is spreading around an the political and social situation in Brazil isn't the best. Few people that are wearing masks removes it to cough.

I was talking to my former co-worker, now my boss, about this situation and now I'm in Japan working at Bassdrum. So far it's being awesome, adjusting to re:new life.