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What changes when you stop treating it as temporary
The decision Alex has made has almost no paperwork attached to it — nothing is filed, no status changes, 永住権 is years away. What changes is a set of small things, and between them they are the actual difference between a posting and a life. You stop converting prices in your head. You buy furniture rather than renting it. You register a 印鑑 and keep it somewhere you will find it. You join the 町内会 or 自治会 — the neighborhood association — which in practice means the 回覧板, a clipboard of notices that circulates house to house and which you sign and pass on, and a 当番 rota for cleaning the local park or putting out the rubbish nets on collection day. Nobody forces you and plenty of people do not join, but it is where you stop being the foreigner in flat 302 and become the person in 302. You learn the kanji your own work needs rather than the kanji on a list. And you start answering 日本に何年ですか with a number you have not calculated, because you stopped counting. None of that is sentimental, which is 中村's whole point: the things that keep somebody in a country for ten years are not the things that make them like it in the first one.