Career choice, should I pursue a postdoc abroad and leave my current IT work at Tokyo?
I am Chinese and earned a PhD in fluid mechanics from the University of Tokyo at 30.
My publication list is kind of fine, 4 first-author papers. One of Journal of Fluid Mechanics, one of Journal of Computational Physics, and two of Physics of Fluids.
After graduation, I worked as an IT consultant in Tokyo for half a year, and somehow, an urge is growing inside me to pursue an academic job.
I applied for a postdoc position around, finally got one offer from France, a 2-year contract, and one from Korea, a 3-year contract.
Should I leave my current job in Tokyo and go for a postdoc, with a high chance that I will try to find a professorship back in China?
But I also have a girlfriend whom I love very much. She works in Tokyo, but she is from Europe. So basically, she cannot find a visa in China that allows her to work there.
The urge to leave Japan mainly comes from pursuing an academic job, but also from the fact that Japan's Yen is so weak, and high inflation is incoming, and they kind of blame foreigners now