What would you rather be doing with your life?

Once you start looking for a job, in particular if you have the resources to be picky and not necessarily take whatever comes along to support your family, you realize you have to have something to do in the meantime. Once you start doing it you may well realize that this is what you were supposed to do with your life all along, and that your previous job was a distraction. Although the pay is usually better, so you may choose to winter a recession doing something else. Don't do it too long, however, because then you start losing the competence from your original job and it will be much harder to come back. If you have something which you can do at the same time as you study, or work on a demo project, it is a perfect way of having something to do while adding some extra income. Perhaps the only income.
What could that be? Preferrably something with flexible hours. And something which is fun. And that you can quit when that "real" job comes up Sports teacher, if you have the talent; or tour guide if you can make it. But one condition that you will find useful is that it pays cash. You are going to have a few tough months ahead, if not years. So an extra cash flow is going to come in very handy.
That also means you should try to figure out something which pays a bit more than the night shift at 7-11, which is the standard of comparison here in Japan. And the vest way to do that is not only to have a unique skill, but one which requires a license or grants you some other monopoly power. If you are the only native English speaker in a small Japanese town, you have a monopoly. Nobody else can claim that competence. And you can charge for access to it. More than you would in a big city with lots of foreign teachers, many better than you. Because a monopoly is no good if nobody wants the goods you are selling. If nobody is willing to pay for what you offer, your offer is worth nothing and you will not get paid for your work. You will have to tweak the offer.
The converse of this is that demand is higher than supply - there are more people who want to buy what you offer than there are people supplying it (well, for education you would count the hours, but you get the idea). This is the position you want to be in. But it has an inherent problem: when price goes up, there will be more people willing to offer products, and they will drive price down - since they often are substitutes who have spotted a way to capture a higher price. In the Engliish teacher example, Japanese fluent in English could start teaching. Since they are not foreigners (but may be perfectly competent teachers) they will have to charge a lower price compared to their competitors to attract customers.
That means prices will be driven down to a level where they correspond to the value for teachers to offer service intersecting the valie for students in learning English. In Japan, about 1500 to 1200 yen per hour. Much better than working in 7-11 for 850 yen per hour. But much fewer hours guaranteed.
There is a way to avoid this price trap, and that is to select a profession where a license is required, because then the supply is likely to be constrained. Licensed electricians, nurses, or truck drivers are scarcer than shoe salesmen or tour guides (although as a tour guide in Japan, you have to be licensed, which means passing a fairly rigorous exam). if you have to pass a license test, demand is almost always higher than supply.
If you want to work abroad, you have to select a profession where the license is easy to translate. You can not take your American drivers license and start driving in Japan. You have to convert the license to a Japanese license - which means passing a drivers test. To get a professional license, you must be able to drive a car with manual transmission. Driving a truck means passing the truck drivers test.
This means there is more demand for truck drivers than there is supply (although nobody cares if you are a foreigner as long as you can speak the language). Being able to speak the language is a pre-requisite in many areas of business. You will do poorly as a nurse if you do not understand what your patients are saying.

All this means it is best to focus on work that either can be done anywhere, or where licenses do not automatically require you to acquire local competence (such as speaking the language). Alas, the first kind of work is really rare. Not that there isn't a lot of things you could do working at home - writing articles for web sites, programming cool buttons, just to mention two. The problem is that there is no writers license, and that programming can be done by anyone with basic computer science qualifications - no license required. There are thousands, if not tens of thousand, of people in India with more than adequate programming or writing skills, who can live like kings if they can make as much as 800 yen per hour. Which means they push the price down - a lot. So while it may be tempting to make a living blogging or writing cool applications, it is a losers game unless you live in a place where the living expenses are really low.

Now, if you can find a way todo the same thing within an area which does require a license, or knowledge of some kind that the Indian writers are not likely to posess, then you can carve out a nicheforyourself as a blogger, and by combining enough different means of monetization, create a living for yourself. The rule of thumb is that you need about 20000 regular readers for this to work, which is doable but hard. You really need to be focused and reach out to and have an exchange with your community. Even on Twitter there are preciously few people who have more than 20000 followers, and the mental effort required to use Twitter is small compared to what it takes to follow a blog.

However, assuming that you have a speciality which is related to the job you are looking for, this is an opportunity. You sre unemployed so you can write what you like. If you write about your speciality, it will also be a useful entry on your CV. That you are trying to keep up with your field and at the same time give back to the community, as well as learning more about social media, can not go down badly. Although you may have to stop blogging once you get employed.
But running a website is tough at best, and short of investing a lot of money there are no guarantees that it will work. Writing books and recording music are equally difficult to turn into a cash flow at short notice. Unless you already am successful, you had better not start something like that when you are unemployed.
Starting a business is otherwise a good way to keep yourself occupied, but it does not automatically mean that you will have a cash flow from day one. If you are starting something which will pay off big in three to five yesrs, it is probably a bad idea to look for employment at the same time. For one, it makes it hard to focus. If you have to go to employment interviews when you really should be selling your products, the new firm will suffer. Having some kind of store or cafe which does not require that deep entrepreneurial engagement is one way of creating a cash flow, but that would require you to take over an existing business. That requires capital as well as taking on a lot of responsibilities, for instance having employees - at least people who can mind the store when ypu are out being interviewed.
So your best bet iis something flexible, where you can increase the hours when you need - as well as decrease when you need. This means something like yoga or martial arts teacher, where there also typically is a certification, even if there is no governement license. The advantage is that the licrnse easily translates around the world - you can walk into a dojo in any country and start practising with the people you meet there.
The disadvantage is that becoming a martial arts or yoga teacher, or any other teacher in a similar field, takes years of practice. It is nothing you can do at the flick of a wrist. But that is true for any other would-be gap-filling positions. You need to plan ahead even when you choose a hobby.