Last year, I spent a semester living in central Tokyo, Japan. I arrived having never lived anywhere outside of the UK before, never learned another language except the very basic Japanese I had recently studied (in my own time; I study English and Creative Writing), and never lived in a place more populous than Norwich. For five months, I found myself in the biggest city in the world, navigating a language quite literally opposite to ours; symbols instead of alphabets, books read backwards, and sentences in vertical lines: top to bottom, right to left.

I lived in a comparatively quieter area of the central Tokyo Shinjuku Ward (quiet by Shinjuku standards, but far busier and more densely populated than anywhere Norwich. (For context, Shinjuku station is the busiest station in the world, with an output of 3.5 million passengers daily).I attended the prestigious Waseda Daigaku (早稲田大学): a massive 50,000 student university with a comparatively small international student population, which had a campus made up of a collection of twenty-storey buildings and a stunning Japanese-style garden in the middle. Living in an international student building was a wonderful homebase; it was where I met and engaged with amazing people from all over the world, but it unnerved me how little the other foreign students around me engaged with the normal Japanese students around us. I was one of only three international students I knew to join ‘circles’; Japan’s name for university clubs and societies (but instead of their being 300 like at UEA, there were over 3,000).

I started university in April, the beginning of the Japanese academic year. At this time, the Japanese I knew was minimal. I could barely string a basic sentence together, let alone have conversations; and so I knew that attending the Waseda circle fair was going to be difficult. What I wasn’t expecting was something resembling a music festival. As I entered the campus square, I waded through crowds of people, everyone trying to get my attention and handing me leaflets. I was obviously foreign, so students tried to recruit me with broken English phrases – I would learn later that university students may have high English reading and writing proficiency, but rarely were they taught to speak it in class; for most, English was a written, not spoken, language. I left the fair with enough leaflets to make a book. 

I joined two circles at Waseda. One was English Parliamentary Debating: it served as the perfect place to make English-speaking Japanese friends and learn about the political context of Japan (plus it gave me the upper hand as I was one of the few debating with my mother tongue). I also joined an elusive Japanese martial art. Coming from Okinawan karate, it is only practiced by around 10,000 people around the world. Taido (躰道) was the name, and I joined because I met an English speaking student at the circle fair who told me the club was beginner friendly and open to Japanese beginners (I was to later find that I was the only non-native and Japanese beginner in the club of 60, but that student I met remains a friend of mine, and visited me in Norwich the other day). Taido became central to my experience of Japan; never before had I felt so confused in my life as instructions I could not understand were shouted at me in a big Tatami-mat room. Their way of training was radically different to anything I had ever experienced before, and I stood out: I was the only westerner and, being 6’4, was a head taller than the second tallest Taido member. I joined new to the club with the first years, but when they realised I was in year older than they were, they quickly switched to a more formal register of Japanese and offered to call me ‘Senpai’ – a respectful name given to those older than you: living in Japan, you learn there is a great hierarchy of age. 

One night a week, I visited my Japanese grandma and grandpa in Ookayama, Tokyo. They were not real relatives of mine, but had known my family for years; and they taught me what it was like to live in a Japanese household. Together with the Taido and other university friends I made, I credit them for teaching me almost all the Japanese I know today. My Japanese grandparents had a house in Yamagata prefecture; one of the most rural (and ageing) areas of Japan. It was both stunning and eerie to see the immensely beautiful mountainous landscapes (over 70% of Japan is mountainous) next to the almost derelict seaside resort towns; a relic of an 80s Japan still in an economic boom. 

One thing about Japan I particularly miss is the public baths. You enter, scrub yourself clean at a sit-down shower, then enjoy a variety of different baths, hot and cold, inside and outside, mineral and other. The perfect place to decompress. I now know the best locations in Shinjuku for public baths; it became a ritual for me to visit after a stressful week of work. And yes, you do bathe naked, and in public. Each bathhouse is split by sex, and you learn to get comfortable with nudity. While awkward at first, I found myself more at ease bathing than I was most other times of the day, even with my western friends.

One day I found myself at the Kanamara Penis festival. As an ancient Shinto festival, it celebrated… the penis. While eating a penis sweet and wearing a penis hat, I learned about the history of the penis festival and watched the portable penis shrine be carried around the town. I was confused a lot in Japan. But I loved it. I particularly remember, soon after arriving, going to the seaside island of Enoshima, where I watched the sun set over mount Fuji-san alongside Elias, a friend of mine from Norwich who had also come to study in Tokyo. We were elated; we couldn’t believe our luck – just couldn’t believe we were here. I miss Japan – I miss it passionately like you miss dreams or moments when you were a kid and life was easier. But in truth, I was glad to come home in the end. I needed to digest everything before I go back. And I do intend to; just like how I intend to one day be fluent in Japanese. I’m conversational now; I practice every day, and I continue to plan my return. I have a whole community to return to in Tokyo; family, friends…

Photo Credits: Oscar Welchman