Year Abroad: Home and Away in Tokyo

Being half Japanese, or, in Japanese-English – “Haafu“, it’s been a really strange experience coming as an exchange student to live in a place I’ve always held a certain nostalgia for as my ‘home’. Despite my Japanese roots, I was immediately considered an alien as soon as I arrived in Tokyo – I even have the “alien registration card” to prove it.

I have the good fortune to have grandparents who are green-grocers and own an apartment building where I am living. So, on the survival front it’s been smooth sailing, but being part of an Asian family carries huge responsibility. Juggling the balance between spending time helping my grandparents, attending lectures and exploring Tokyo, I’ve found that I’ve been living life at 100mph from the moment I arrived in September.

Exploring Tokyo as a legal adult has been something that I had not really been able to do up until now. As a university student, I have (naturally) endeavoured to immerse myself in Japanese drinking culture. You always hear stories about Japanese wage slaves drinking themselves silly ‘til the early hours of the morning and making use of the “love hotels” which are found in the dark corners of urban Japan.

I can now confirm having worked in a bar that all the salary-man stereotypes are completely true. I work every Friday night in this tiny bar which has been frozen in time since it was opened in the 80’s; same furnishings, same funk and soul records, same customers for the past thirty years. Every week customers get just as drunk as they did the week before and tell me more sordid stories about the other regulars.

This has made for great practice of my Japanese skills which I’m very grateful for because it turns out that Japanese universities are notoriously rubbish when it comes to teaching anything! Students work themselves to the bone in order to get into Uni and then they stop working completely. So if you’re thinking of studying in Japan, the silver lining is that you are able to get away with doing very little work, focussing on gaining a wholesome cultural experience as a typical Japanese university student!

Getting immersed in student life

In the past few months I have found that most people have been surprised when I say that I’m “Haafu” or half Japanese. This could be a result of my terrible Japanese and the way in which I compose myself – through the way I dress and my body language. These subtle – or not so subtle – signals are all tell-tale indicators of my ‘foreignness’.

Hopefully by the end of my year here I’ll be fluent enough in Japanese so that I’ll no longer see the look of panic rising in the Japanese shop assistants faces as they consider the possibility that they may be forced to make use of their rusty English. That’s my ultimate aim for living here – to regain some of the Japanese identity which I’ve missed out on having grown up in England.