Going to Japan to learn Japanese

I originally graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy. I thought Philosophy was pretty cool at the time (I still do) and I really enjoyed studying it, but after graduating I had a hard time deciding what to do with myself, which I think is a common problem for humanities/arts graduates. Anyway, after working in a shitty phone customer service job for most of a year, I went back to do a Masters, but this time in Computer Science rather than Philosophy. I had always been into computers and stuff and had enjoyed programming when I'd had the option to try it at school, and most importantly it seemed like something that could lead to a real career.

The course was pretty difficult, as you would expect for someone trying to do an MSc with no previous experience, but I managed to get through it. Also while studying, I met my current girlfriend, who happens to be Japanese. I had been pretty lazy in preparing for the start of my MSc course and hadn't managed to organise anywhere to live 3 weeks before I was supposed to move to a new city to start the degree. Luckily someone had dropped out, and a room was available in a halls of residence (UK term for dorms) that was normally for international students. I took the room. The halls were divided into flats of 5 people with shared kitchens. My flat was 2 Chinese people, an Indonesian guy, a Japanese girl and myself.

I liked her from the start, but she says her first impression of me was 'the guy who couldn't make eye contact while talking'; apparently I managed to win her over over the next few weeks. Since we lived together, and the rest of our flat mates mostly kept to themselves, we spent most of our time together. When the year ended (Masters degrees are just 1 year in the UK) and we had to move out, she stayed in the UK until her Visa expired, which was February this year, before going back to her home in Tokyo.

Once again I was left with a graduation certificate but no plan for the future. However this time I had a genuinely useful qualification (hopefully) and a girlfriend! I looked at jobs near where I lived; some of them didn't seem to bad, but it all seemed pretty dull to me. After spending a year hanging out mostly with people from other countries (mostly Asia), getting a job in the south of England seemed like the most boring thing in the world. I felt like I wanted to travel and do new stuff and meet new people.

I had had a similar feeling when I finished my degree in Philosophy, and had briefly looked at teaching English in South Korea (I was playing a lot of SC2 at the time), but I didn't have the confidence to go through with it. This time however, I was a couple of years older and more grown up, or at least capable of dealing with some basic tasks the adult humans are required to do, and I felt like I was capable of taking on a challenge. This time, rather than looking at Korea, the natural choice was obviously Japan. Not only because I would be closer to my girlfriend, but because I had been spending some of my spare time learning Japanese on my own anyway. I think I started because I felt a little bit inadequate; she was capable of fluently speaking my language and seemingly effortlessly understanding my culture, while I didn't know very much about her language or culture other than konnichiwa and sushi.

I met a Japanese girl and decided to move to Japan.

So I decided I would try going to Japan. I wanted to go for more than a couple of months, so I knew I would need a Visa of some kind. I looked at various options: PhDs, software development jobs, English teaching jobs, working holidays and becoming a student. In the end I decided a PhD was way out of my league (I only have 1 year of experience in Computer Science lol; I have no idea what I'm doing), and getting a work Visa as some kind of developer was a long shot since my Japanese was terrible (still is).

English teaching was a more viable option since the only requirements for some positions is that you have some kind of degree and you are a native English speaker (my greatest achievement). I decided against it after reading lots of people's experiences as English teachers. It seems like lots of the time people end up living in a country, potentially for years, and never learning the language; instead just hanging out with other foreigners and getting by with basic phrases. I didn't want to fall into this trap because one of my main motivations for coming was that I wanted to learn to speak Japanese, and I also feel like I would never get the full experience of living in another country if I can't interact with the people there in any meaningful way. Another option was a Working Holiday Visa; where you get a 1 year Visa for a country and permission to work part time; however I decided against this because I would still struggle with the language barrier, and also have to try to find work. This led me to look at language schools.

Enrolling in a language school is a more expensive option since I have to pay tuition fees on top of all the other costs of moving to the other side of the world. Luckily I had enough savings to barely cover my tuition fees/flight/accommodation. I also worked some tedious temp jobs to earn a bit more money while preparing for my trip. The extra cost seems worth it to me; I will hopefully be able to speed up my language learning and being able to get a student Visa allows me to be in the country for a significant length of time that would be otherwise quite difficult, and allows me to work part time if I can find a job.

My girlfriend is from Tokyo, but in the end I decided against living there, at least for now. The cost of living in Tokyo is significantly higher than the rest of Japan, and I barely have enough money to get by as it is. Also, I grew up in a small town and find large cities stressful; if I have to spend more than a few hours in London I end up tired, stressed and grumpy. I also thought that I wanted to try to challenge myself, and was worried that if I just moved in with my girlfriend then I wouldn't try very hard to meet new people or speak Japanese. I looked at Osaka for a bit too, but it's another massive city so I thought I might as well live in Tokyo rather than there. I eventually decided on Kyoto. It's still a city, but significantly smaller; and it's within a reasonable travelling distance of Tokyo (sort of).

I found a language school in Kyoto that looked pretty cool and signed up. I also found a room in a large share house which has a mix of Japanese people and foreigners living in. I thought this would be perfect because living with Japanese people would force me to practise Japanese, and living with foreigners would allow me to relax and speak English sometimes so I wouldn't get completely overwhelmed. I did all the stupid Visa stuff (had to make 2 journeys to the Japanese Embassy in London) and booked a flight.

I decided to sign up for a Japanese Language school in Kyoto.

My mum gave me a lift to Heathrow airport which was nice of her. On the way there I realised I'd never even been on a flight on my own before, and I usually let whoever I'm with do most of the organisational stuff while I trail around after them like an idiot, so even the simple tasks like working out where to check in and which gate to go to were new to me. I got through it all ok though and got on the plane.

I booked the cheapest flight I could afford; unfortunately it wasn't that cheap because the week that my school term starts on clashes with the start of cherry blossom season; and Kyoto is famous for cherry blossoms so tourists from all over the world come to see them. This means that the price of flights goes up on this week (-_-). The flight I booked was with China Eastern Airlines with a layover in Shanghai, before flying to Kansai International Airport in Japan. Everything was going well until they served the first in-flight meal; I spent the next 4 hours with intense stomach pains. I declined the other 2 meals that were offered to me on the journey, and because I didn't want to spend any more money and didn't bring any Chinese currency for the time spent in Shanghai, I ended up surviving on a packet of mints and a packet of Werther's Originals for like 18 hours (I don't really like either of these things very much; my mum gave them to me).

When I landed in Japan, I had to wait 2 and a half hours at passport control; I suppose it was busy because of the previously mentioned cherry blossom season. Kyoto doesn't have an airport so I flew to Kansai International which is close to Osaka. My flight landed in the evening so I had booked a hotel for the first night. I chose the hotel because it was close to the airport and had a free shuttle bus. Unfortunately because of the queue at passport control I came out too late and missed the last shuttle bus so I had to get a taxi; the driver of which charged me about 4500 yen (about 38 USD) for a 5 minute taxi ride. Everyone I've told this to has said that it was a complete rip-off and taxis in Japan aren't anywhere near that expensive. I thought so at the time, but I was too exhausted to argue. Everyone I've told this to has also been shocked that a Japanese person would rip me off like that; normally they are very professional and fair, but to be honest I think it's pretty common for taxi drivers at airports to do this kind of thing wherever you go in the world; after all, someone who's just got off a plane probably hasn't internalised the value of the local currency so they're pretty easy to trick. I finally made it to the hotel anyway.

The next day I left the hotel, went back to the airport and got a coach to Kyoto. This all went smoothly and I arrived on time at Kyoto train station. I then had to get from the station to my new accommodation. Google maps said it would only be a 20 minute walk and I wasn't up for getting ripped off by another taxi driver so I decided on walking. I couldn't get any WiFi but I had a print out of Google maps with the route from the station to my new home mapped out.

I was really disorientated when I got off the coach though, and had no idea which side of the station I was on. It took me about 15 minutes to even work out which direction I was facing in. Luckily Japanese street signs seem to be written in Romanised form as well as in Kanji so I managed to find where I was going. Unfortunately I had underestimated the weight of my bags and the temperature of Japan compared to the UK. I was a sweaty mess before I had travelled even 1 block. I persevered though, and eventually made it to where Google said my house was. I had no idea which house it was though. I was supposed to be meeting the landlord there, but I wasn't sure exactly where to go so I just stood in the street like some kind of sweaty traffic cone. Luckily I was the only gaijin (foreigner) in sight so my landlord managed to find me. I moved in and paid the first month of rent in cash.

I travel to Japan and move in to my new house.

I only moved in a couple of days ago so I don't have much else to add yet. Kyoto seems like a nice city so far; it's clean and the cherry blossoms are pretty. My house is quite central so I can easily get to the down-town area, there's also a river nearby which is lined by cherry trees and a few big old Buddhist temples dotted around so I've had a nice few days wandering around taking rubbish photos of stuff (I'll post some at the bottom).

Today was my first day at language school. We had to take a placement test so they could evaluate our level of Japanese ability (think SC2 placement match). It was pretty tough because I still suck pretty hard, but it's ok to suck at this stage I guess. There was a written part and a speaking/listening section where they took us in groups of 3 and asked us some simple questions like 'who are you?' and 'where are you from?' (but in Japanese obviously). I was most worried about that part because I think my listening comprehension is terrible, but it actually went ok; I think I even answered the questions a bit better than the other 2 guys I was with.

The writing part went a bit shit though. The first section was just testing if we knew how to write Hiragana and Katakana (the 2 'easy' Japanese alphabets) and that went sort of ok, although my mind went blank and I forgot some of the Katakana letters even though I've written them all a load of times before. We then had to translate a bunch of Kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese) into Hiragana, and then a some Hiragana words into Kanji. This is where it started going wrong. I know quite a few Kanji (maybe like 500) but didn't even understand what the question was asking me to do. The later sections went just as bad. We had to conjugate some verbs that were in example sentences, but I didn't really understand any of the sentences. Then we had to write some dialogue ourselves imagining we were calling up the school for some reason (assuming I understood it correctly). I basically wrote a dumb conversation that went like this (but in broken Japanese):

Me: hello, that test today was really difficult, I didn't understand question 5 at all, and question 6 was too difficult because I don't know Keigo (formal Japanese).

School: stop complaining and study harder Moose-san (but my real name instead; my real name isn't Moose)

Me: Ok T_T bye

(this was a conversation I made up for the test, it didn't actually happen)

We then had a lunch break followed by an orientation meeting. I was kinda grumpy because I don't like doing poorly on exams (probably a common feeling) and the orientation meeting seemed to be mostly about fees and paperwork and reasons that a student might get expelled or deported, so I left the meeting even more grumpy.

On my way out, one of the teachers called my name and gave me my test back. Apparently I had completely misunderstood one of the questions in an embarrassing way that I don't want to attempt to describe. She let me re-answer the question quickly, although this time I could only do about 40% of it. I then stormed off.

I talked to one of the other students on the way home; he said he came to Japan because he met a Japanese girl who was studying abroad and he came here to be with her; sounds familiar...

I suck at Japanese, and maybe my life story isn't as original as I thought.

This is my new room in Kyoto. It's pretty sweet. I need more coat hangers though.


This is some naicu sakura and a river that's next to my house


This is a big temple in Kyoto called Nishi Honganji, although I might've been lost, in which case it's probably Higashi Honganji