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こんにちは！
On this page, you can read about my semester studying in Togitsu, Nagasaki, Japan!
Spring 2024 - Nagasaki, Japan
After planning, working, and waiting for four years, I boarded a plane to Japan on March 12th, 2024, to make my dream of studying abroad a reality. This journey actually felt like a continuation of what happened a month prior. In February 2024, I went to Japan for the first time, accompanied by my cousin to go see the Nagasaki Lantern Festival for a few days together. That experience gave me a small but meaningful head start on navigating Japanese airports and transit. This short trip also doubled as a way to see if I would like my future host city, and to see if I could imagine myself enjoying Nagasaki and living there for two full semesters.
My father, who shares my love of seeing the world, came with me to Japan in March, and I found myself acting as navigator and translator for us both. We spent roughly two weeks in Tokyo and one day in Osaka, and by the time I arrived in Nagasaki for good, I had already done something that I hadn’t done before: confidently led someone else through an unfamiliar place in a foreign language.
My learning goals going into Nagasaki were fairly straightforward: become more fluent in Japanese, pass my courses, and absorb the culture I had spent years reading about. I suppose I measured success in vocabulary lists and grammar points. Fluency seemed like a finish line you crosse if you studied hard enough. What those five months really taught me is that language is not only a subject you master; it is an almost living thing. It’s always shifting and always changing, and there is always something more to learn. That shift in my thinking could not come from a textbook. It came from experiencing daily life in Togitsu, the small town outside Nagasaki where the university was actually located.
Now I’ll be honest about the Nagasaki program: it was not the right fit for me. The town I lived in was actually quite far from Nagasaki itself, unlike what I was expecting from the program brochures. It was quiet there, like back home for me, but the program was structured in ways that felt isolating, and I struggled to feel at home in the way I had hoped. Japanese society itself presented a steep cultural learning curve: the social harmony, the rigidity of rules, the group-first expectations that leave very little room for individual exception. Coming from the American South, where directness and individual expression are almost a point of pride, the contrast was pretty sharp. I watched myself and other foreign students make small missteps daily whether it be from speaking too loudly or misreading an unspoken cue, and the corrective response was always indirect, always polite, but also unmistakably clear. There is also an undercurrent of gender expectation in Japanese society that I noticed as a young woman navigating it alone, something I would later study more formally in the following year.
The “hardest week” I would say was dead in the middle of the semester. The first weeks had been difficult, but in an anticipated way. I was warned and ready for the newness and emotions that would bring. But by the midpoint, the novelty had worn off, I was homesick, and I still had everything I had just been through left to repeat. Internally, what carried me through was the consistent conversation I had with myself: "You signed up for this. You knew ehhhh roughly how it would go. You are doing this because it is your dream, and because you know you will grow into something you cannot yet see. Someone you’ll be confidently proud of. You've got this. Keep it up. This much down… that much more to go." I know it sounds simple, but it worked for me. (I still do this kind of thing even now.)
What really carried me through though was the people. I had one very close friend from the start of the semester, and we did so much together. Then, in the second half of my time in Nagasaki, I made some new friends, and all together, they are the ones I still look back on with warmth, and they are the reason I coined a phrase I have lived by ever since: "The people make the program." The place was not right for me, but the people made my memories bright. I still look back fondly on Nagasaki! Not because the place or school was perfect, but because of who I met there and how they shaped me for the better.
Of course, the Japanese classes and the cultural courses were important for my growth and progress towards my major, but which class stands as the most significant? I would say that the most academically significant experience of that semester was Peace Studies. Sit with that for a moment, because it is easy to read it as an ordinary course title. Nagasaki is not an ordinary place to learn about peace. It is one of the two cities in the world that experienced a nuclear attack. The history there is not safely archived at a museum, it is in the landscape, in the memorials, and even in the faces of older residents you pass on the street. The class itself was designed by the teacher to be a tad lighthearted because of how shadowed by the irreducible reality of where I was sitting was as we had those discussions. Similarly, taking the Japanese history class while living in Japan meant that the events I was studying were not abstract, but were the context for the city outside my window.
The most important thing my time in Togitsu taught me, though, was to advocate for myself. When I realized the program was not right for me, I did not just endure it. I reached out, made calls through 14 time zones, sent emails, and ultimately secured a place in another program in another country for the following semester. Definitely not the original plan. It was scary, but I learned how to say clearly: this isn’t working, and I can try again somewhere else. Self-advocacy is not selfishness, and that lesson has shaped the decisions I have made since.
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