I arrived at Meiji Gakuin University’s Dorm in Totsuka, Yokohama late-night on April 1st, 2025, returning to Japan after a semester in Seoul and a break at home in Mississippi. I came back with higher Japanese language proficiency, a deeper comfort with being abroad, and, if I am honest, the shadow of comparison following me everywhere.

      My learning goals for this semester had shifted considerably from where I had started back in Spring of 2024. I was no longer chasing fluency as an abstract finish line. I wanted to use Japanese, not perform it for a grade. I wanted to be able to think on my feet comfortably, and use it to connect with real people in real situations. That goal was met in a way I didn’t see coming: with a host family.

      What was arranged as a single overnight visit with a Japanese family became a recurring invitation across the entire semester. Their two children, a girl of eight and a boy of six, welcomed me back again and again. I helped with homework. I fumbled through dinner conversations. I laughed at things I only half understood and was laughed with in return. My Japanese improved more in those evenings than in my months of formal study. And I think it is because my motivation and my finish line both changed: instead of gaining a grade, I gained connection. One evening, sitting in their living room, I thought about the international students who had stayed with my own family back home in 2019, the ones who had first opened my eyes to the world outside my town. I finally understood what they must have felt back then.

      Tokyo, which I spent a fair amount of time in throughout the semester, was not what I remembered nor what I had expected. As a resident now and not a tourist: the scale of the city was overwhelming, and its vastness felt like its own form of loneliness. I was surrounded by millions of people and felt profoundly alone in a way I had not experienced in Seoul. I made mistakes. I learned lessons. I made one close friend who I could count on completely, and she on me. She was a Maryland girl, and sometimes I think we were each other's anchor. If nothing else, she was mine.  But the disconnection I felt from the city itself was real, and I now sit with it rather than pretending otherwise, like I used to.

      One of the most meaningful academic experiences of this semester was in my Japanese Literature course. I had always loved reading, especially fiction novels, and I would read fiction the way most people do: taking the story at face value, finding enjoyment in the narrative itself. This course taught me to apply an analytical lens to fantasy in literature: to ask what a story is doing beneath its surface, how it reflects the anxieties, values, and history of the culture that produced it, and try to find other meanings in what the author(s) might be trying to say. Learning to use that lens while living in Japan gave the exercise an interesting feeling. I still love fantasy and fiction on their own terms, but having the ability to engage analytically when I choose to has permanently changed how I read.

      The Japanese Pop Culture course offered a similar deepening of my academic experience. We learned about a more niche side of Japan’s history, and classroom discussions led us to question what “pop culture” really is and where it “officially” originates. Watching and discussing these topics in Japan, where cultural references land differently and classmates have their own lived relationships to the material, created a fundamentally different experience than having those same discussions in a classroom in South Carolina. The conversations were richer, and the questions were more specific. I was no longer reading about a culture from a distance. I was inside it, trying to make sense of it with borrowed tools, and that friction ultimately produced more thoughtful and meaningful analysis.

      I also carry my Intercultural Communications class, in which I did a project on Southern sayings and idioms, a topic close to my heart and rooted in the vivid, image-rich language of where I grew up. It sparked an ongoing interest in idioms internationally, and I now keep a running list of expressions from every language and culture I encounter. It is one of the stranger and more personal things my life abroad has given me.

      This semester also reinforced something I had begun to notice in Seoul: that comparison is inevitable, but too much of it is corrosive. I spent a very large portion of this semester aware that I was measuring everything against Seoul, and that awareness itself became something to work through. I was also dealing with a recognition I did not yet have words for: that I had possibly lived one of the best chapters of my life the semester previous, and that the pressure of that knowledge was making it harder to be fully present in this one. That is a real and underappreciated challenge of having extraordinary experiences in sequence. You have to keep going, because you truly never know what you might get to do.

      Lastly, what I carry closest to my heart from this semester is my host family, and what they quietly gave me: the chance to be seen as a person rather than a student, to force myself to talk in Japanese not for a grade but because there were two small children who wanted to communicate with me, and to feel loved like family in a place that otherwise felt lonely, large, and impersonal. 











And I didn't even get to mention Enoshima, haha! Love that place so much.