By Akari
People assume that being fully Japanese meant living in Tokyo would come easily to me. On paper, sure. I grew up in Singapore, but I’ve visited Japan at least twice a year for as long as I can remember. I knew the long train rides. I knew the trash-sorting rules that make grown adults hesitate at the bin. So when I decided to spend three months of my gap year doing university research in Japan while teaching kids on the side, I figured I had it covered.
Turns out a vast canyon separates merely visiting a place and belonging to its weekly rhythm.
Take the mornings. Every single one started with me tearing down the back-alley shortcut that shaved my walk to the bus stop down to two minutes, then speed-walking through the station while conducting the day’s most pressing debate: a rice ball or freshly baked bread from the bakery. The commute itself was also a thing I began to love. There was something satisfying about becoming the kind of person who knows exactly which train car will get you to the perfect exit.
At the same time, living alone was harder than I expected. No one warns you about the particular hush of unlocking your door after a draining day, only to be met with nothing but silence. I also had misjudged how tiring it would be to operate in Japanese 24/7 with no breaks. My Japanese had quietly rusted, as American boarding school gave me almost no reason to speak it. A single polite email to a professor or a senpai could eat half an hour as I spiraled into a loop of second-guessing every phrase. By the end of the internship, however, I had that process down to ten minutes, which I consider real personal growth. Ironically, the thing that finally rooted me in Japan wasn’t the language or the routine. It was the people in my lab.
I was tucked into a smaller room with the youngest crew—mostly third-year undergrads—which meant lunch together every day and a front-row seat to a version of Japanese student life I’d spent my whole childhood admiring from the outside without ever getting to live. These people celebrated everything. I remember one of my classmates walking out of his final exam and, before he’d fully processed being done, the rest of us had already gone out to buy him snacks. My senpais also threw me a takoyaki party, aka a tako-pa, the quintessential Japanese welcome ritual. I got the full underclassman experience too, quietly cycling through the three registers of politeness in my head depending on who I was talking to.
The best memories were the ones nobody planned. My senpai and I wandering into the Pokémon Center after work on a whim, chasing it with matcha desserts. The whole lab deciding, apropos of nothing, to run the campus jogging loop. The women organizing a proper girls’ day out for afternoon tea. None of it was momentous, and yet all of it felt momentous—partly because I had never lived on my own in a city before, and partly because it was quietly thrilling to just make spontaneous plans.
The work itself gave those three months their backbone. At Yokohama National University, I was studying a haptic spinal drill, specifically, an orthopedic drill with automated bone-penetration detection, and using surface electromyography to measure whether that feature could ease the physical strain of operating it. Then, in June, I got to go back to Japan to present my paper at IEEE ISIE 2026 in Nagoya, and it was an incredible experience. I sat in on sessions spanning engineering and robotics I’d never have stumbled into otherwise, trading ideas with researchers who’d flown in from all over the world. The forums were their own highlight: the Women in Engineering Forum and the Students & Young Professionals Forum put me in rooms full of people I genuinely didn’t want to stop talking to. Some of those conversations became friendships, and others became future collaborations.
Then there were the afternoons I didn’t spend in the lab at all: a big chunk of them were spent volunteering. I taught English at an after-school program for underprivileged middle and high school students, which quickly became a highlight of my days. Attendance was hit-or-miss, so it felt special when a student told me specifically that they’d be back next week to keep working with me, and then actually showed up. Watching a kid go from barely willing to open their mouth to cracking jokes with me mid-lesson is a reward that’s hard to describe. It also, I think, helped the loneliness from a different angle: it gave me something steady outside the lab, and made Tokyo feel less like a place I was passing through.
Finally, because this was home turf, I got hours with family I had never really had. I have a cousin whom I drifted apart from over the years of living abroad and then in the States, but over three months we bonded over Pokémon and video games. At some point I started using my tutoring tricks to get him to actually do his homework (which stunned the relatives). I also traveled with him and other relatives to provinces in Japan I had never visited, soaking in onsen baths to rest my overworked brain. I am so grateful for these mundane moments. Sunday basketball with a neighborhood team of Japanese salarymen. Introducing my grandmother to tacos, poke, açaí, malatang, and watching her regard each one with profound suspicion. Rolling in at ten p.m. after volunteering, still needing to cook dinner, but content because the kids had a good lesson that day.
I have been coming to Japan my entire life, and somehow this stretch felt like a place I’d never been. Nothing cinematic happened. It was just that, day after day, I kept stacking up small, unremarkable, yet wonderful memories. By the end, Tokyo had stopped being somewhere I go. It had turned into somewhere I live—plain, familiar, mine.
