I'm moving to Japan

February 27th, 2026

For about five months, anyway.

I’ve wanted to go to Japan as long as I can remember. I grew up with Pokémon, and the other games I played were almost exclusively Nintendo. Little did I know, I was slowly getting indoctrinated into Japanese culture.

My first Pokémon game when I was seven years old was SoulSilver on the DS, a remake of Silver for the GameBoy Color. It came with the Pokéwalker, a fancy pedometer that you could transfer your Pokémon from the games to and walk around to level them up. Sound familiar?

Although the first four Pokémon games all take place in Japan (the real area the Kanto region is based on is literally called the Kanto region), Gold and Silver feel especially Japanese. This makes sense, because it takes place in the Kansai region (in game: the Johto region) (good job actually giving it a different name this time, guys!), home of Kyoto, the previous capital of Japan, and much of the country’s history. All of the towns and landmarks are based on real locations, with cities based on Kyoto, Osaka, and Nara, and landmarks based on real temples, tombs and mountains (this reddit post has a cool breakdown with pictures).

All this to say that I grew up with an extremely Japanese game. I played the hell out of it, and absolutely fell in love. The music was beautiful, the scenery was gorgeous, and the region was so endearing. Watching the anime to fill in all of the gaps that two 256x192px screens couldn’t show just made me fall in love with this world even more. I already wanted to go to Japan at that point, but didn’t quite realize just how much of this world was just Japan plus cool little monsters (and some big ones).

Over the years, I started to learn more things (as you do) and realized so much that I loved about the little world in my DS was in Japan. I also learned I’m extremely easily impressionable (I watched a Pokémon movie that takes place in fictionalized Venice and begged my mom to go for years). So, I started to learn more about real Japan and not just the fictionalized version with little guys in it (and some big ones, as we learned before).

When I got to Rowan, I learned there was an exchange program to study abroad in Japan for a semester, and immediately scheduled an appointment with the study abroad advisor to talk about it. I learned it’s pretty realistic that I could go, and it wasn’t a very competitive program. My major has plenty of free electives, so I could still graduate on time, and I planned to go spring semester of junior year.

Well, here we are. Spring semester of junior year. I made it into the program, I got my visa, and I leave on the 22nd of March. It still doesn’t feel real, and I don’t think it will feel real until I’m there for a couple of days. In fact, I feel a lot of things about going. Mostly excitement, but there’s a lot of anxiety too. But for one of the first times in my life, I think it’s just normal person anxiety and not the kind that I need to raise the dosage of my meds for.

This will be the longest amount of time that I won’t see my friends and family for, by far. I’ve gone maybe six weeks without seeing my family before, but even then I have my friends at school and I’m still in the same timezone as my family at home. Instead, I will have mostly new people around me, where our language in common will often be the one I have the capabilities of a third grader in (although I guess I don’t know how hard a Japanese third grade class is—maybe I’d do alright in math?), and my family and friends at home will be 13 hours behind me. Life will be completely different in almost every way. But at the same time, isn’t that the reason I want to do this in the first place?

The world of Pokémon didn’t enchant me because it was just a cooler version of my real life, but because it was something totally different than what I knew. There were cities with beautiful landscapes and storied histories, something my suburban town that was only named in the 60s does not quite share.

When I fell in love with the world of Pokémon, it was because I wanted something different. And just about 14 years later, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

I plan to blog weekly while I’m in Japan (until about mid-August). See you soon.