So I’m (21F) an exchange student at Waseda, (just moved here a month ago) and I’m having a hard time making real friends. I have lots of classmate friends, and people I’ve gone to karaoke in groups with, but none of the natural, real connection I have with my friends back home.
Is it truly impossible to get close to Japanese people if we didn’t go to junior/high school together?
Any advice for trying to meet people (as authentically as possible)?
I’ve been recommended to try izakaya, but the idea of suddenly striking up conversation with a salaryman or elbowing my way into the college-age friend groups who go together just…doesn’t sound too appealing to me.
Also, I’m in the Japanese language program (mid-intermediate I’d say), and it feels like the people who are pretty fluent band together, and the people who aren’t form a group and just speak English.
A lot of the former tend to talk fast and get annoyed if they have to talk to people that are lower level than them (which is fair, but ouch), and the latter either feels very “I like to travel and party and be hot” or “Let’s talk about anime and sakura and about how non-western Japan is”.
Nothing against them, and I enjoy class conversations with them all just fine, but I keep looking for that spark of connection and coming up short.
Am I unrealistic to hope for relationships beyond surface level?
TLDR: Can’t seem to make good, solid friends here. Any advice? Am I hoping for too much?
22 comments
Yeah, it’s pretty hard even if you are fluent. COVID and our general reliance of the internet has made making face-to-face friends pretty impossible.
Honestly, I’ve had better luck over Reddit than anywhere. 😛
I mean, if you just moved here a month ago it *is* a bit unrealistic expecting to have formed super tangible relationships deeper than surface level within that timeframe. Those kinds of friendships don’t just flare into existence at first sight Romeo and Juliet style.
Give it some time you’ll prob get in just fine with classmates and such if you’re going out with them and such, no need to panic about this so soon.
As for meeting people, people tend to meet either through work or clubs or other school activities so I’d keep my eye out for such things. Otherwise I’ve heard the Meetup app/website works for some but never personally used it, and others use language exchange meetups as well
It took me a couple years to make Japanese friends, and it didn’t really seem to change even as my Japanese improved. In the past as a student, I had an easier time making friends with people who studied abroad (they were maybe more open to making friends with a foreigner).
Once I moved to Japan, I found luck making friends online or from getting involved in community events. A lot of times the people you meet are older but it was a start. In any case, it took a couple years, but now I’m fairly close to people in my same hobby groups, and with people I met online
Welcome to adulthood. Let this be training for out of school experience. Not just Japan but anywhere. Make friends in whatever circles you find yourself in and expect to have to put in some time before people warm up.
I’m also a 21y/o-university student looking for friends, hmu!
The usual routes are club and extracurricular activities, events your university has, events centered around hobbies, and maybe Bumble BFF.
The number one recommendation is to find a group that is hobby related. Easier to make friends when you are all working on a common hobby.
Just try to go out of your own shell and talk to your classmates more. Invite the once you have surface level relations with, to go out for drinks or something like that, to further your relations. It will all develop eventually.
And for your own sanity try not to listen to much to those lonely redditors! You got this!
as a jaded adult living here for 5+ years and counting I don’t try anymore and just be myself. Who stays will stay.
You need to be lucky to meet a person with who can have a real connection .. but that would be the same in your home country at this age!
But I’d recommend using the app “Meetup”. It’s an easy way to find things to do with people who have the same interest as you
In summary, you don’t need to care about it so much. It’s better to make Japanese acquaintances and brush up your skills.
My opinion;
Probably, it’s extremely hard to make friends, like friends you have back home because of the language barrier.
What you can say in a foreign language and what your acquaintances can understand in the language are very limited.
Also, it’s pretty hard to make friends from your own country whilst staying in Japan.
I studied in Europe and it was almost impossible for me to make Japanese friends there. My good friends in Japan are people I chose from hundreds of people I got to know in schools.
Meanwhile in Europe, there were not so many Japanese exchange students in a city where I lived. It was just difficult to find someone who had good chemistry with me.
I really understand what you stated here.
People who major in the target language look down upon people who don’t.
I felt the exactly same when I was abroad. I was a guy who didn’t major in the language but I had learnt a lot to communicate with local people in the language. A Japanese girl who majored in the language were sometimes really condescending and I felt uncomfortable.
Join a meetup group in which you have interest, may be sports or some other hobbies. Avoid the party ones or that is held at a club or a bar. Japanese people are really difficult to get close to even after a while as they find it difficult to open up about their inner feelings.
Watch out for Waseda boys. They notoriously ran rape clubs targeting women in Ikebukuro.
All colleges have clubs/cicles, this is how Japanese people make friends quickly. Join 1-2 of them. I highly recommend both a physical (sports etc) one and a mental/cultural/indoor one (and not JUST an indoor/geek one, in order to interact with a range of interesting people).
I did an exchange at Sophia a long, long time ago and quickly made long-lasting friends by joining a few circles.
Note: These were Japanese circles with mostly/all Japanese native students – one for TRPGs and SF/Fantasy, the other for kickboxing – and not the international/foreigner-centric circles. At the time, my Japanese was shit, too (at the time I had only been studying for two years); but since it was a mutual hobby we all got along, and people went out of their way to make me feel welcome and included; that’s the sort of thing that happens when you join a circle. My language skills catapulted thanks to joining these circles. And as mentioned, I made long-lasting friends whose connections grew as I got deeper into learning Japanese.
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EDIT: I just noticed that Waseda has something like **500 Public Circles**, holy crap!
[https://www.waseda.jp/inst/weekly/circleguide/](https://www.waseda.jp/inst/weekly/circleguide/)
I went through my 4 years at university experiencing this. As someone who isn’t speaking through the “I’ve only lived here as a working adult” or “I went to University overseas” lens, yes, quite possibly achieving anything more than surface level relationships may be difficult to nigh impossible.
A lot of early 20’s Uni students in Japan are still mental equivalents of High schoolers and don’t really have a lot on the way of responsibility. Not a knock to them, they just havent been put in situations where they had to be grown ups, so thinking with much depth isn’t something they experience a lot. For them, Uni is just the next school step. They still pretty much act like school kids because they don’t have any need to grow up yet.
This *is* a bit of a generalization, but when you’ve experienced Uni students basically telling you to foot 20,000 yen bills for school related activities for assignments because “everyone else is” when their parents are paying for their parts entirely and *you* are working the maximum number of legal hours just to pay for your own rent and food, and then they get upset when you tell them you can’t because “it’s not fair” that they have to pay and you don’t, it makes you re-evaluate just how much they really understand about the real world and how being an adult works.
Making proper friendships is a big part of that imo, and they lack knowing how to do it with foreigners in particular because they haven’t opened themselves up to the possibility of treating foreigners like just another person, rather than specifically “a foreigner”, so for whatever reason they default to just kind of avoiding it because they can’t relate.
I was in the same position as you last semester. (Also doing Japanese language programme at Waseda rn).
The first month or so was incredibly hard for me, nothing seemed to click and everyone was already in a friend group.
The main thing that helped for me was making class group chats and subsequently inviting them out to do things (cool festivals, interesting events etc). It’s especially effective in the 総合日本語 classes as you see those classmates the most.
It was slow at first but soon I had a group around me.
In terms of making friends with Japanese students at Waseda, it’s for sure doable, but it’s hard. Especially since our program is foreigners only. What helped for me was regularly showing up at a circle every week, and generally trying to be as friendly as I could.
I’m general, people here are the same as people anywhere else, you click with some and don’t with others. Try your best to find people with shared interests and feel free to reach out to me too! がんばって！
The good thing is that you’re still a student and you have a large pool of people to interact with. Trust me, it gets ‘Dark Souls’ level hard when you start working full-time.
Join clubs, find people with similar hobbies and interests, hang out with them often. According to scientific research, it takes about 90 hours of socializing with someone to become a ‘real’ friend.
Good luck!
I tried to get close to my Japanese office mates to the point that I can call them friends but not enough to consider them my close friends. Maybe because of being workmates becomes that barrier to leveling up the friendship (in my case).
Bars and matching apps did the trick for me. There, you can see Japanese people who are genuinely interested to associating themselves with foreigners. Champion bar and bars around that area in Shinjuku have many locals who loves having casual talks with foreigners. My closest Japanese friends and partners I had were people I found from matching apps.
Best advice I can give is join a circle (or two!) at your exchange university.
Some of the best friends I made during my exchange year in Japan years ago were through the university Badminton club I joined. I played a bit back home, so knew the basics. I just rocked up to their practice one day (by myself), asked if they wouldn’t mind me joining in and went from there.
By the end of the year I’d not just played badminton with the team, but I’d gone with them to their karaoke nights, their end-of-year party, I helped out at their spring festival booth and met up with a few of the members individually on weekends, too. I managed to introduce three of four of them to some of the other exchange students so we could all hang out as a group, and even persuaded a couple of the exchange students to start playing badminton.
The first step, turning up and asking to join in, was by far the toughest part. My Japanese was about N3~N2 level at the time. But after that, everything went reasonably smoothly. Many of the other exchange students I studied with had similar experiences with other circles, from sports and music clubs to art and even volunteering.
I think you already answered your own question.
Personally I feel very tired when I talk with someone in Japanese who doesn’t have a high level of fluency in the language, because you have to wait for the other person to think and speak (which takes a lot of energy and patience) and you also have to dumb down your vocabulary so they can understand what you’re saying and you don’t have to repeat the same thing twice. That usually also means that you cannot have deep and more complex conversations with the other person, and as a result, you’re unable to make a real connection with them.
So imo, if you’re looking for good solid friends, you should seek people who speak the same language as you, or you should study more until your Japanese conversation skill gets good enough to hold normal fast paced conversations.
As an adult making friends is hard, but better in a lot of ways. Like other said pursue activities that you’re interested in and find people that are also interested in it. A simple google search will give you dozens of ways to find people like minded. One thing I consider is being the one to invite other people out to plan and schedule things, it’s a pain but if you just join things that shows the minimum amount of effort of being a friend.
Also think about the pool of people. You’re by definition a transient unless you actually plan on staying here long term. People in similar situations to you probably are more flexible with having transient friends. Even if I got along well with someone and I knew in a couple years they’ll probably leave it would factor into whether I got deeper in a relationship with them. It’s not the only thing that matters but it would matter.
Have been living in Japan for one year and ended up not bothering Japanese that don’t speak English. It’s tedious to always talk behind a “polite wall” and I ended up joining foreigner dominated events. I don’t care about making Japanese friends anymore and just let the wind blows. The ones wanna be my friend will be my friend imao.
FYI Japanese that have lived abroad or speak English are more likely to remain open to connections with foreigners.
Meet people outside of the context of learning english/japanese. College circles or clubs, local watering holes that you feel safe at. Especially if a mama runs the place, she’ll adopt you in an instant.