After watching anime for years, I started focusing on the culture and language in the series. It was different than what I was used to, yet not totally foreign. So some friends and I decided we would have up to travel to Japan to see the culture for ourselves and the differences between the series and the real world.

At the time, my friends couldn’t save up the money or get time off their studies, so I decided to travel to Japan myself in 2018.

I loved this trip! Japan was such a nice and friendly country, with beautiful architecture and a very split culture. You would have the small shrines, beautiful on their own and often have an interesting story to them. Yet right next to it, there would be a skyscraper easily higher than the tallest building in Denmark.

I traveled in Tokyo and Kyoto, and even though the cities are huge and full of international tourists, the average person in Japan doesn’t speak English very well. They weren’t so bad that we couldn’t understand each other, but you had to use simple and kind of dumbed-down English for it to work.

Since I came back from my trip I have wished to go back, and hopefully, explore some more of the countryside this time. But when you can’t read the signs, and English is broken in the major cities, I’m not exactly confident in their skills in the more rural towns.

Therefore I decided to learn Japanese myself. I like a challenge, and once I started learning a bit, it was funny how different their sentence structure is built up. Once I had gotten this understanding, I understood why English might be so hard for them, they use fewer words to describe the same things. so when directly translated it ends up in this “dumbed-down” form of English.

Sadly, I found it hard to concentrate on self-study, and I couldn’t check your pronunciation of the new words. So I committed less and less time until I finally stopped teaching myself. That was a shame, so when I went back to it I decided to start Japanese classes near where I live. But the class was disorganized and Covid forced many sessions to be canceled.

So I saved up and decided I would move to Japan, so in 2023 I will be moving to Tokyo to study Japanese at a language school for a year. This is one of the biggest decisions I have made, but I still look forward to what it will bring. Follow along as I will update my Travel Blog under the “Japan 2023-24” page.

Below are some of the pictures I took while I was in Japan in 2018.