I was born in Poland, but my parents moved our family to the UK when I was just one year old, and I’ve lived there ever since. My hometown of Corby, in the English countryside, has been the backdrop for my entire schooling. At the same time, Poland has always remained very much a part of who I am. We speak Polish at home, and every year my family visits relatives there, so I’ve grown up moving fluidly between two languages and two ways of life.

Those annual visits shaped me more than I realized at the time. We would usually drive to Poland from the UK, passing through France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany along the way, sometimes extending the trip down to Italy through the Czech Republic, Austria, and the Alps. Long before I ever thought about Japan, I’d already developed an instinct for what it feels like to be a stranger passing through somewhere unfamiliar, ordering food with hand gestures, and picking up the rhythm of a place you only partially understand.

That early exposure also gave me a fascination with languages that has never really left me. From around age 11, when our family first visited Italy, I wanted to learn Italian. Later I tried German, French, and more recently bits of Korean ahead of a weekend trip to Seoul. I have a habit of starting languages and then moving on to the next one, but I’ve come to see that as its own kind of education. Speaking a language outside of English from childhood has made my ear more flexible, and I genuinely believe it helped me with Japanese pronunciation—Polish has a rolled “r” and consonant clusters that prepare your mouth for sounds English speakers often struggle with.

Like many of my generation, my first real exposure to Japan came through anime. I remember being struck by how the language sounded—how smoothly it flowed, without the sharp edges of English or the harsher consonants of Polish. The school I attended only offered French and Spanish, languages relatively close to English, and I wanted to learn something fundamentally different. Japanese fit the bill.

One anime that stayed with me was Free!, a slice-of-life series following a group of high school swimmers. It wasn’t just the story that captivated me; it was the way the show depicted everyday life in Japan—the walk to school, the routines of student life, the quiet textures of an ordinary day. I’d later learn that some scenes in Free! looked very similar to locations at Aoyama Gakuin University, which felt like a strange coincidence when I eventually arrived on campus and recognized the courtyard and the gates from the background of a show I had watched years earlier.

At age 16, in my sixth-form years, I started teaching myself the basics. I watched YouTube tutorials on hiragana and katakana, printed out my own worksheets, and pinned them to my bedroom wall to memorize the characters in my free time. It wasn’t goal-oriented at the time—I just enjoyed it. After that, I took a gap from Japanese while figuring out what to study at university. Initially, I had thought about going into acting. I’d spent years on creative endeavors: drawing since I was a kid, doing dance (ballet, hip hop, K-pop), musical theatre, and art at GCSE and A-level. But the more my parents and I talked it through, the more it became clear that acting wasn’t quite the right fit. They suggested I think about Japanese, since I had already built a foundation from my self-studying. When I looked into the Japanese Studies course at Oxford Brookes University and saw that a year abroad was part of the degree, something clicked. That was the deciding factor.

When the time came to choose where to spend my year abroad, my university offered about sixteen partner institutions in Japan. My first instinct was Kyoto—the historic capital, the temples, and the more traditional atmosphere. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I wanted to experience city life. I had grown up in the small town of Corby and studied in Oxford, neither of which had prepared me for the scale of a megacity. So I shifted my focus to Tokyo and started narrowing down the options there.

AGU rose to the top of the list for a personal reason: a friend from AGU who was on exchange in the UK suggested it to me. She told me about the clubs, the excellent location, and the campus itself, and when I started looking into it, everything she said checked out. I was drawn to the convenience of the Aoyama campus, sitting right at the heart of one of Tokyo’s most dynamic neighborhoods, and the architecture also caught my eye. The range of courses offered in English meant I could continue to take classes aligned with my interests beyond just Japanese language study.

The culture shock I experienced on arrival was less about any single thing and more about a hundred small adjustments. Talking on the train, talking on the phone in public, eating or drinking while walking—these are everyday acts in the UK that are quietly discouraged here. I had a Japanese friend once tell me that the UK has many rules, which surprised me because as a local I’d never noticed them. Coming to Japan flipped that around: suddenly the rules were everywhere, and they were not mine.

The classes I’ve most enjoyed here at AGU have surprised me. Last semester I took British Thoughts and Cultures Ⅱ, which focused on British country houses and readings from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey. Pride and Prejudice has been one of my favorite novels for years, so the class was a joy. It was also interesting to be the only British student in the room while my Japanese classmates studied my own country, and I had plenty of chances to share my experiences. This semester I’m taking Lecture on English Culture Ⅰ（1）, which has turned out to focus on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and a continuing Media Studies Ⅰ [in English] class tracing the history of human communication, from the time of cave paintings to the present day. The Shakespeare class has been particularly intriguing because the framing places more weight on religious imagery and interpretation than my schooling in the UK ever did, a unique angle that may reflect AGU’s Methodist heritage.

The Japanese language classes, I will admit, have been a bit challenging. It has required adjustment, but the studies are paying off and I’ve felt my speaking and listening improve in everyday situations outside the classroom—at convenience stores, at restaurants, and in casual conversations with Japanese students on campus.

Independence has reshaped how I think about my own capabilities. The skills I picked up here, almost without noticing, are ones that go beyond Japan: organizing my own routines, problem-solving without my parents an hour away, deciding on a weekend trip and just going. I’ve become more socially active in some ways, throwing myself into new experiences and friendships from around the world, while also becoming more comfortable spending time alone, more attentive to the difference between being lonely and being content in my own company.