I’m going to be honest: I didn’t like Tokyo. After a month in Gifu, Nagoya and Kyoto, the scale of it was overwhelming. The crowds, the noise, the stations that feel like small cities of their own, and everything moving at a pace I couldn’t keep up with. I’m sure plenty of people love it, and I can see the appeal, but after the calmer pace of everywhere else I’d been, it just wasn’t for me. I’m fairly sure I’d still be lost in Shinjuku Station if it weren’t for my phone.

What made Tokyo worth it was the people. I met up with another friend from university, and he brought along a friend of his who was doing an internship in policy. He took us to a sushi bar and then on to karaoke, and suddenly the city felt a lot less overwhelming.

The school project is coming along, and I can finally say more than “I’m working on it”. The surveys I sent out in Week 4 have had 20 responses so far, which is a solid start, and they’ve let me hear from students and teachers directly rather than relying on my own impressions.

The main takeaway is reassuring: people are happy with the current structure of the sessions, so there’s no need to tear anything up. What they’d like is more interchange within the conversation time, switching between when people speak English and when they speak Japanese. That fits the big idea I started with, bringing the two languages closer together and strengthening the sense of community, and it’s a much smaller change than I’d feared.

My immediate thought is to trial a test run in the last session. I still need to check that with my supervisor first, so for now it’s a plan rather than a promise. It’s nice to see this move from a vague observation to something with real data behind it, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes.

The best conversation of the week had nothing to do with sightseeing. At a station, I met a woman from New Zealand who asked if I was travelling solo, and we got talking. That opened the door for me to tell her about my experience here, including the teaching I’m doing with my church. We went for coffee and then lunch, and the conversation went properly deep: travelling, faith and studies, and how the three overlap when you’re far from home. It’s funny how being surrounded by a language you only half understand can make you more open with someone you’ve just met. Explaining why I’m here to a stranger also made me appreciate it more myself.

Tokyo wasn’t my city, but the company made up for it. Five weeks in, and Japan is still finding ways to surprise me. Next week is my last, which is still so hard to believe!