My Best Year at Berkeley Was in Tokyo

I went to UC Berkeley, but it was never exactly the college experience I had pictured. In my head, I was going to end up at a smaller private school back East. Something more contained. More personal. Maybe a little more like the version of college I had seen in movies or imagined for myself. That did not happen. I did not get into my top choice. I was on the waitlist somewhere else. Berkeley was a great school, it was in California, and it made sense. So I went. And to be clear, Berkeley is an incredible university. I am grateful I went there. But I do not think I was perfectly matched to it at 18. It was big. Really big. You could disappear there if you were not careful. And in some ways, I did. I never fully felt like I had my clique. I had friends, but I did not have that tight, obvious group that makes a huge place feel smaller. For someone who was already a little shy and introverted, Berkeley could feel overwhelming. The funny thing is that the thing that finally made Berkeley feel smaller was Japanese class. My dad had always spoken highly of Japan, and I ended up taking Japanese at Berkeley. Language learning was hard for me. I was never one of those people who picked it up naturally. I probably got to a low-intermediate or intermediate level at best. But I loved the class. I liked the teacher. I liked the community. I liked that it was not some giant lecture hall where you were just another person in a seat. It was smaller. You had to participate. You got to know people. You got to be seen a little. That class became one of the better parts of my Berkeley experience. And eventually, it became the doorway to something much bigger. After my junior year, I went to Tokyo for a year abroad. That year changed the whole story for me. I have joked before that my best year at Berkeley was in Tokyo. It sounds like a joke, but it is also pretty accurate. I only knew one or two people from Berkeley who were going. So instead of carrying my same social identity into a new place, I got a reset. New city. New friends. New culture. New routines. A whole new version of myself, or at least the chance to try one on. There is something about being a foreigner in a foreign place with other foreigners that creates a strange little family. Everyone is slightly disoriented. Everyone is learning. Everyone is making mistakes. Everyone is trying to figure out the trains, the food, the language, the customs, the small rules you do not know until you break them. That shared confusion becomes glue. I made friends from around the world. I had experiences I never would have had if I had stayed on campus. I felt the kind of social ease I had been missing. Not because Tokyo was easy, exactly. It was not. But because the challenge was shared. And I loved Japan. I loved the order of it. The density. The maturity of the culture. The way a place could be incredibly crowded and still not feel chaotic. I have always described Tokyo as a little like watching ants march in the same direction. That could sound negative, but I do not mean it that way. There was something beautiful about it to me. Millions of people moving through this huge city with purpose, with rhythm, with an unspoken agreement about how to share space. It made sense to me. Maybe that is what I connected with. Berkeley was crowded in a way that made me feel anonymous. Tokyo was crowded in a way that made me feel part of something. That is a strange distinction, but it is how I remember it. When I came back, I had to stay one more semester because my credits from Japan did not fully transfer the way I needed them to. So I graduated in winter 1997, after 4.5 years instead of four. On paper, the year abroad delayed me. In reality, it was probably the most important year I had. It gave me a bigger view of the world. It gave me a smaller community inside a huge experience. It gave me friends, confidence, stories, and a version of myself I might not have found if everything had gone according to the original plan. That is the part I keep coming back to. The thing that does not look like the perfect fit can still open the right door. Berkeley was not exactly what I expected. But Berkeley gave me Japanese. Japanese gave me Tokyo. And Tokyo gave me the college year I had been looking for.