Feels like home

My being here at Columbia is, to a large extent, a fortunate accident. One day in the fall of my senior year of high school, when I was writing college applications, my mother asked, “So why aren’t you applying to Columbia?” Trying to piece together vague memories from my college tours of two summers ago, I thought for a moment and said, “I don’t know.” On a whim, I applied to Columbia without knowing much about it. I later had an admissions interview with an alumnus, and I asked him, “So what exactly is the Core Curriculum?”

My unexpected admission into what I had thought of as a distant reach school plunged me into a period of uncertainty and indecision, as I tried to decide between Columbia and another school. One day, I took a walk in the park by our house and went up to a high point with a panoramic view. It was a beautiful, clear spring day, and the sakura (cherry trees) were in bloom. I could see the ugly smokestacks of the oil refineries on Tokyo Bay, with the Bay Bridge spanning it, and off in the distance, Mount Fuji. I knew that I needed to make a decision then and there, and I decided on Columbia.

I’m one of those people who doesn’t quite know how to answer the question “Where are you from?” The easiest answer is, “I’m American but I live in Japan.” That doesn’t quite capture it, though. I feel like a foreigner in both countries. In ethnically homogeneous Japan, I’m immediately marked out as a gaijin (foreigner) by my physical features and by certain linguistic and cultural barriers. In the U.S., the country of my birth and citizenship, nobody can immediately tell, but I don’t feel like I’m at home. Little things give it away. I still don’t get Fahrenheit. I often don’t get basic American pop culture and history references. I have to refrain from peppering my speech with Japanese words like we did in high school, and like I do with my sister—let alone launching into full-fledged Japanese or Japlish. So where do I feel at home? Having lived in Japan for 10 years, the greater Tokyo area feels like home, but I’m still a gaijin. The only places outside my house where I really feel at home are Yokohama International School and Columbia.

One of the major factors that brought me to Columbia was the global outlook of the university. I knew before coming here that Columbia has one of the highest percentages of international students, and that the various culture- and language-oriented programs (the School of International and Public Affairs, the departments of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures, etc.) are very prestigious. We’re also in New York—enough said.

The first night I moved into Columbia, I attended a dinner for international students, followed by a speed meet-and-greet. The next morning, there was a breakfast event for international students, who had all moved in early. I can think of at least six people that I met at those two events alone who are now some of my best friends. I’ve admittedly been disappointed at how few freshmen I’ve met from Japan, and I lament that I don’t have many people to speak Japanese with, but that first night, it didn’t matter. Apart from the fun of meeting people from really cool countries, it was important to be in a room with people who were just as scared as I was about moving—many of us across oceans—to what in many ways was, even for me, a new and strange place.

After a year at Columbia, I never cease to be impressed by its global outlook, which to a certain extent rises above that of my international high school. In high school, when I tried once to get some groovy Arabic or Hindi music played at a dance, people teased me for listening to “weird” and eccentric music. Here, CU Bhangra is revered as one of the best and coolest dance groups on campus, and I was thrilled to see that students of various backgrounds attended Basement Bhangra.

As I looked at the stereotypically Japanese panorama of sakura and Fujisan, I was struck by how much I would miss the country I confusedly call home and the international setting in which I had been raised. Among the thousands of considerations of financial aid, how much interest I actually had in dead white men, and the programs that intrigued me in the colleges I was considering, I knew I wanted to be in a city as dynamic as Tokyo/Yokohama, and I knew that I wanted to continue to be educated among people with strikingly diverse experiences, backgrounds, and life stories. And as it turned out, I ended up in the most dynamic and cosmopolitan city in the world, and I hang out with people from Australia to Adıyaman. I have not been disappointed.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.