Every human wants to belong – whether it’s to a sports team, a club, a religious group, or in my case, a School. Little did I know that I would get to feel that sense of belonging from an environment that was so different from what I grew up with.

While I was three years old, my family moved to the United States because my father wanted my sister and me to grow up in a western environment. After living in Hawaii for seven years, we returned to Japan. I was 10 years old. I enrolled in a Japanese school without knowing how to read or write Japanese. Although I looked just like everyone else, I was treated differently and struggled to make friends. This made me feel isolated and out of place. For this reason, my father decided to have me transfer to another school. 

After a year at the Japanese school, I transferred to IISJ. My father saw a segment on television about the School, which prompted him to do further research on it. He then decided that he would send me here. I expected to be treated the same way as I was at my previous School. After all, I would be different from the majority of the students here as well. However, imagine my surprise when my classmates and teachers welcomed me with open arms. Some of the students in my class even made an effort to get to know me and helped me get used to the new environment. For example, they would offer to sit next to me during lunch and insisted on walking to the train station together. For the first time in a long time, I was able to make friends.

Being in this new setting, surrounded by people from different cultures, made me realize how people can see past their individual differences and find ways to make meaningful connections. IISJ also gave me the opportunity to experience other cultures I never would have been able to experience at any other School.

Enrolling at IISJ and meeting the people here has taught me how there is always an opportunity to build sincere relationships, no matter how unalike people are, as long as we have open minds. This may have happened at IISJ and not my previous school because the people at IISJ were already used to being surrounded by people coming from different backgrounds. They were more accepting of me. It could also have been that they could empathize with what I was experiencing.

This made me realize that fitting in did not mean changing myself, rather it meant being accepted for who I am.