I’ve spent the past eight months in Japan studying Japanese on a scholarship from Nihon Keizai Daigaku, organised through links with my college at Oxford University. I live in Fukuoka, on the southern island of Kyushu in a dormitory provided by the university with some other people on the same scholarship. As a little disclaimer, some of what I say here may be different in more or less urban parts of Japan, but overall I hope this will give you some idea of what you are in for wherever you end up.