A Japanese and Chinese Major

After moving to Japan it is a good idea to try to make some friends, especially if you want to experience the city or improve your Japanese.  So how can we go about finding them?

Well, using English websites are mostly a hit or miss.  Sending out random messages and emails to Japanese people on facebook may look a little stalkerish too.

I would first suggest to search on facebook groups relating to meeting people in Japan, for example “Nagoya Japanese/English conversation club”, or something like that.  You can also try Mixi, which is basically the Japanese version of Facebook, located here.  The site is in Japanese, so if you can’t understand it, follow the how to join Mixi guide to register.

These things didn’t work for me, so I took a more unique approach.  Instead of searching Google for how to meet friends in English, I decided to search for its equivalent in Japanese.  Search for friends the same way the Japanese search for friends. But how do the Japanese say they want to meet new friends? Is it simply 新しい友達を作る (atarashii tomodachi o tsukuru) lit. “make new friends”? That search comes up with roughly 7 million results, but they’re no good.  The first result links to a yahoo answers type of site that asks the same question, with recommendations that are not so helpful in our case (like suggesting to meet new friends at work).

So let’s try Google again, and this time have the ’suggested searches’ list guide us.  Entering 友達 (tomodachi) friend in Google search comes up with a list of results seen here:

Google tomodachi search results.

Are any of these useful? Let’s see…

1. 友達コレクション (tomodachi collection) Friends collection – Probably a video game since it shows up again down the list with a ‘ds’ next to it, not helpful.

2. 友達がいない (tomodachi ga inai) I have no friends – This doesn’t sound helpful, just depressing.

3. 友達の作り方 (tomodachi no tsukuru hou) How to make friends – A great try, but it only leads us to more yahoo answer type sites and sad blog posts.

4. 友達がいない 社会人 (tomodachi ga inai kaisya jin) I have no friends at work, or company men don’t have any friends – It either sounds like someone is sad that they have no friends at work, or they’re trying to find out if it’s really true that company men have no friends, probably due to little free time.

So far, none of these have been helpful.  So let’s try again. This time let’s try searching for ‘meeting foreigners’.  Typing 外国人と (gaikokujin to) foreigner in Google comes up with the suggestion 外国人と友達になる (gaikokujin to tomodachi ni naru) become a friend of foreign people.  It sounds like a great search term but again the results are blah.

One more try.  Enter 外国人友達 (gaikokujin tomodachi) foreigner friend and … bingo! Well, not exactly bingo but it’s more in the right direction.  A bunch of dating social sites come up, which I guess would be fine if you were single, but if that’s not the case then those sites might be a little risky.  We want REAL friends, not one-night friends, if you know what I mean…

After a few more searches I finally came across a networking site that was reasonable.  Excite Japan (You remember Excite, right? The same Excite from the earlier Internet days) has a friends section where you can meet new people.  The most useful part of the site is being able to search for people who live in the same location as you do.  It’s just what we were looking for, but a major flaw is that you can’t see the picture of the person you want to contact.  You can search for people in your location to meet, but to see what they look like you must ask for their picture first.  Here is the link: Excite friends.  I’m sure they’ll be very surprised when they see a foreigner wants to contact them.

Excite friends isn’t perfect, but it’s just one good one I’ve found so far.  Do you know of any?  Please let us know by leaving a comment.

How to Meet Japanese Friends, the short version.

Make friends the way the Japanese do.

1. Search for “how to make friends” or “friend making site” in Japanese instead of English, to see what sites they use and join them.

2. Join Mixi or other Japanese social networks instead of the primarily North American Myspace/Facebook.

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