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The original was posted on /r/japanlife by /u/jitenshasw on 2023-08-11 18:30:51.

I moved to Tokyo a little over a year ago with my husband and we’ve really struggled to make friends. He grew up in Japan until 8 years old so he’s pretty fluent conversationally. I’m about intermediate level, enough to comfortably enjoy kids TV. More than anything we wanted Japanese friends, so that we could assimilate here.

We knew Tokyo was notorious for being a hard city to make friends in before we moved here. We were prepared and introduced ourselves to all our neighbors with gifts when we moved here. I occasionally bring over gifts to my neighbors from our travels or baked goods I’ve made. We have a great relationship but all our neighbors are much older or if they’re our age, they have kids and are generally busy. We don’t have kids. Nothing has clicked.

Hubby and I both work from home, so no luck making work mates either. We joined some community events, but most of the people were either too young or old, the events are also further from my home, usually Shibuya, when I’m on the east side of town. After a year, our only outing with an extra friend was with my Japanese teacher.

We really needed to make friends for our mental health, so I decided I needed to think outside the box, so I made a post on Jmty. I wrote it myself without hubby’s help because I want them to get a taste of how garbage my Japanese is lol. I made my focus on gaming, because that’s what I do with most of my free time with my husband. I made the post a little funny and wrote blurbs about our background, hobbies, etc. Then I wrote a bit on what we were looking for in a friend.

Some of the things I mentioned were age (5 year max difference). We also asked for a person with an open mind as we’re both tatted foreigners, we will probably make mistakes. I kept the listing up for only a few days, only listing it under my part of Tokyo (not spanning all of Tokyo), and we’ve made 4 friends already (1 couple and 2 single people)!! One of them lives less than a 10 minute walk away. Everyone has been so kind and really cool! We’ve been having so much fun the past few weeks going out and we’re doing weekly hangouts at our house to play Smash bros!

If you’re struggling to make Japanese friends, I really recommend Jmty!! Good luck 🤞