I just came back from a year of working in Tokyo. While that might sound like a great, interesting experience, it was also an isolating one. See, my Japanese is mediocre at best and Tokyo is much like New York City; busy, impersonal, unfriendly, and sometimes hostile, though in a more passive-aggressive way than NYC. Between the language barrier, Japanese shyness, and a fairly prevalent distrust of foreigners, it seemed sometimes impossible to make friends until I found a D&D group.
I tried going to mixers with foreigners and locals as well as international bars at first. The problem with making friends with someone while tipsy, though, is that one of you typically reconsiders their choice the next day. You find yourself looking back and thinking “Why was I even talking to this person?” or “What were we even talking about?” or perhaps “Who did I even talk to last night?” Yeah, not always the best way to make friends.
To make matters worse, I missed Dungeons & Dragons. By “missed,” I mean that I seriously needed my roleplaying/strategy/acting fix. I had tried online groups like Roll20 before for D&D, but the lack of face-to-face interaction, among other issues, kept that particular itch from being scratched. As a last-ditch Hail Mary, I looked for any roleplaying groups in Tokyo via the app MeetUp. I guess that a bunch of others had the same idea long before me because there was already a rather large community of people who wanted to play or had games and events organized.
One such event was a monthly RPG Day in a craft beer bar in Otsuka, a neighborhood on the north side of Tokyo. While it was definitely out of the way, I figured it was worth a shot to join a game or two for at least a few sessions. Besides, even if the games were a bust, I could finally get some real beer and not the insipid swill that dominates Japan.
Seriously, how can an entire country drink weak lagers all the time? Oh wait, we have Bud Lite…
The three-story bar was packed with tables and cushions for people to play D&D, Star Wars: Force and Destiny, Lamentations of the Flame Princess… You get the idea. While there were some unfortunate stereotypes in attendance, most of the participants were friendly, jovial, patient, and funny. Heck, there were even some rather attractive guys and gals in there too! Unfortunately, the “craft beer” was garbage, but it was worth buying a few drinks to support this kind of fun.
Going home with a smile on my face, I knew I would return each month, but recognized that it was not enough. I wanted an actual, proper, weekly campaign. After some digging, I found a girl named Sophia who wanted to get a D&D group together. We grabbed a couple of other players and arranged to meet in the open, public Roppongi Hills. Luckily enough, I could walk there from work, but as I did, I felt that same trepidation in my gut that usually preludes a first date. This time, though, I was watching the sparse crowds for an ambush.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I’m paranoid.
Still, being a foreigner who was meeting random people from the internet, a touch of paranoia was justified. Heck, I didn’t even have any idea of what these people looked like. I was flying blind and the best we could do to rendezvous was to meet underneath this unsettling sculpture of a… I think it’s supposed to be a spider? It kind of looks like the Mind Flayer from Stranger Things if you ask me, but it was clearly visible, public, and afforded lots of escape routes.
Seriously, what is this thing?
Eventually, an American girl and I made eye contact. Like two cats meeting for the first time, we casually circled each other, pretending not to have noticed the other’s presence. No one wanted to break the ice first and, let’s be honest, it would have been pretty awkward to start chatting up the entirely wrong person. Still, she got sick of the awkward dance and asked if I was Matthew. Bingo, we had the start of a party! Mutual paranoia still in full swing, though, we kept a fair distance. Looking at her, I categorized her as “Mostly Harmless.” Then again, if The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is any indication, “Mostly Harmless” can still kill you. After about fifteen minutes of awkward, stilted conversation, another guy approached us. Then another and a third who already knew Sophia from school.
We exchanged names, which I promptly forgot because I’m terrible with that sort of thing, and set up at some of the outdoor tables for Session Zero. Two of our group had never played before, so much of the time was spent showing them how to create a character and encouraging them to be as goofy as they liked because D&D should never be taken too seriously. That by itself seemed to loosen everyone up! We had a short session just so that we could play something and get to know the characters.
We laughed, we joked, we made some dumb mistakes. Eventually we added each other on a Discord server so that we could chat. I don’t know whose idea it was, but instead of using our real names, we each called ourselves by our characters’ names. Sophia was Orchid. Kevin the Great was Elred, or El for short. Aaron was the black Dragonborn Doug Dimadome and the other guy was Milo, the halfling riding his friendly, slobbery Saint Bernard Mimsy. Oh yeah, if you haven’t noticed, some of the players’ names have been changed at their request. Kevin’s really not that great. He’s wonderful.
By our next session, we had another player join and thank the gods it was a second girl! I don’t know about you, but I’ve found that roleplaying groups dominated by guys tend to get kind of weird and uncomfortable. Thus Lillie joined us as Aeliana. By the end of the year, Milo dropped out, but we picked up Mr. Awesome who played Krell and another Aaron, playing Feather. For a long time, we gamed more than we hung out. We just heard our character names and even referred to each other by them on the street. Frankly, I heard their character names so much more often that it took me nearly three months to get their real names straight.
We started playing in Sophia’s apartment when she felt comfortable enough with us. She cooked for us for almost every session in exchange for a boozy drink or two and the privilege of making our characters suffer. Frequently.
The after-effects of a character death.
Yet we did not always meet for D&D. If Sophia was too busy to prep for a session or we just wanted to do something different, we would! Cards Against Humanity? Sure! We already knew that we were all horrible people anyhow. Indian food and karaoke? Absolutely! Nothing like locking yourself in a box with a mic and terrible singing to bond with someone. We even tried to get together and visit Tokyo’s only capybara and cat café! You know you’ve made friends if you are doing something that weird.
We also frequently chatted about video games before and after D&D and Lillie actually works for a fairly high-end studio. When the Tokyo Game Show rolled around, it made sense to go together! Lillie even brought her long-term Japanese boyfriend along and, while browsing the booths and demos, we managed to get the rather shy guy to come out of his shell a bit. This event led to a small Halloween party with the happy couple and their friends inviting us along. Card games, drinking, and terrifying ourselves with Resident Evil VII (aka Biohazard VII) loosened lips and opened hearts between people we had never met before that night.
Frankly, by the end of the year, I was fairly crushed to say goodbye to these goofballs. Collaborating, creating, pranking each other, and weaving a story in our heads drew us closer than many others that I have called “friends.” We introduced each other to our outside friends, expanding our network, our community. We supported each other when things got rough at work or university or when the Coronavirus hit and drove several of us back to our home countries.
We also had no idea that the others even existed before we started playing D&D together.
Bars, parties, clubs, yeah, those are nice. They’re fun, but they’re not the best place to make a community in a new home. Work? You might find some people there to hang out with if you’re lucky. If you really want to make friends, though, if you really want to find people who will hold you up when everything else is trying to tear you down, stick to your guns. If there is something you love or simply enjoy, find other people who feel the same! Find people you can share that with. For me, that was D&D and gaming. For others, it could be hiking, or music, or books. It could be anything!
Those you meet may not always be your kind of people, but eventually you will find someone to make you feel less alone in an overwhelming world. That’s how you make a community for yourself. That’s how you turn a new place to live into a home.
