Eighteen Days of Trust

At the end of the third quarter of 2026, I began my journey to study in Japan.

The interval between conceiving this plan and carrying it out was extraordinarily short, nothing at all like something a compulsive planner would do.

Still, it would not be accurate to say that the idea of “going to Japan to study Japanese” had suddenly appeared. In truth, “going to Japan to study Japanese” had been circling in my mind for many years.

Yet for a middle-aged person who had spent years in the working world and even built a family, such a thing could exist only in dreams in the middle of the night. After all, dreams contain everything.

Then, on 5 September 2026, an impulse made me decide to try giving this fantasy a concrete form.

There are always moments in life when one seems to have been injected with pure adrenaline. For a middle-aged person who feels time passing faster and faster, three months truly was not more time than I could afford to lose.

A sensible person planning a three-month study programme might begin six months ahead, researching schools, comparing accommodation, and preparing documents at a measured pace.

But when I counted the time, I realised I had to get myself to Japan in October. Otherwise, I had no idea when the next workable opportunity would come.

If I failed to seize this chance, might one delay turn into several more years, leaving me standing still in the realm of fantasy yet again?

That very evening, 5 September, I immediately put three different AI programmes to work searching for language schools, compiling lists in my chosen area, comparing tuition, accommodation, and online reviews, then cross-checking one another’s findings.

AI is indeed very good at organising information, and it produced very pretty tables. Yet it had overlooked one thoroughly practical problem: however good a school might look, that did not mean it still had places available one month before term began.

By then, I knew I no longer needed another, more comprehensive comparison table. I needed someone who could immediately check with the schools for me and who knew what had to happen next. Time to find an education consultant.

The next day, 6 September, I contacted two study-abroad agencies. One was an organisation through which I had previously taken online Japanese lessons, but they replied that they handled only long-term study. I turned to an online search instead, deliberately avoiding the large agencies recommended by AI. In my own experience, B2C clients are extremely demanding, and B2C clients always have an enormous number of details that need confirming.

Unfortunately, arranging an individual study programme is exactly the sort of B2C work that comes with a vast number of fiddly details.

At a popular, well-known agency, whether staffing is adequate and employee training is sound directly shapes the B2C client’s experience.

In my years of professional experience, the larger an organisation specialising in B2C business becomes, the greater the chance of something going wrong. People’s attitudes towards their work are a very practical reality. Even in the luxury industry, where starting salaries, standards of customer care, and staff training are all better than in ordinary companies, a certain proportion of employees will still prove utterly hopeless.

So when I searched online for a study-abroad agency, I began with two assumptions:

First, it could not be a chain. That immediately put the big-name agencies recommended by AI at the top of my rejection list.

Second, this smaller agency still needed some kind of operating track record.

That is how I came to meet Ms Yu (俞千仁), a consultant at Study in JAPAN ∞ PATH.

6 September was a weekend. I sent Ms Yu a message asking about short-term study. I did not expect a reply. After living in Germany for more than twenty years, I firmly believe that everyone has the right not to work at weekends. Besides, administrative efficiency in Germany is almost the same thing as no efficiency at all.

I am therefore quite accustomed to waiting a long time for replies, especially when a message is sent outside business days and business hours. In Germany, such messages are often simply ignored.

To my surprise, Ms Yu replied rather quickly and agreed to take on my case.

Once she had a general sense of what I needed, Ms Yu confirmed on 9 September that a language school in Osaka still had a place and that accommodation through a provider working with Ms Yu’s agency was also available.

On 11 September, I booked a flight departing on 29 September. Classes would officially begin on 5 October.

In other words, only eighteen days lay between booking the flight and actually setting off.

But when I thought about it carefully, the very act of using a study-abroad agency is a profound test of trust.

Ms Yu and I communicated online from beginning to end. We had never met. Even our first phone call took place only shortly before my departure, when I suddenly needed to alter a document and the two of us spoke briefly over LINE.

Ms Yu was conscientious and attentive throughout. Yet today, when the cost of fabrication keeps falling, a website can be built, documents can be imitated, messages can be written to sound professional, and even voices and images may not be trustworthy. Is that not precisely why scams succeed: the more pressed for time people feel, the more easily they lose their capacity for calm thought, until a criminal group finally cheats them out of their money?

So during those eighteen days, an agent I had never met asked me to hand over identity documents and send money far away to institutions I did not know either. For many people who are careful and cautious, unlike impulsive me, would that not have meant spending much longer weighing everything and checking it again and again?

This is precisely what reveals the importance of trust as an asset in any successful business.

Taiwan also likes to call itself a kingdom of scams. Trust is continually being consumed between one person and another, and that is not good for commercial development. Many businesses even use their ability to persuade customers to pay as a performance KPI, treating fluency in sales patter as a self-hypnotising measure of successful management.

Yet “honesty” and “trust” are the foundations that matter most in any long-term commercial relationship.

Unfortunately, because these measures reveal their results only over the “long term,” many companies concerned solely with short-term profit and returns simply do not care about integrity. That is also why I felt moved to write a recommendation for Study in JAPAN ∞ PATH of my own accord.

Handing identity documents and money online to someone you have never met makes every step a test of trust. Perhaps reassurance is simply this: amid all those tests, someone is always quick to tell you that your message has arrived and things are still moving forward.

Of course, I am not famous and have no influence whatsoever. Even so, this recommendation will be one sincere grain in the vast sea of the internet.

Once, in September 2026, an ordinary middle-aged person like me happened to meet Ms Yu, an education consultant. Because of that encounter, my path towards short-term study in Japan truly began.

Study in JAPAN ∞ PATH

https://www.studyinjapan-path.com.tw/about/2