My name is Stuart Frisby, and in 11 days I will leave my parents home in Coventry, England and embark on a journey which has been in the offing for years, but whose arrival never seemed probable until a couple of weeks ago. On August the 28th I will be leaving Blighty bound for Osaka, and eventually the southern Japanese city of Fukuoka on the island of Kyushu.

For the last few years I’ve been studying Japanese at John Moores University in my adopted hometown of Liverpool, and this trip is a right of passage for all scholars of my ilk, this small group of people who pursue fluency, acceptance and assimilation. My cohort and I will be dotted around various parts of Japan and the world, from the desperately cold northern tip of Japan to the unfathomable crazyness of Beijing, via the beautiful Aix en Provence and some god forsaken corner of Germany.

My particular destination is a complete unknown to me. I’ve been to Japan on two previous occasions, spending both of them on the largest Japanese island - Honshu - and within and around Tokyo. I’ve not strayed to either of Japan’s polar extremities, but gladly my experience of such will be in the direction of the equator, and not Siberia which my friend Chris will endurejoy in Sapporo.

It would be a criminal understatement to say I was excited. I have longed for this to come around for an age and the prospect of it finally happening is almost too much for my poor brain to compute. People keep telling me I’m going to have the best time of my life, I want to have the best time of life, and if it’s anything less I’m going to grow old a bitter and angry man.

My time in Fukuoka will be spent in the most part at Seinan Gakuin University, a private institute - and partner organisation of my own uni - where I’ll be studying Japanese in addition to a range of other subjects related to the business, culture and historical aspects of my host nation. I’ll be living in what appears from all of the literature to be a nice, clean international student dormitory where they can keep an eye on us unruly foreigners. There’ll be me and my friend Stephen representing mother England, a whole lot of American students and some Chinese, Korean, Norwegian and Canadian folks living in what they call the i-house, and what I’ll be calling the iHouse.

The main aim of my time in Japan of course is the bettering of my Japanese, though I hope that will happen in a more organic fashion than simply through my participation in university classes. I’ll be getting out and meeting people, and trying to immerse myself as fully into the locale and it’s yokels as possible. Even if that does mean partaking in some of the towns stranger pastimes - and yes, I include baseball in that classification! Being a big sports fan I guess I should at least give it a try.

I’m hoping to be able to blog regularly and articulately(ha!) about my time overseas, if not to provide some mild form of entertainment to my readers then to create a full and accurate record of a seminal event in my life. So I invite you to come with me on my journey to the other-side of the world, and to follow my trials and tribulations as an Englishman in Fukuoka. I’m also toying with the idea of podcasting every now and then, playing a few tunes and trying to capture Southern Japan in audio format when the opportunity arises. 11 Days and 2 hours to go.