Hello to anyone reading this page! My name is Blair Cameron, I'm a 22 year-old college student living in Sendai, Japan. I'm actually from Louisville, Kentucky in the US, but I'd like to live in Japan permanently, so I thought it best to move early in life.
This blog is essentially going to be my personal journal. Things like my hobbies, travel history, yummy food I ate or made, or even academic projects I'm particularly proud of. This way i can have an archive of my life to look back on at any given moment. While it's made for me to look back on, everyone is welcome to join me for the ride.
This post is mainly to serve as an example for my future posts. Each post will be laid out in a similar fashion, skipping or adding headers as needed to encapsulate my month. Starting with…
I went to a high school in Louisville called Valley Station High School. At the time it was considered a pretty bad school, but honestly, I think the teachers were kind and did their best to teach high-level content to the students who were willing to learn it. Unfortunately, I was a junior in 2020 when COVID-19 hit, and my last two years were pretty rough because of it. I went from being a Harvard applicant to being lucky to go to college at all. Either way, I had to drop out early into my very first term at University of Louisville, and entered the workforce. I worked in pharmacy from 2022 to 2025.
I chose my current school (Tohoku University) for a variety of reasons: location, accessibility, and most importantly major. It happens to offer an English-taught course (already a rarity in Japan) in my chosen field, marine biology. By fulfilling all three of my desires (being in Japan, English-taught, good major option) it became a no-brainer to apply to. Somehow I managed to get in and here we are! I consider myself very lucky to be here, and every day I learn something new. The professors are also very kind and patient. It's a blast!
Recently the highlights of my classwork has been my introductory labs class. Learning how to use the equipment has been incredibly fun! My favorite is the micropipette—the way you hold it, adjust the setting ring, use the control and eject button, it all just feels like science. Right now we're performing an experiment on the quality of water near Hirose river, and we get to use this machine called a spectrophotometer. It measures how much light is absorbed by the intensity of the light shining through a material, which we can use to determine the concentration of certain pollutants. It's been a very illuminating topic, and I'm already thinking about different ways to use that tech in the future.
Early in my life, I was raised on a diet of fast food, which is all too common these days in the States, especially for the poor (not impoverished!) families. That is to say, when I entered adulthood and was on my own, I had basically zero background in cooking. Thanks to my friends, including my best friend and at-the-time roommate Brandon, I slowly began to develop a basic knowledge, and now I'm cooking on my own almost every day!
Typically I cook Japanese food since it's cheaper and overall healthier and tastier, in my opinion, than American food, but I do dabble in American and other international cuisine once or twice a month. Now, I'm no professional (or even amateur) at food photography, so my pictures might not be the most appetizing thing ever. But that's not going to stop me from posting the meals I'm most proud of! This, for instance, is okonomiyaki, a type of pancake with cabbage mixed into the batter that's popular in Japan, especially in Kansai and Hiroshima. I made mine with pork belly, but you can add in pretty much whatever you like.
I'd also like to highlight this cafe I go to from time to time on weekends. It's called Cafe Mozart Atelier, and it's situated on the edge of the Hirose river, with an absolutely gorgeous view. In these pictures I had their higawari pasta (daily rotating pasta special), daily cake special, and an iced earl grey. The pasta came with a refreshing salad and the cake was some sort of pound cake with white chocolate chips and blueberries mixed into the batter. It was absolutely delicious, a 5 star cafe in my books!
I don't travel very often at the moment due to my budget, but once I get a part-time job I intend to save up some money to travel starting in 2027. This will be quick trips nearby in Japan for the most part, though my dream trip right now is an autumn trip to Kansai, which would be a few days longer. For my first post, I'll instead talk about my process of preparing for and arriving in Japan.
Tohoku University's admission process is as follows: you submit your documents in January for the initial screening, then if you are accepted as an applicant you will take a written exam in math, chemistry and biology as well as give a verbal interview for the second screening. After that, you'll know whether you are accepted, which is announced in April. There's about a month between each stage (submission, announcement, test, announcement), which were the longest months of my life, but the final announcement in April was the happiest moment of my life so far as well.
Once I was accepted I had to apply for a Certificate of Eligibility (COE), where I submitted information to my university which then applied at the embassy on my behalf in Japan. I received that in the mail and digitally, and then went to the Japanese Consulate in Nashville to apply for my visa, which was issued in about a week or two. I ended up getting my visa with about two or three weeks to spare for my flight. At that time, I had already sold my car, so Brandon drove me down the four hour trip to Tennessee. We went to Centennial Park and saw the Parthenon museum (the lady was kind enough to give me a student discount) before the appointment, though we miscalculated the heat and were absolutely dying by the time we got there. The staff there were extremely kind and patient with us, and we had a delicious meal afterwards before the drive home. It was exhausting, but it's one of my favorite memories.
On the day of my departure, Brandon drove me to the airport before the sun had even come up. I kept forgetting my things despite having stayed up all night packing, saying goodbye to my cats over and over again, but eventually we made it after picking up my other friend, Allen. My grandma met us at the airport, having stayed in Louisville after we had one last dinner meetup the previous night. We hung out for about an hour before I headed towards the gates, and they watched me until I was out of sight. Brandon's gift to me before I left is one of my most cherished possessions now.
The flight was miserable, but it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. That sounds like a contradiction, but there's just no way to make a 15-hour flight anything other than miserable. My legs hurt, I was dehydrated, I had to bother my seat neighbors whenever I had to get up for the bathroom, it was a mess, but I slept most of the flight off-and-on so it wasn't unbearably bad.
We landed at Haneda Airport, where I bought pocket wi-fi and a ticket for the monorail to Hamamatsucho station. There the station staff helped me buy a combo local rail-shinkansen ticket to Tokyo station on the Yamanote line. I was an absolute mess in layers upon layers of clothing, to the point the staff thought I might be ill, but I made it to my seat on the shinkansen and passed out for the entire ride to Sendai, perhaps to my seat neighbor's chagrin. I stayed at a hotel near the city center that night, and headed for my dorm the next morning. The rest is history!
At the moment, I don't have many active hobbies. If you know me, you might be thinking to yourself, Blair, what about learning Japanese? What about video games? Well, I don't consider those hobbies. Japanese is more of a necessity than a hobby, though I do have fun with immersion, and video games are like TV or movies—a way to spend time getting some dopamine when I have nothing else left to do for the day. Even the reading I do at night is less about hobby engagement and more about maintaining a calm wind-down routine.
That being said, I'm rather invested in my immersion, the series I watch/read and the games I play. Here you can find my:
These are mostly new accounts that have my history only since about April of this year, 2026. In that way, they keep pace with this blog's age.
I'm hoping that I can save up some money from my part-time job (and any gift money I get from family for my birthday or Christmas) for a ukulele. I'd also like to start drawing, reading more often, visiting shrines, et cetera. All that sort of content will be housed in this section!