How do I find my old Japanese friends?

August 26, 2024 1:33 PM

I was good friends with a number of people from Japan in the late 90s. We bonded in a college exchange program, followed by occasional visits both ways (Japan and US). Our main communication style was by letter(!) Today, I don't have their physical or email addresses. And I'm stumped as to how to find them digitally. They don't seem to be on LinkedIn, Facebook, IG (maybe those aren't popular over there). Bonus difficulty: I can no longer read Japanese (I was never that good anyway)...
posted by Text TK to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Response by poster: Note: Contacting the college exchange program is not a viable solution for several reasons, one of which is it no longer exists.
posted by Text TK at 1:38 PM on August 26

I think Line would be the way to go for social media but I don't know how good it is for finding people as opposed to adding people who are already in your contacts.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:51 PM on August 26 [1 favorite]

Apparently Twitter is somehow very popular in Japan, though having never used it I also don't know if it's helpful for actually tracking people down.

When you say you don't have their physical addresses, do you mean their current addresses or the ones you used back then? If the addresses you had back then were home addresses and not dorms, it's not impossible that if you wrote to the old ones someone might send the letter forward to the new address, or to someone who would know what the current address is.

Note: Contacting the college exchange program is not a viable solution for several reasons, one of which is it no longer exists.

Does the university they went to still exist? Maybe they have an alumni list.
posted by trig at 2:47 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]