Undergrad Rachael Merrill led a group of volunteers to Japan—where she put her Japanese minor to the test.
Imagine going on a humanitarian trip in the mountains of Yuzawa, Japan, and only taking with you a dozen teenagers—none of whom speak Japanese—and your trusty Japanese minor. Undergrad Rachael Merrill (Applied English Linguistics ’25) did just that in spring 2024. Though Merrill had completed all of the classes for her minor long before the visit, she left for Japan nervous to be the sole Japanese speaker in her group. However, after five weeks in Japan, Merrill returned home with a greater understanding of the value of her minor as she learned how language can be used to form lifelong relationships with new people and their culture.
Merrill’s Introduction to Japanese
Merrill first explored Japan in 2019 while serving a mission for the Church. Only six months after landing in Kobe, she was reassigned stateside as COVID-19 spread throughout Japan. Following her mission, she returned to BYU wanting to pick up where she left off with her language studies and added a Japanese minor to her courseload. Merrill quickly found studying Japanese difficult because it required a certain level of vulnerability to make mistakes in front of expert speakers. Looking back on those first few classes, she says, “I don’t know how I kept going, but I’m really glad I did.”
Though still hesitant to broadcast her language skills—and even more so, to use them abroad—Merrill accepted a volunteer position in Japan, where she led a group of 16–19-year-old Americans as they befriended Japanese students learning English. She says, “I felt like this would be a really good opportunity for me to not focus on myself but to focus on others and use whatever I have—however little or small it is—to contribute.” With this objective in mind, Merrill returned to Japan and began working with Mikuni International College near Yuzawa.
Serving in Japan
Having kept up her language studies in Japanese classes, Merrill was able to navigate the difficulty of using Japanese in an immersive environment with a measure of familiarity—even if it wasn’t comfortable. She says, “You have to talk a lot and do all these things that were really uncomfortable. It was honestly a really healing experience for me when it comes to Japanese.” As she found herself in new situations and circumstances, Merrill then had to trust her education in Japanese and the Lord’s ability to help her communicate. As she did, she was able to serve the school in ways other volunteers couldn’t.
Merrill recalls one of these experiences at the school’s talent show, where she used both English and Japanese to communicate her appreciation and love for the people she served. For her act, Merrill felt prompted to perform a popular Japanese song about maintaining friendships from the premortal life while on Earth called, “I’ll Find You, My Friend.” She recalls, “I was able to sing one verse in English and one verse in Japanese so everyone could understand it. I just felt like that song really captured what I could give back to them to tell them how much I love them.”
The Power of Service
Through her service, Merrill gained more than just the confidence to speak and use Japanese—she saw her sacrifice as a student and as a volunteer bless her personal life. Her time studying the language at BYU helped her grow in confidence and maintain her mission language, which ultimately led to this fulfilling experience in Japan, where she got closure on the first six months of her mission. She says, “There’s always part of me that just wonders what my [mission] would have been like in Japan; it felt a little bit unfinished. So being at the school, I felt like these were the friends that I was supposed to meet and that my mission didn’t end four years ago.”
Months after returning from Japan, Merrill recalls her experience with gratitude as it gave her the opportunity to serve and strengthen her testimony. These experiences were a direct result of her efforts to understand the language and culture found in Japan while working on her minor—especially when it was hard. Now, Merrill looks back on her time at Mikuni and says, “[The service] felt really healing and happy, and I built a lot of relationships that I hope to keep up with for the rest of my life.”
Find ways to serve those around you by joining Y-Serve or looking for an internship abroad.