Liam Browne – The Playbox Japan Tour 2025
In July of 2025, Playbox took a tour to Japan, during which around twenty Playbox seniors ran workshops in schools, explored the city of Tokyo and the surrounding areas, learnt about the rich culture with our wonderful homestay families, and more. We are all so lucky to have been able to experience this incredible country with such a talented team, and our experiences there certainly left a deep impact.
After landing in Tokyo Haneda Airport, the team immediately jumped into the amazing culture of Japan. We visited a traditional paper making factory, where we met the head of MLS, Masa. MLS is the incredible organisation Playbox partnered with during the tour, a company who uses theatre to build confidence and teach life-changing lessons whilst allowing its members to pursue their passions, much like Playbox itself.
We then met our homestay families, the infinitely generous people we would be staying with for the majority of our stay in Japan. With them, we went on a bus tour of the city, visiting landmarks, markets, and shrines, with which we were all so impressed. We then promptly headed home for a much-needed sleep, ready for our first day of workshops.
Our team taught at two schools during our four days of workshops in Japan: Higashi Yamato Minami High School, and Otsuma Ranzan Jr High School. We spent one day at Higashi High School, where many of us were left completely alone to run our workshops with the students, with the goal of putting together a short performance at the end of the day.
All of us found this immediately challenging. We had to continuously adapt our workshop styles to work with the students’ levels of confidence and the language barrier. However, we all used what we had learnt from running workshops back at the Dream Factory to allow both us and the students to have an extremely gratifying experience, with the performances at the end of the day being so much fun for all involved.
The next three days of workshops were spent at Ranzan Jr High School, where we would be devising a piece to perform at the end of the third day. Once again very similar challenges faced us, however after giving feedback to each other and getting help from Tom Preston, our lovely MLS facilitator, we were able to find ways to break through the even larger language barrier and help the students grow in confidence ready for their big performance.
All groups at Ranzan performed exceedingly well, and saying goodbye to our groups was a very emotional experience all around. We all found our time teaching extremely challenging but simultaneously some of the most rewarding and joyful days we had ever had. It is hard to put into words the feeling that comes with watching a wonderful group of students grow so much in such a short time, but seeing this certainly convinced some of us that running workshops was something we wanted to do many times again.
Having finished our work in the schools, we spent the next few days exploring the beautiful country. We shopped in Shibuya, prayed at the Meiji Shrine, and even took a bus journey to the beautifully stunning Mount Fuji.
During all of this, we were staying with our lovely homestay families, who cooked for us, taught us so much about Japanese culture, but most of all took care of us with such great kindness. On our free day with our homestays, we all took part in various exciting activities, from exploring gardens and shrines to bathing in coffee at a luxury spa. To say we enjoyed our time with our homestay families would be a major understatement. We have formed friendships which will last a lifetime, and we are forever grateful for their kindness. Our trip wouldn’t have been the same without them.
On our last day, we visited the beautiful Kamakura and had a chance to spend the afternoon at the beach, followed by an evening of karaoke back in Tokyo. It was a wonderful way to send off
both our trip in Japan and our last big event at Playbox. For almost all on the trip, this was our last year as members of Playbox, and I could not think of a better way to have celebrated all we have achieved and the friendships we have made than working together on this amazing journey.
We were all so impressed with the culture in Japan, including the care and respect with which everyone treated their treasured country and the incredible traditions that have been preserved over centuries, qualities which we will hold close to our hearts forever.
We are beyond thankful for both this trip and everything that Playbox has done for us over our many years there. We will never forget this adventure and will certainly be back to the Dream Factory many, many times in the future.
Thank you Emily, Juliet, Toby, Kris, MLS, and everyone who made this tour possible!
