A little background: 23/Asian male/never had a girlfriend before. Currently living in Japan.

So I made a new Japanese friend yesterday who handed me a flyer for some sort of youth meet thing. I was interested at the prospect of meeting new people but it seemed expensive so I told him I wouldn't be able to afford it. He told me not to worry and asked me to meet him today so I could go as a member of staff. I barely knew the guy but I admired his confidence so I said fuck it and accepted, going with zero expectations.

So I met him at his school and he introduced me to his club mates. They were all guys but I managed to make quick friends with one of them exploiting the "wtf-you're-american?" trick. Apparently they wanted me to help pass out more flyers to random people on the street. I've never done anything like that before but figured it would be a perfect chance to practice opening sets. Problem was, it was already past 9pm so it was a bit difficult to get started. I paired up with my new friend and we walked around trying to find some sets to open on.

We were both new to this so we were met by a lot of AA but we stuck to it and eventually managed to open on a HB7 waiting at a bus stop. We pretended that I was having trouble understand something in Japanese and asked her if she could speak English to help translate. Of course, she couldn't speak English at all but it was enough to break the ice and have a nice chat with her. After a couple of minutes her bus came and we waved her off, successfully passing off our first flyer. Feeling a bit more confident now, we met back up with my initial contact. This guy had been opening on everyone passing by, regardless of how large the set was. Zero AA. We tagged along to add some support and chatted with a few more people, each time using my foreigner status as a talking point.

As we were about to call it quits for the night, we opened on one last set of girls coming out of a restaurant, HB6, HB7, and HB8. HB6 looked foreign so we tried to open using English but it turns out she was actually half-japanese, half-indian and couldn't speak it at all. As my friend chatted up the other two, I noticed she was looking around a lot like she didn't want to be there. So I got her attention and asked about her parents and if she could speak Hindi, etc. I managed to warm her up pretty quickly while maintaining strong eye contact and a genuine smile. Meanwhile, HB7 and HB8 noticed this and started turning their attention towards me. I gave them small glances but mainly focused eye contact on HB6. HB8 was eye fucking the shit out of me, which was weird considering I've never had anyone done that to me before. I pretty much brushed her off every time though as a DHV. Despite my weak Japanese, I managed to keep the conversation going for quite a while before they noticed it was 11:30pm and decided to head home. Regretfully, I didn't ask them for their numbers but I've learned a lot from this and will definitely make sure to do it next time.

Overall had a really great time and received a major confidence boost. I wouldn't have even shown up tonight in the first place if not for Seddit.