He is well on his way to pursuing a career in languages and tourism.
Jacob Peters, 16, from St Columba's Catholic College in Springwood, recently spent 10 days in Japan on an all-expenses trip paid for by the Japanese government.
Learning about the "culture, the people and the place" he was one of the youngest students ever to take part in the Japanese government's JENESYS program. The acronym JENESYS stands for Japan-East Asia Network of Exchange for Students and Youths.
Jacob said his favourite part about the trip was visiting the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and the nearby Sensoji Temple and also riding the bullet train.
"The temple had all this Japanese culture right in the middle of a big urban city," said the year 10 student.
He said he had developed a "deeper understanding of the Japanese culture and the language" during the whirlwind trip with 47 other Australian students in the last school holidays. He loved the contrasts in Japan, where technological advances sit comfortably alongside thousands of years of tradition and history.
"Since the trip I've definitely learnt a lot more about the culture and the language and collaborating with the other students, it's really helped me learning the language."
"I was pretty nervous, the other students were in years 11 or 12," he said.
Part of the idea for the trip is to build stronger ties with Japan and part of Jacob's post trip mission is to convince his friends that Japan is "cool".
"It's very bright [in the cities], it's got anime, it was different to what I was expecting and was cool to experience."
His teacher Shizue Sato said St Columba's was selected for the program "consecutively by the Consulate General of Japan three times since December last year and eight senior students participated in the program".
"Jacob was one of the youngest participants. He is a very mature and responsible student and represented St Columba's community and Australia very well," Mrs Sato said.
Mrs Sato said the program was not open to the public.
"The Consulate General of Japan in Sydney select a few schools in NSW as schools which have very active and successful Japanese language programs at the senior high school level. Only four students were selected from those schools in NSW," she said.
For Jacob it was a great stepping stone to bigger things.
"I definitely want to make language part of my career and study it at uni," Jacob said.
