The mandate of self-access centers is to provide a venue, materials and support for self-directed learning; taking learning outside of the classroom. The Academic Achievement Center (AAC), on which this paper focusses, is a support service offered within a self-access center at a university in Japan. Students who receive support do so on a completely voluntary basis, in a self-directed effort to support and enhance their classroom learning. This paper was written as a collaboration between the coordinator of the AAC and three peer tutors, who were employed in the center. At the time of writing, one of the authors was a student in the Graduate School of Japanese Language Teaching Practices, while two were undergraduate students in the Faculty of International Liberal Arts; taking their learning outside of the self-access center and sharing it with a wider audience. This paper was motivated by the desire on the part of the peer tutors to share what we are doing in the AAC with those thinking of, or in the process of, creating a tutoring center, especially in Japan. Additionally, it was written to give readers an insight into how a tutoring center in an international university in Japan is run, as well as its successes and challenges. The paper itself is a co-authored publication by a professor and a few student-tutors, representing the vast possibilities of active and collaborative research which can be done in a university setting.