I’m not sure how many current participants / alumni of the JET Program regularly read my site, but if you’re out there…

I was asked by JET alum and all-around nice guy Steven Horowitz to plug his new website JetWit.com, a blog “for the JET alumni freelance and professional community”. It looks pretty good, so if you’re a freelancer / professional JET alum (or a freelancer / pro who’s interested in Japan), check it out:

JetWit.com Homepage

I’ve been to Japan a few times now. First as a high school exchange student, then as an educator through the JET program, and most recently for as a ”tourist”,  living with my then-girlfriend for three months at the tail end of 2006.

My first night in her apartment she gave me the obligatory tour. The thing that most caught my attention was the shower. It looked like something from straight out of the Industrial Revolution.

It was an imposing metal unit, and its operation required the use of five different cranks and knobs. That evening my girlfriend provided the necessary explanation:

“Turn this knob to start the gas. Then turn that knob to “high”, and then push and turn this knob, and hold it down. While holding it down, turn this crank. [*click, click, click*] Okay, look in the little window. Can you see the blue flame?”

I looked in the window: “No.”

“You need to get the angle right. Look again.”

I scrutinized the inside of the metal box from every possible angle, but still didn’t see it. Wait. There’s something, but it looks more like a reflection from somewhere, or a dying ghost. “You mean this little thing?”

“Yes, that’s it. Now turn this knob to here. Okay, if the water gets too hot or cold, adjust that knob over there. NEVER turn it past this point, or you’ll get burned. Enjoy your shower.”

So I took my first shower in my new home. The funny thing was, with five different knobs, there was still no way to adjust the water pressure. It was either barely on, or off.

During the course of my shower, occasionally an arm, thin and yellow as an egg noodle, would squeeze through the crack in the door, check the water temperature, adjust the knobs accordingly, and then slip back out.

When my shower was done, I had tea with my girlfriend, the owner of the helpful arm. She explained that the shower was like a person; you needed to get to know its moods. If the water was just the perfect temperature, then it would soon be too hot or too cold. You had to anticipate this and act preemptively.

For the first shower, the arm took care of things for me. The second time I showered, the arm was at work, so everything was up to me. I struggled with some knobs and got the little blue ghost to appear. Then I played with more knobs and got the water going. Sometimes it would be so hot it could give you second degree burns, other times it was ice cold. Eventually I started to get the hang of it.

That night, I talked to my girlfriend. I took a shower today, I told her, but I’m not sure I did everything right…

She looked me up and down and said solemnly, “Well, you’re still alive, so you probably did okay.”

Pictured Below: The shower unit, in all its wonderful, horrible glory

Pictured: The upper right corner of a poster from one of my elementary schools, featuring all the teachers’ photos and names. Yours truly is pictured hovering in the little UFO.

Here is the ninth and final of my Tuesday mini-series of reflections on my experiences in the JET Program, lazily culled from e-mails sent to friends and family at the time. This one looks to be from August 2004, written in recognition of my one-year anniversary in Japan:

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As some of you may know, before coming to Japan I spent a year at a classy four star hotel conveniently located in the heart of Minneapolis’ financial district (as dramatized on my comic book Young Men of a Certain Mind). I worked in the capacity of a night bellman, arriving everyday at 11pm and staying until 7am. I spent my time helping the odd late arriver with their bags, shining shoes, delivering papers, or wandering around the hallways, looking for trouble.

But the life of a bellman isn’t as exciting as it might seem. In the course of a year I ran into only one couple having sex in the stairwell, only one naked man who got locked out of his room somehow, broke down only one door, and brought cereal to Janet Jackson at 3am only once. The television programs would have you believe that all this happens to a bellman nightly, but that’s just not the reality of the job. It’s actually pretty boring.

It’s hard for me to believe that the amount of time I’ve spent in Japan is just now roughly equal to the time I spent at the hotel. At the end of my year at the hotel, my bank account had a few more thousand dollars in it. That’s about all I have to show for the experience. In the same amount of time in Japan, my whole world has been transformed. I’m starting to slowly grasp some of the mores and ways. Signs aren’t just a collection of meaningless squiggles, they have meaning. And the conversations I overhear are no longer just complete gibberish, now they’re only 95% gibberish. Okay, granted, I still need another year to really get my Japanese to a true conversational level (I’m staying for a second year for those of you who didn’t know), but still I think it’s pretty cool that two years that I could have spent puttering around empty hotel hallways (or working as a graphic designer or whatever) will instead be spent reaching a working level of language and cultural proficiency. I dunno, it’s interesting to me anyway…

And on top of that, after planning and scripting it for a year, I’ve officially started production on my next comic book project. Not only is this comic more labor-intensive than any of my previous efforts, it’s also likely to be more than two hundred pages (my longest single narrative to date was sixty pages long). After slaving away for three weeks, I’ve managed to churn out about three and a half pages of finished comic. If I can continue at this breakneck pace, I’ll finish the whole thing in 170 weeks, which is juuust over my goal of finishing the whole thing in a year and a half, so… er… that’s good…
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And that was it. 

Even though I stayed in Japan for another two years after I wrote this, that was the last mass e-mail I ever sent out. I don’t think I really planned it to be the last one, and I don’t know why I stopped writing them. Probably to devote more time to the comic, I guess.

The comic book referenced is, of course, Tonoharu. Tonoharu would go on to be  twice as long as I originally projected (at least), and despite my hopes, wouldn’t even come close to being finished before I left the JET Program. But oh well, that’s the way it goes.

It’s also funny to look at this old e-mail now and see that I thought I’d have reached a “working level of language and cultural proficiency” by the end of my second year. Ah, sweet, naive optimism…

But anyway… that’s it! The end of the JET Program Reflections entries. From here on out, the old blog will be updated just once a week on Fridays, just like the masthead says.

But I’m sure I’ll revisit the JET Program again in future entries from time to time, so I implore JET Program enthusiasts to continue to stop by on Fridays. Peace!

Here is the eighth in my Tuesday mini-series of reflections on my experiences teaching English in Japan through the JET Program, lazily culled from e-mails sent to friends and family at the time. This one looks to be from April 2004:  

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The new Japanese school year just began today. Actually officially school started on Monday, but if you’re like me you believe that much in the same way that “Life Begins at 40″, a Japanese school year doesn’t start until you’ve had an opening ceremony. And today we had one of those. I have to admit I thought we already had opening ceremony because there were two other apparently unrelated ceremonies earlier this week. But no, today was the real thing with an audience of parents and public officials and the student band’s rousing brass interpretation of Queen’s “I was born to love you”.

Blissfully ignorant, I walked into the teacher’s room this morning looking like an unemployed lumberjack. When I saw everyone in their figurative Sunday Best I knew I was in trouble. Luckily I didn’t wear my Little Mermaid windbreaker this morning but opted instead for my tasteful solid black jacket, which I kept securely zipped throughout today’s ceremony. Face-loss inverted.

I’d like to tell you that before the ceremony they spray painted all the student’s heads black so that those with naturally brownish hair wouldn’t ruin the sea of uniformly black-haired heads, but unfortunately they don’t do that at my school. The honor of that anecdote belongs to one of my colleagues at the different school. Much to my chagrin, my schools refuse to marginalize the individual in such a blatant way. I mean sure we have uniforms, but do we reproach the inferior biology of those with slightly less dark hair? The sad answer is no. How my humorous mass e-mails suffer in the face of such reasonable behavior!

A few months ago the shyest teacher I work with gave me a ride to a teacher’s party. We both live in the same area, and since I knew she had lived there for five years I asked her opinion about some of the restaurants around there. She hadn’t been to any of the restaurants I asked her about, and went on to tell me that she doesn’t like to go out very often because she’s embarrassed that she might run into her students. With a shudder she related a story of a time she went out to get a haircut and was spotted by a couple of her students. The next day the students told their friends about seeing her, much to her horror.

A few weeks ago at the end of a teacher party at one of my elementary schools, all the teachers all sang a song by the Japanese band SMAP while two teachers accompanied on the guitar and xylophone. This is a prime example of something that didn’t strike me as funny until I imagined the equivalent happening in America, with a group of American teachers singing a Backstreet Boys song off printed lyric sheets in the Home Ec room. Thinking about the coordinated practice the guitarist and xylophonist must have put into the endeavor tickles me in particular, I can’t really explain why…

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“My Little Darlings” Corner.
About a month ago, I taught a certain third grade class for the first time since I got here. I have no idea how the powers that be decide when and where I go; the only school I consistently go to every month has a grand total of five students. But I digress. In this class, I noticed a little girl in the front row clutching a folded note throughout class. At the end of class after several false starts she worked up the courage to come up and give it to me. “Why would I want a note from some dumb little kid?” I told her in Japanese. No, just kidding, I thanked her. Later I removed the novelty printed tape keeping the note closed and read it. It said (in English):

Hello.
Nice to meet you.
My name is Haruka.
I am a girl.
I am 9 years old.
Thank you.

Immediately before “Thank you” I could faintly see that she had written “Thank you for being my friend”, but must have decided it seemed to forward as she had erased it.
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The ninth (and final!) installment of JET Program Reflections will be up next Tuesday.

Here is the seventh in my Tuesday mini-series of reflections on my experiences in the JET Program, lazily culled from e-mails sent to friends and family at the time. This one looks to be from mid-February 2004: 

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So, February isn’t off to a very auspicious start. I’ve been sick for about two weeks straight, attacked by two separate viral infections back to back. I’m okay now, but it was rough going for a while there. Various people around me speculated that the children I teach were to blame, but I’m almost more inclined to blame the teachers. One thing about Japan that I think we can move out of the “culturally relative” column and into the “just plain lame” column is the fact that there is no substitute teacher system. That means if a teacher doesn’t show up, another already overworked teacher has to pick up the slack. So unless a teacher is like deathly ill, they come in. How Japanese people have the highest life expectancy in the world I’ll never understand…

Do you remember during the SARS scare, they showed all this news footage of people in Hong Kong or wherever wearing surgical masks? I suppose the intention of that footage was to provide a visual example of the hysteria and fear–I mean, I think the plague would have to break out before we’d wear something like that in the West, otherwise we’d just feel too stupid. But here in Japan (and let’s speculate Asia at large so that my SARS lead-in makes sense), it’s not really that rare at all; I mean, kids wear them everyday when they dish up food for other kids during school lunch. It looks pretty funny, actually, this line of kids dishing up food wearing lab aprons, shower caps and masks. So that SARS scare news footage might have been a touch misleading in that sense. I think most people wear them so they don’t make OTHERS sick rather than to save themselves from sickness. All around me, during this flu season, I’ve heard the hacking and sniffling of various mask-wearing teachers, and I think it finally caught up with me. I missed just under two straight weeks of school, so now I’m frantically trying to salvage the rest of this month and make up for as many missed classes as I can, while planning for new ones.

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And now on to “Reader’s Corner”. My “Christmas in Japan” entry has drummed up more reader mail than any before. As you may remember, in the last installment a reader corrected my erroneous assertion that Christmas Cakes were a purely Japanese invention. Another reader had this to say on the subject:

“While your correspondent was correct in pointing out that the “Christmas Cake” is, strictly speaking, a “British import”, in that country, I believe it is actually something entirely different (i.e. not a grocery-store-style birthday cake that says “Marry Xmas” on it). I’ll leave it at that.”

Not leaving it at that, the reader went on to say, with a grim smile on his thin lips: “Also, you probably know the other meaning of Christmas Cake (“kurisumasu keeki”) in Japanese, but in case you don’t, it’s a euphemism for a woman who’s turning 25 years old and is still unmarried. Until recently, 25 was considered the “expiration date” for would-be brides, after which point they, like the cakes on December 26th, “sell for half price”. Though this politically incorrect term is still widely used, the average marriage age for women in Japan is now something like 28, rendering it meaningless.” This said, our reader noticed and tried to dislodge a small piece of tobacco, left on his lower lip from a hand rolled cigarette, by blowing on it. When this failed to produce results, he finally removed it with his fingers.

Another reader, a girl from Alabama that I’ve never met before, took offense at another part of my “Christmas in Japan” article, in which I asserted that “eating Kentucky Fried Chicken accompanied by champagne was a 200 year old Polish Christmas tradition.” She lived in Poland for one year, she told me, and the only Polish Christmas tradition of note is that of keeping live carp in the bathtub. “Vodka” she went on, “being the most popular ‘tipple’ in Poland would most likely have been served with the carp.”
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Check back next Tuesday for Part Eight.

Here is the sixth in my Tuesday mini-series of reflections on my experiences in the JET Program, lazily culled from e-mails sent to friends and family at the time. This one looks to be from January 2004ish:

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It’s been a while since I’ve sent out one of these mass e-mails. I guess the main reason is for this lapse is I’ve been here long enough to have fallen into a routine, so there’s less to write about. Also, and I don’t mean to be melodramatic about it or anything, but I’ve started to forget some of what is exclusive to Japan, what is exclusive to America, and what is ubiquitous. Obviously there are some things you could never mix up, like eight-story malls and smoking areas in McDonald’s, but for other things the lines have blurred. Like, do we have skinny, one person wide escalators in the U.S.? I don’t think so, but maybe. Lapses such as this has made it a little harder to make fun of Japan from the framework of a culturally superior point of view, because I’ve forgotten what is funny and backwards, and what is normal. So please start sending me tapes of Paris Hilton exposes immediately!

Lacking anything of substance to say, I’ll retreat to discussions of the weather. It hasn’t been Minnesota-cold or anything, but it’s been pretty cold over here. It’s been the coldest it’s been in twelve years. Actually, I’m not sure if that’s true, but I seem to recall someone saying something that related the weather to “twelve years” so let’s run with that. It’s been the coldest it’s been in Kyushu in over a decade. There was talk of an accumulation of two centimeters of snow, and talk of road closings. I don’t think either happened, but it’s still cold.

Talk of two centimeters of unrealized snow probably doesn’t seem very impressive. And to be frank, a handful of really cold days notwithstanding, the weather has generally been the equivalent of the colder autumn days in Minnesota. I guess the thing that makes it rough is the lack of heating (central or otherwise) in my apartment. It’s sort of funny that I live in an apartment with a singing microwave and a toilet with a control panel, and yet no heat. Last night I could see my breath as I watched tv, for example. At the monthly meetings I attend with fellow expatriate teachers, people shared advice on how to stay warm; wear black, open curtains and let the sun shine in, and so on. One person went so far as to recommend leaving the door to your toaster oven open after you’ve used it, to let out that one square foot of warm air out.

Speaking again of the toilet, its control panel has both a button to heat up the seat AND a button to blow warm air on your posterior. Somehow this tip to keep warm was never mentioned at any of the meetings; maybe I’ll bring it up at the next one. Another tip that didn’t seem to occur to anyone was buying a heater. I did buy a little heater that can get my bedroom pretty warm; it takes about thirty or forty minutes, but then it’s pretty nice. The funny thing about this heater is it looks just like a little fan, except instead of blades inside the little cage it has a big concaved mirror that reflects back the heat. Completing its fan-lookalike aesthetic, it even has an option so make its top sway back and forth. It reminds me of one of those old cartoons where the characters would go to “Crazy Town” or something and see fish flying and birds swimming and stuff like that. I have a fan that makes you hot, ha ha! Please shake your heads and say “Only in Japan, only in Japan”. Unless we actually have these things in America, in which shrug your shoulders and wonder why I’m mentioning all this.

Wow, I’ve spent this whole e-mail writing about the weather, and writing about not having anything to write about. And now I’m writing about what I’ve written about. I guess I’ve underestimated my ability to write about nothing. I’d make a good nihilist author Hahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!

PS-One of my corespondents has informed me that contrary to my speculation, the whole “Christmas Cake” phenomenon in Japan is actually a British import. It’s funny, because the UK is one of four countries I’ve spent Christmas in, and I didn’t even notice. So there you go.
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Check back next Tuesday for Part Seven.

Here is the fifth in my Tuesday mini-series of reflections on my experiences in the JET Program, lazily culled from e-mails sent to friends and family at the time. This one looks to be from December, 2003:

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*Christmas in Japan*
Please bear in my that my impressions on Christmas in Japan are those of someone that has never actually SPENT a Christmas in Japan. That out of the way, let’s get to the sweeping generalizations. I think one could draw a sloppy parallel between Christmas in Japan and Halloween in America, at least in the way the holiday is treated (though obviously not in the paraphernalia involved). That is to say, like Halloween in the U.S., everyone knows about Christmas here, and you see Christmas stuff at malls and convenience stores everywhere in Japan leading up to the holiday. But at the same time, to continue with the Halloween comparison, it’s not really taken all that seriously; it’s sort of seen as a kid’s holiday, people don’t get the day off of work, and adults without children either ignore it or use it as an excuse to throw a party. Perhaps unlike Halloween, I think Christmas in Japan is also sort of seen as a date holiday, so in that respect maybe it’s more like Valentine’s Day or New Years. Buuut anyway….

I asked kids what typical Christmas foods were, and received answers almost exclusively limited to Kentucky Fried Chicken, champagne, and Christmas Cake. Regarding this last item; I certainly don’t mean to imply that Americans have a monopoly on Christmas traditions, and I’m sure that somewhere, out of all the countries to which Christmas is a native celebration, there are a few that includes cake into the festivities, but I’m pretty sure that all this “Christmas Cake” business is a purely Japanese invention. Eating Kentucky Fried Chicken accompanied by champagne, however, is an old Polish Christmas tradition brought over to Japan by traders about two hundred years ago.

In asking kids about their impressions about Christmas during my lessons, I was alternately fascinated by the various things they did and did not know. They all pretty much knew that Christmas is a Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Mr. Christ, V. Mary being his mother. Okay, this seems basic to us I suppose, but you have to keep in mind that Japan is only like one or two percent Christian, so it’s actually kind of impressive. I think most ADULT Americans (much less junior high school aged kids) would be hard pressed to provide ANY facts about Buddhism other than that it’s an Eastern religion. The students also knew about Santa, how he enters people’s homes, and that his mode of transport is a sleigh driven by flying reindeer (though I did recently see a Christmas snack that portrayed Santa riding around on a broom). What gave them trouble was where Santa lives (the consensus seemed to be Finland, or at least SOME country that ended in “land”) and they didn’t seem to be aware that elves make his toys. Or that Santa says “Ho, ho, ho” a lot. And they’ve never seen candy canes before, and think we eat Christmas Cake. I didn’t even bother trying to bring up eggnog, but they did get a kick out of the whole “mistletoe” thing–it is sort of weird, if you think about it…

Merry Christmas, everyone! Think of me as you and your date sip champagne and eat chicken!
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Tune in next Tuesday for our sixth installment, dealing with the crowd-pleasing topic, the Weather.

Here is the forth part in my Tuesday mini-series of reflections on my experiences in the JET Program, lazily culled from e-mails sent to friends and family at the time. This one looks to be from November, 2003:

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So! November shaped up to be one of the busiest months of my life, probably, and certainly my busiest in Japan thus far. Predictably I sometimes wonder whether I’m doing a good job or not. But then I realize that I’m teaching a total of NINE grades, six of which with teachers & students that speak little or no English and for which there is no set curriculum and for which I have to plan single-handedly. Additionally, I have absolutely no formal training, and my post-arrival training amounts to maybe a week of seminars held sporadically since I first arrived. So all things considered, I think I’m doing pretty good! But it’s definitely been a “keep my head above water” scenario. I’m juuuust starting to reach the point where I try to consider the best way to fill up the class time, rather than wonder how to fill it up at all. Ah well, the end of this month has a pretty long winter break to look forward to, so I’ll get a chance to relax then.

Moving along…

Japanese TV.
For one thing, practically every show in some way involves food. The funny thing is most of the time they don’t actually show you how to prepare it (not that the cooking show genre is by any means underrepresented). Usually these shows have a panel of guests dressed in flamboyant, bizarre costumes. The guests banter for a while, laugh, and occasionally hit each other on the head a la Three Stooges. Then there’s a taped section that shows a nuanced delicacy being prepared (but as I say, they don’t really seem to give you enough information so you could make it yourself). Oftentimes, in the top upper left or right corner, there’s a little picture-in-picture box showing the panel guests’ reaction to what they’re (and we’re) watching. Then after the taped section is over, someone wheels in some of the featured food and all the guests try it. Luckily for students of Japanese such as myself, there seem to be only two ways to say “This tastes good” in Japanese, and they use them ad nasseum. The following script translation is made up yet real!
G1: This is good!
G2: This is good!!
G1: It’s really good!
G3: Delicious!
G4: Ah! This is good!
G1: That was good!
And so on. All the while, the live studio audience is whimpering loudly, because they want to try it too.

The other night I saw a half-hour quiz show where every question was about mayonnaise. I guess you know you’ve been in Japan for a while when this doesn’t immediately strike you as bizarre. It was only later when I thought “Hey, every question on that quiz show was about mayonnaise” that it struck me as kinda queer.

Okay, granted I can’t speak much Japanese, so the situations are taken out of context. In some cases, there may be a reasonable explanation or logic to these shows that I can’t penetrate because of the language barrier. But on the other hand, I saw one show where a group of women were sent out one by one to try to seduce a man. In the meantime an older woman was watching the proceedings and feeding directions to the seducer through a radio earpiece. At any time (and seemingly for no logical reason) the older woman could push a button that made an alarm sound and a group of men dressed in camouflage would leap out and drag the seducer away kicking and screaming. The camera would pan over to a large rubber duck on wheels driving towards the camouflage guys and the screaming woman. The rubber duck would pull in front of them, and a mental tray would come out of the back of it. The woman is forced onto this tray and held down. Then, coming from the back of the rubber duck, a huge quantity of dough smothers the woman. I caught the show partway through, and witnessed this occur three different times, with different women getting “dough”ed. I’m prepared to renounce cultural relativism and proclaim that this show is intrinsically, fundamentally WEIRD.
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Part Five, covering the subject of Christmas in Japan, will be up next Tuesday.

Here is the third in my Tuesday mini-series of reflections on my experiences in the JET Program, lazily culled from e-mails sent to friends and family at the time. Seeing as how there’s a Halloween reference, this one was probably sent out in September, 2003:
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On Halloween I finally finished up the last of my self-introduction classes. Basically I’ve been doing the same lesson, with small alternations based on the age group, since I got here. Thank God I’m done. If I have to say Mississippi, nurse, Snoopy, 10,000 lakes, “get married”, Post-it notes, illustrator, 26 years old, or Mariah Carrey one more time I’m going to puke.

It pains me to stoop to this, but I have a cute kid story. I think making a cute kid story actually interesting to someone that wasn’t there and doesn’t know the kid is probably about as hard as telling about a dream and making it interesting, but I’m going to take a stab at it anyway. Because this kid was really cute. To give you an idea of how cute she was, she probably could have melted even Arik’s dried up heart of stone. She was cute, I tell you. Cute.

Anyway, this “story” (okay, it’s really little more than an anecdote) begins with me teaching my first day of first grade classes at a school I had never been to before. I taught three in a row, and then was done for the day (well, done teaching; I have to stay at the school until 4:15 no matter what because that’s the way it is). I ate school lunch, and thought I’d use the remainder of the lunch/recess hour to leave school grounds to find a vending machine to get something to drink. I read somewhere that there’s one vending machine for every 23 people in Japan, so they’re generally easy to find.
Anyway, as I was putting on my outside shoes in the front entrance, one of the first grade students I had taught earlier that day walked up to me. What are you doing, she asked me in Japanese. I shifted through the small pile of Japanese words I know and picked the ones that came closest to what I wanted to say. I’m going for a walk, I said. A walk! Ha, ha, ha, a walk! she said. The idea of taking a walk was a very amusing and novel prospect to her. Yes, let’s go for a walk! And with that she led me by the hand back into the school (forcing me to quickly change back into my indoor slippers) and down a dead-end hallway. Okay, nothing going on there, so we continued our walk by doubling back and heading up some stairs, towards the fourth, fifth and sixth grade classrooms. As it was lunch/recess time, so most of the classes were empty. When we came, on the course of our little walk, to a classroom that had a couple students in it, she would lead me inside, holding my wrist with two hands above her head. She would then shake my wrist vigorously, thereby creating a crude waving motion, while saying “Harro, Harro” (“Hello hello”) to the shocked student/s. I joined her in greeting them in English. She would then lead me over to them to shake their hands and exchange pleasantries. Then she would lead me to the next class. Sometimes she would call out “Gaikokujin, Gaikokujin!” (“Foreigner, foreigner!”) to alert interested parties of my presence. In one class, she had me demonstrate to a group of sixth graders how I could pick her up and hold her in the air. Amazing, isn’t it? she asked them. They seemed unimpressed that I could pick up someone that weighed a little more than a medicine ball.

I wanted to write about something else, but I’ve already written a novel about a cute child that isn’t even my own. Dear god, I’ve become what I despise. Please await my next e-mail for pictures of my cats dressed up as pirates.
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Next Tuesday will feature our forth installment of these reflections. Teaser: Japanese TV is covered.

Here is the second in my Tuesday mini-series of reflections on my experiences in the JET Program, lazily culled from e-mails sent to friends and family at the time. This one was probably sent out… Octoberish?, 2003:

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Since the last time I wrote, I’ve had a couple of significant firsts. I saw my sister get married for the first time, and taught my first class at an elementary school. One of these two events led to another first for me; that of being gang-violated by a group of Asian children. Can you guess which one? Those of you who guessed Lisa and Bryan’s wedding are absolutely correct: it was a part of their convention-smashing ceremony. No, just kidding. It happened at the elementary school.

If you’ll allow me to generalize based on only a week of teaching second and third graders: Japanese elementary students are more adorable than a large, hollowed-out marshmallow filled with kittens, and they are filled to the brim with energy and enthusiasm. But they are also completely insane. Sometimes their insanity is endearing in a strange way, like the girl that stood there and stroked my arm hair for five minutes, seemingly without joy, the way you might absentmindedly pet a cat that happened to be near you while you read a book. More often though, their insanity is more violent and looks like a munchkin riot. I had heard stories about mischievous little boys that viewed the nooks and crannies of the bodies of ALTs as their own personal worry stones, but I figured I could fend them off. I CAN fend off two or three, but throw half a dozen at me and it starts to get tough; after all, I only have two arms with which to push away these little sex offenders. But really, it wasn’t as bad you’re probably imaging. There’s always a Japanese teacher in the room with me, and they usually listlessly step in to restore order when the kids begin starting fires and turning over cars.

I had Monday off from work, because it was “Health and Sports Day” (a national holiday, apparently?). I don’t know about you, but I celebrated “Health and Sports Day” by sleeping until noon and watching TV. Today I’m back at work, and inexplicably have no classes. But thankfully they’re making up for lost time by having me in class for each and every period tomorrow. This will be the first time I’ve taught six classes in one day, and I’ll be going it at elementary school where adorable children will undoubtedly exploit my fatigue and work together to smother me to death.
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Tune in next Tuesday for another one.

In an effort to add some more of that all-important “content” to my blog (without going to the effort of actually creating it) I’ve decided to post some slightly edited versions of the e-mails I sent out to people during my stint on the JET Program. I figured I’d post a new one every Tuesday until I run out of them; I have enough for probably two months or so. These Tuesday entries will be in addition to, not instead of, my weekly update of all-new material every Friday (Wow!).

So here’s the first one that I could find, written Mid-August 2003, shortly after my arrival to Japan:

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After a flurry of activity my first few weeks here, things have settled down, almost TOO much, to be honest. School doesn’t start here until September 1st (about the same time as in the US then, I suppose) but in the meantime I am expected to be physically present at the Board of Education office at town hall every weekday from 8:30am to 4:15pm. Attendance and punctuality are important everywhere I suppose, but especially in Japan. So even though I arrive at work almost half an hour early every day because of the train schedule, I can’t leave even one minute early. It’s also important for me to sit in on the daily meeting, even though I can’t understand anything and as such obviously don’t participate in any way. I almost suspect that one’s physical presence is almost as important as one’s relative contributions.

So how do I fill my time? No one has actually told me what I’m supposed to be doing, just that I’m supposed to be here. Luckily, there’s really no end of things to do, from reading the mountains of books about my job that I received at the Tokyo orientation to studying Japanese. I also chat with my co-workers, and swap cultural notes and slang. I’ve recently began preparing my self-introduction, which I will be repeating to about 1200 students in blocks of 30-50 at a time. Apparently I’ll be doing it for about a month straight. I’m glad I still have a couple weeks left to continue in my preparations, but at the same time I’ll be glad when school starts and I can begin inspiring students with the sweetness of my personality, and gently guiding them away from their backward traditions and into Christian churches and McDonald’ses.

Beyond that, I’ve begun exploring my little town. Probably the most interesting place I’ve been to so far is a little sushi bar where sushi goes by you on a conveyor belt, and you just lift off what you want. Each plate contains 2 pieces of sushi, and costs 100 yen, or about 85 cents (in Minnesota sushi would generally run about four or five times as much). At the end of your meal they just count the number of plates you’ve accumulated and then charge you accordingly. Neat, huh?
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Thrilling stuff, isn’t it? Check back next Tuesday for more. They get better, honest!

Since it played such an important role in shaping my new comic Tonoharu, I thought I’d devote a journal entry to the JET Program.

The JET (Japanese Exchange and Teaching) Program was founded twenty years ago by the Japanese Government to:

promote grass roots internationalization at the local level by inviting young overseas graduates to assist in international exchange and foreign language education in local governments, boards of education and elementary, junior and senior high schools throughout Japan… [and] to foster ties between Japanese citizens (mainly youth) and JET participants at the person-to-person level.
Source: JET Program Official Website

Japan is, of course, an island nation, and is ethnically homogenous, with 99% of the population being Japanese. Outside of large cities, Japanese kids don’t have much (if any) contact with foreigners, so it’s easy to understand how English education would seem totally irrelevant to their lives. It’s the job of the JET program participant to serve as a living example that English has actual utility outside of the classroom, thereby (hopefully) inspiring students to devote a little more energy to working on their English skills.

There are three different kinds of JET positions, but the most common is that of the ALT, or Assistant Language Teacher. It was in this capacity that I was employed for three years. JET Program ALT positions vary a great deal, but in my particular case it meant teaching grades one through nine. Since I was the only elementary/junior high school ALT in my city, I had a total of roughly 1800 students. I’d see each class once a month, at most. There were a few classes I probably only saw two or three times a year.

English education is mandatory for junior and senior high in Japan. So when I taught at the junior highs, I really did serve as the “assistant” to the real English teacher. They’d usually plan the lessons, and I might prepare a warm-up game or whatever, and then follow their lead for the rest of the class.

Elementary school classes were another story. The homeroom teacher (who usually couldn’t speak any English) would stand in the back of the room and discipline the kids if they got to rowdy or whatever, but I basically had to do everything else myself, from deciding what to teach and how to teach it. It was stressful and energy draining at times, but it was also fun to have a little more creative control.

My favorite school was Ainoshima Junior High. It was on a tiny little island that I had to take a twenty-minute boat ride to get to. The school only had three to five students at one time during my tenure, with no more than two kids per grade (the above photo shows the entire student body, plus the English teacher Ms. Tanaka, during my final year). It was laid back and the kids were great. During every midmorning break, all the teachers and all the kids would get together and play volleyball, having just barely enough people to make two teams. It really felt like a family more than a school.

Like I said, ALT jobs vary a lot (some ALTs had less pleasant experiences and left after just a year), but in my case it was great; one of the best times of my life. I wouldn’t recommend the JET Program to just anyone, but if you have the right disposition and get lucky in your placement, it can be great.

Anyway, I have some old mass e-mails that I used to send out to people during my tenure on the JET Program, so I’m going to post one every Tuesday until I run out of them. (New content will still be added every Friday.) So check back on Tuesday for more JET Program reflections.