Refections on a first year in Japan

Dear readers,

I have a confession to make, I have fallen in love with Nanyo City. It has charmed me, as has Yamagata. I often amble about the streets around my house with a sort of hazy daze about me, thinking – this is amazing. My place is great. My friends are fantastic. There is a danger in this, because when you get so attached to something or someone, it becomes difficult to break that bond. But at the moment, I can say that I’m very happy I decided to stay one more year. It has been almost a year now since I left England and entered into Japan for the first time. Now, I’m sure I’ve been in Japan for longer than all the times I’ve ever been on holiday in Europe and America. Everything was fairly foreign and a challenge to deal with back them, but now I am so familiar with everything – I know exactly what shop assistants are saying to me (and how to respond), I can give people directions, because I can say them well enough in Japanese, but also know my surroundings well enough. I know when the busiest days to eat out or go shopping are. All these small things add up to make your experience a lot more enjoyable and give you more confidence to tackle the next year.

But one has to remember that this kind of life is not really the real world. Now is the time for goodbyes to all the JETS who are deciding to leave this year. I have made so many fantastic friends and so many of them are leaving me. I imagine it will be a strange experience to have a totally new bunch of people living in the area. The dynamic of the community will no doubt be different, but it that won’t be a bad thing. One of the hardest things I have realised that JETs have to deal with, is that you have to fit into the shoes of the person who had your position before you. You are not ‘the new person’ when you arrive, you are ‘the person who replaced the other person’, ‘the other persons successor’ – this is perhaps one of the problems Japan has with Internationalisation – it treats everyone as the same person. Then again, it’s an easy thing to do – there is only one job we can obviously perform competently without having to rely on the Japanese language, which chances are we don’t know. What you have to do in this role, one of your many sub-jobs, is to define yourself as a person different to ‘the other person’. To begin with, you are called by the name of your predecessor so many times (particularly if you are both of the same gender), and then, after a while you see the cogs working inside heads, and a picture develops of a different person who has different hobbies, different skills, different habits, different patterns of intonation. Sure it can take a while (even after a year people occasionally slip up and call me by my predecessors name), but what I am trying to explain, in a slightly long winded way, is that many ALTs I think can get very frustrated with the attitudes of their colleagues, students, friends and neighbours, and the pace of the progress to define themselves as who they are. I can see the benefits and advantages of staying a second year. As is often the case, particularly for Municipal JETs (Junior High School JETs assigned to a city, rather than one Senior High School) Japanese communities want the same person to stay for longer than a year. Just as momentum picks up, and people become familiar and trusting towards that JET, they can leave, and the process has to start all over again. Because I am staying a second year, I know that my connections with the schools I visit will strengthen, my relationships with teachers and colleagues at the Board of Education will strengthen, as will my skills as an assistant language teacher and community internationalizer! This is not what everybody wants at all, some ALTS just don’t feel effectively utilized by their schools, don’t feel that they are given enough respect for what they try to do, and find living in the thick of Japanese life an endurance test rather than something that one can adapt into.

There are many situations, and the many aspects and angles are very interesting to consider and reflect upon. Japan adopted a very unique and complex internationalisation system into their society and education system with the JET Program– and it has not failed to produce unique and complex situations and relations between different communities.