What I remember most about my first year in Japan is being feted. Hundreds of new Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs) arrived in Tokyo in August for a week’s orientation. It started with a welcome party and ended with a farewell party (with a few small parties in between). We were then escorted to our villages, towns, and cities by our local employers and welcomed with another party. After a few days local orientation and settling in, we were taken to our schools and welcomed with yet another party. During my first year, the city didn’t have enough teachers to enable long-term appointments, so ALTs changed schools every four to five weeks to ensure all city students got to “study” with the foreigner. Consequently, every few weeks there was a farewell party organized by the school at which I had been working followed shortly thereafter by a welcome party to the new school at which I would be working. Sometimes there were parties in between depending on the season, the school calendar, or whether there were any sociable, curious teachers who wanted additional interaction with the foreigner.
While we were known as Assistant Language Teachers, very few of us were in fact teachers by training or experience. If you’ve read this far, you know I had none. I didn’t even have any aspirations to be a teacher. But having a classroom experience opened my eyes and inspired me to consider teaching as a career.
Initially I had no idea what to do in the classroom, and I think some of my fellow Japanese teachers were equally confused about how to use me. This was only the second year of the JET programme and many Japanese English teachers had never done team-teaching, never worked with a non-Japanese person, in fact may have never met a non-Japanese person. In advance of our arrival, they had had some guidance from the education authorities, but many were making it up as they went along. As my first year included visits to a number of junior high schools, including some one-off guest appearances at nearby elementary schools, schools for students with special needs, or community centers for adult learning, my routine consisted of a canned self-introduction, Q&A, and a few language games. At first it was interesting because everything was new and I didn’t know what to expect. After a while, I knew exactly what to expect and the repetition became tedious. But from that experience, I learned how to plan a series of activities and how to stand in front of a group and command attention, and how to interact with a wide variety of people (with whom I didn’t yet share a common language).
Because I was engaged in team-teaching, I had quite a lot of opportunity to observe teachers, students, and the process of learning (or not learning in many cases, I suppose). Because I was changing schools so frequently, I saw quite a large number of teachers and classrooms. I started to question why teachers were doing what they were doing and how humans learn language. I began to feel like I needed to learn something about language acquisition (a term I didn’t yet know) and how to be an effective leader in this process. But this was still the 1980s. Online education was not yet available because the very idea of online wasn’t yet an idea. So, how could I ever hope to educate myself?
To my great surprise and delight, I found a private language school in nearby Kobe offering a 120-hour, part-time CELTA course. The Cambridge Certificate of English Language Teaching to Adults was at the time one of the few international credentials available to EFL/ESL teachers and is still today one of the better respected. In addition to instruction in theory, the program includes practice teaching and observation, something of which I was both horribly afraid and in desperate need. I did the course over several weekends in the spring of 1990 and besides learning about teaching, I had my first introduction to British education standards, and met a woman who would introduce me to Mutsumi, to whom I have been married, as of this writing, 27 years.
But before I found Mutsumi, I found TK. We met in the very first school to which I was assigned, Haneda JHS. I would like now to know how I was chosen for this school and why it was first on my schedule. As I was fresh off the boat, I had no way of knowing that Haneda was any different than any other school filled with students any different from any other students in Japan. In truth, it wasn’t, but in fact, it was. The school is located in a low caste neighborhood, populated by children from low caste families, whose status comes from their association with the handling of animal carcasses in the production leather, of one of Himeji’s notable manufactures. Japan today considers itself a modern, democratic, constitutional monarchy in which all citizens are accorded equal rights. But prejudices take time to wither. The government recognizes years of mistreatment and sets asides special funds and quotas for the development of these neighborhoods. I recall when I was there the school provided additional tuition after class hours, something I saw at few other schools except when preparing seniors for high school entrance exams.
But for me it was just a Japanese school, the first I’d ever been to. What did I know? One of the teachers I worked with was TK, a young lady from a rural background who was enthusiastic about her work and helpful in orienting me to my new responsibilities. She was one of the first Japanese people I had regular contact with, and it was therefore quite natural to meet outside school for a meal or for her to show me something about my new surroundings. I stayed at Haneda only one month before moving on to another school, but TK and I continued to meet socially and before long we were dating and then we were getting married.
Looking back on it more than 30 years later, I suspect we were both too young and naive. I was fascinated by everything in my new environment, especially this young woman who seemed to take an interest in me. I was the first foreign person with which she had ever had any sustained contact and she may have been taken with the idea that a young foreign man might be interested in a simple country woman like her. We were married in the Himeji Catholic church because that was available and it seemed getting married in a church was the thing to do, even though neither one of us were Christian. We were divorced about one year later. The main point of contention was TK’s devotion to work. Her appointment at Haneda had been a kind of internship in advance of receiving her teacher’s license. With the license came an appointment to a new school and new responsibilities. We had talked about leaving Japan in a few years’ time but now there was no question of leaving. Her job was the most important thing in her life. I can appreciate devotion to a cause, but I was not devoted to a lifetime in Japan. Ironically, once I did leave a couple of years later, I wanted desperately to return.
By the time we were divorced, I was approaching my third and last year on the JET Programme. The government set a three-time limit on annual renewals, so I needed to start thinking ahead, something I had frequently ignored to great detriment on past occasions, such as what to do after high school and then again after university. I couldn’t just hang around in Japan waiting for something to happen. I would need a visa and no one was going to help me kick around doing low-wage work while I figured out what to do. I was also aware of being a year from 30 and bereft of a career or any direction to life. I knew that I enjoyed working in the classroom and was pretty good at it. I enjoyed living in and learning about this new culture. I had done well on my CELTA and one of the course tutors had recommended me for part-time work at his university. I was curious about language learning as I was engaged in the process myself as a student of Japanese. Put all those together and maybe I had the makings of a career. What cemented the decision was the discovery of Temple University’s MEd program in Applied Linguistics, offered through an Osaka branch-campus (which was really no more than a floor of rooms in a downtown office building). The program was designed for working teachers with classes scheduled weekday evenings and weekends and would take perhaps two years to complete. The JET Programme paid well and I could afford to self-finance the degree. Here was a clear path to a livelihood, something I might do for the remainder of my life (or at least a good part of it) that could support me emotionally, intellectually, and financially. Everything just seemed to fall into place at that moment and in the fall 1990 I began attending classes in Osaka.
By spring of the following year, I still had no leads on permanent work. I had a couple of classes at Kwansei University and worked with a group of adults near Aso, but neither of those would serve as visa sponsors. And then an opportunity fell into my lap. The last school in my tenure as a JET happened to be a school I had worked at previously. The school had hosted a visit from my parents, who had been in Japan to see me and my new fiancé. I seemed to have gotten along well with the teachers there and requested from the education board a return visit for my final year. Apparently, there were no objections and I was able to end my JET life there – and with quite a nice surprise. I was approached one day and asked if I would like to take a position identical to my JET assignment but working directly for a local board of education. The good news was that I would have to work only two days a week for the same remuneration I was receiving for five. The catch was that the school at which I would teach was on an island in the Inland Sea. I would have to commute 30 minutes to the port, then an hour by ferry.
I don’t recall what I then thought about this offer, but I accepted, most likely because I didn’t have others worth consideration. There were several significant advantages, though, including less work, more time to study, and potentially the opportunity to multiply my income by taking a few more part-time gigs. There was also the adventure of exploring a new place and learning about island culture. Some days or weeks later, the board of education and school administrators from Ieshima came to visit my school in Himeji, the details were ironed out, and by fall I had a new visa sponsor and was travelling weekly to the island.
Actually, I visited two islands. Every week I would set out from my Himeji apartment early in the morning by scooter to the port, ride the ferry for an hour, walk to the nearby board of education office, and from there borrow a scooter to ride to the school a bit further inland. After a day’s lessons, I would have dinner at one of the local pubs, sleep in a teacher’s dormitory, and wake the next morning to take the scooter to the port on the opposite side of the island from where I had arrived. There I would catch a much smaller ferry to the smaller island of Boze, ride my scooter to school, teach, and in the afternoon double back on this exact route, dropping the scooter at the board of education, walking to the port, and taking the ferry back to Himeji.
The best thing about that posting, as it turned out, was the money. More so than anywhere else I had experienced in Japan, the people of Ieshima had a distinct sense of us and them, of insider and outsider, the latter being anyone not from Ieshima, which perhaps until I came along was exclusively Japanese mainlanders (which seems an odd thing to say, as Japan is nothing if not a collection of islands). The teachers in my school were welcoming but they were for the most part young mainlanders, not locals. Ieshima didn’t have a sizable enough population to generate a sufficient number of teachers to staff an elementary and junior high school, and as no one really wanted to live on Ieshima (apart from the locals), most of the public school teachers were rookies on their first full-time teaching assignment, who after three years’ service would be assigned somewhere not Ieshima. These teachers came from places all over the prefecture and were like me trying to survive work and life in a somewhat alien environment.
The students as I recall were like most students I had met in other schools apart from the fact that quite a few seemed more resigned to even more predictable and narrow futures. Many Ieshima parents, I was told (as I never met many), didn’t especially like the idea of their children excelling at their studies since achievers might then seek opportunities off the island. In essence, the parents were afraid children with aspirations would likely never return and the parents would then be left to take care of themselves. I suppose these parents may have also seen such loss as a threat to island culture. There was very little (if any) immigration to the island, so each child lost to the mainland was one less person to carry on island traditions. Consequently, parents encouraged children to marry other islanders, to marry early, and to begin families early. In this way parents sought to limit their children’s options and confine them to life on the island. I saw evidence of this in many young families, something not especially common in other parts of Japan.
This impacted my work as more than a few students didn’t quite see the point in learning a foreign language. While I could sympathize, I had to justify my salary while perhaps helping those few students who might be interested in living wider lives. The people on the smaller island of Boze were even more insular and the students more troublesome. I once asked a class in advance of a summer trip to the US if there was anything I could bring back for them. Porno, a boy said. On another occasion I asked the class what they would like to learn, hoping to find a way to make the lessons relevant to them. Names of body parts, someone suggested. One day during afternoon cleaning, for reasons I don’t now remember, a boy spat at me. That was the worst it got and the worst I ever experienced in any Japanese school. Teaching there was frequently trying, but fortunately it was only two days a week and at the end of the day I could literally sail away.
Besides the money, one of the benefits of the Ieshima job was that it was concentrated. I left home one morning, came back the next afternoon, and the rest of my week was free. I managed to pick-up a private tutoring with a precocious elementary school girl who had attended international school in the Canary islands. Her father had served there in a school for the families of Japanese expats and the father and I had crossed paths in a junior high school at which he taught science and to which I was assigned while on the JET programme. He recruited me to tutor his daughter, whom I worked with for several years, who once visited me in Atlanta several years later, who went on to university in Australia, and who now runs a dental clinic in Himeji. I also picked up a day’s worth of classes at Kobe International University, which in addition to my classes at Kwansei University meant I was occupied for most of four days teaching.
One another assignment I took was both negligible and considerable. It came from a Japanese woman I met on the CELTA course, a woman who had studied in the UK, had a noticeable British accent, and who ran her own teaching and translation service out of a small studio apartment in Kobe. Some of her students were preparing for the Cambridge proficiency exam, a section of which featured a live, one-to-one interview with a native-speaking assessor. She asked if I could assist by sitting in as the assessor and run practice interviews with her students. I don’t remember now how many students I interviewed, but one of them I remember quite clearly because we married sometime later in Atlanta.
Mutsumi was to my initial disappointment married. As I later found out, she was preparing for divorce. I was already separated; divorce proceedings may have already been completed. We journeyed carefully, both nursing our own disappointments. She lived in Kobe so we got together infrequently, sometimes in Kobe, sometimes in Himeji, other times in Osaka when I had to be there for grad school. We grew closer and I grew more afraid. Perhaps she did, too. The time was approaching when I would be finished with grad school and I was talking about leaving Japan. Would I do that with or without her?
My plan was to use my new degree to seek work elsewhere in the world. I had been in Japan five years and felt ready to try something new. I certainly didn’t want to continue the Ieshima job indefinitely and wasn’t particularly interested in pursuing other options in Japan. I wanted to see a bit more of the world, to broaden my experience, to see if I could be a teacher somewhere other than in Japan. For once, I was thinking ahead and formulating a plan. In April I flew to Atlanta to visit family and attend the annual TESOL conference hoping to score an appointment at the conference job fair. I recall submitting my CV to a number of employers and doing a few interviews. I don’t know if it was one of those that turned into an offer from an Indonesian school, or if I managed to find that job elsewhere afterwards. While the job there didn’t come through, the conference was eventful as a source of future employment. I met someone there who would help me move to Kuwait several years later.
After returning to Japan, I started my final semester and set about preparing to leave. I managed to graduate, resign my jobs, and make arrangements with Mutsumi, but the Indonesian offer fell through. The school called to say that my position had disappeared along with declining enrollment. I don’t know if that was an excuse. In 1993 it would have been difficult to verify. The biggest problem was not so much losing that particular job but being left in the lurch. I had only a few weeks until my visa expired, and I was left wondering what to do next.
Since Thailand had more liberal visa requirements and crossing borders was easier there than Indonesia (should I need to make a visa run), I kept to schedule and aimed at Bangkok. My plan was to stay at a guest house and canvas schools for work, whatever I could find. Mutsumi agreed to follow a few weeks later.
Those five years were a turning point, a time when I began to live independent and secure, form a lasting personal relationship with a spouse, and find a purpose, some way to direct my energies for my own good and the good of the world. I remain grateful for the JET Programme and the people of Japan. As much as I loved everything that happened to me there, saying farewell wasn’t especially difficult. I was ready for a new adventure.
#
No comments:
Post a Comment