i know this is a langblr, but you guys indulge me a lot anyway, so i'd like to write a little bit about japan and what it was like to live there for a year. i'll talk about jet a little bit too.
i was placed in wakayama prefecture in kansai, which has one of the lowest populations in the country. wakayama city is a nice city, but i didn't live there. i lived in what americans would call a suburb and what japanese people would call inaka (countryside). it was a nice town but i'm a city person at heart, and i'm probably one of the few usamericans who, when they went to japan, actually experienced a DOWNGRADE in frequency/convenience of trains. (the buses there are still better though.) also, i didn't have a car, which is tough in the inaka--not that i wanted one, it just bars you from a lot of social events and other kinds of opportunities. so i didn't get any "quintessential japanese transit" experience where you can just show up at a station and ride wherever you want. that said, the trains in wakayama are still LEAGUES better than anything you'd get in a COMPARABLE american suburban or countryside area (i mean, they exist first of all, lol). basically, i walked everywhere in a town made for cars, which you really hope to leave behind in the us.
my town was technically a city by population, but again, i would hesitate to call it a city. there wasn't much in the way of leisure activities besides arcades and gambling, neither of which i'm interested in, so on weekends i ended up going to the bookstore a lot or going into wakayama city to wander around. the library in town was nice but really inconveniently located for me, even the buses going there kind of sucked. and getting to the station was a trek, so going into the city was usually like a day trip type situation.
so yes, like i said, i might be a bit of an anomaly in that i went from a very urban, convenient, walkable lifestyle to a very suburban and narrow lifestyle. this was one of the two major factors that led me to decide to leave japan.
so, jet! let's talk about jet. have you guys heard what people say about jet, that 50% of people who went on it say it changed their lives and 50% of people who went on it say it was kind of dogshit? you'll have to forgive me, but i'm sadly in the "it was kind of dogshit" camp. however: that opinion says much more about me than about the program. i'll explain a bit more.
i applied to jet to be an alt (english teacher), which has no japanese proficiency requirement. if you're familiar with jet, as i was not at the time, you may be thinking to yourself, "well, that sounds like a mistake..." and sadly, it was. anyone with any familiarity with the program should have told me to apply for the cir (translator/interpreter) position, but of course, that's in the past. so if nothing else, i worked a job in japan that was not suited to my skills, so i was bored. like, really bored. like, "i read over 150 books and manga in eleven months while ostensibly working a full-time job" bored. um...so that wasn't fun.
the good news is that the reality of it was a little more complicated. i had plenty of pretty good days at school, and one of the teachers i worked with ended up being my second-favorite person in japan (more on that in a moment), but in the end it wasn't worth it to me to continue the program in the exact same position. so no matter whether i left japan or not, i knew pretty immediately that i didn't want to do another year of teaching.
(a side note: i have taught in various jobs in the us for many years, but on jet i was teaching an age group i had never taught before, and in the end i decided i didn't like it as much. so this is from the perspective of someone who enjoys teaching in other capacities.)
i want to talk a little more about my personal life there. i lived alone in what i would honestly call an extremely nice apartment, despite its shortcomings. it was japan, so i didn't have anything that's hard to come by in that country, like an oven or a clothes dryer, and the walls were like fucking paper. but i never ever felt i hated my apartment and i even felt really fond of it, so that was lucky. i absolutely adored the washitsu (tatami room), i would sit on the floor and work at a low table and it was a dream.
re: paper walls....luckily this was not an issue in terms of noise, but in the winter, i honestly think i was not truly warm for a span of like five straight months. even with the wall unit, the space heater, wool socks, long underwear, slippers, hot tea, the works...even all of that together can't make up for it if the draft in your house is so powerful it rustles the drapes like a breeze. (to be clear, it did not go below 20 fahrenheit at night and barely ever went below 32 fahrenheit during the day, and i'm from a six-months-of-winter state in the us.) so that was tough, and it felt like it lasted FOREVER. people complain about summer in japan but winter was no joke either.
as for summer, yes, it was fucking hot and there was no shade, because roadside trees aren't really a thing in many towns there. i lived on the second floor of an apartment building, so i didn't get any bugs more serious than jumping spiders, which was a relief. (i never saw a mukade even outdoors, actually!) all in all, the warm weather was manageable.
and of course, the natural disasters...i did not experience anything more severe than a weak earthquake, but we received a LOT of disaster WARNINGS which could have come to pass. notably when i first arrived, a huge area of the country was placed under the first ever official nankai trough earthquake warning, which if you don't know is a once-a-century earthquake predicted to hit within the next 30 years. they think it will kill hundreds of thousands of people. so yeah, that was terrifying, and in fact a lot of japanese people protested the jma's handling of the situation, saying they caused a lot of unnecessary panic (reminding everyone of the botched 3/11 evacuation). almost immediately after that, we had a typhoon warning, although it never actually hit my region. and then just recently there was the tsunami warning from the underwater earthquake in russia, which didn't end up producing waves higher than 50 cm but still placed all of southern wakayama prefecture under an evacuation order. again, it did not end up being a big deal and did not even affect my immediate area, but it was still scary. i would say with respect to natural disasters, you gradually get used to all the watches and warnings and begin to understand which are serious and which are protocol.
moving back into my personal life in japan...now this may surprise no one at all, but due to the kind of town i lived in, it was really difficult to make friends. um, impossible even. i lived there for a year and i speak proficient japanese and i didn't manage to make a single japanese friend, because i lived in a commuter town and didn't have a car. (of course, i had many many japanese acquaintances i was friendly with, and everyone's bar for friend vs. acquaintance is different.) probably i could have tried harder, so i won't make excuses on that front, but i will go ahead and blame suburban sprawl for at least some of it.
so that all means i was really, really lucky to make friends with the two other american jets in my town, and one of them in particular, who ended up being my first favorite person in japan. i think a lot of people who go on jet are not so lucky. i seriously don't know what i would have done without this person--but on the other hand, maybe not having them would have forced me to try and make more japanese friends? it's hard to say, but in any case, i'm very lucky to have had this person.
i definitely understand why people say two years on a program like this is ideal, because the second year is when you really start to feel like a regular resident and you start taking more risks and, yes, probably making more friends. i was very seriously considering quitting jet but staying in japan, but i ended up not going this route.
the long and short of it, which i'm sure everyone has heard before, is that i didn't want to participate in japanese work culture (and for an absolutely shit salary to boot). even if i moved to a city and got a job in translation or similar, i didn't want to be held to the kind of hours and responsibilities i saw other teachers and civil servants being held to. especially with nationalism very palpably on the rise in japan, i didn't want to devote myself to an unforgiving job in a country where i couldn't even get all the benefits a citizen could. (a doctor once refused my coworker service in our town! obviously that happens all over the world in more or less underhanded ways, but a doctor actually told him to his face not to come back to the practice, which shocked me.)
also, i've posted about it on this blog before, but the misogyny in japan is no joke, especially in the inaka. i don't wear makeup and just being in public made me self-conscious about it for the first time in my life. i stopped wearing shorts and skirts because people would comment on it. people commented on my legs when i was just wearing normal pants. i started eating less at lunch because people would comment on it. i was stared at every single day, every time i left the house, and maybe the only thing worse than that was when people actually refused to look at me. people would cut in front of me in line constantly, which apparently neither of my male american coworkers experienced. and i felt way less comfortable at work than they did, though for what it's worth, i never felt actually unsafe.
i guess when you put it that way it sounds really miserable....but i know for a fact it was worse for other people in my cohort than it was for me, and at the end of the day, i experienced almost no actual, persisting problems on jet. i definitely lived without some things i would have preferred to have, but i also didn't meet any major roadblock that didn't eventually get solved. a lot of it i solved myself, which would be hard if you don't speak japanese, but if nothing else i managed.
let me end by saying something positive: i'm glad i went on the program. i'm really really glad i did it. even though i felt a LOT of internal conflict while there, i enjoyed almost everything i did that was non-work-related, like sightseeing and riding trains and speaking and reading japanese daily. i want to go back to japan soon and i want to be grateful for the time i spent in wakayama, and if nothing else i really did learn a fucking lot of japanese. i honestly think sometime in the future, not soon but sometime, i might reapply as a cir. anyway, if you have any more specific questions for me about japan or jet, please send me a message!! i'd be happy to talk in more detail! and if you read all this way, thanks for reading! :)
