Not Just Ninjas

I just heard from a friend working abroad in Honduras. She’s had a difficult time adjusting, and has just started to feel acclimated, now that she is beginning her second year in the Peace corps. I am trying to heed her advice, “don’t sweat the first year and a half”.

My experience in Japan definetely reminds me of dating someone new. It is all smiley faces and rainbows to start out with, but now the realities are sinking in, and I am trying not to feel trapped in a job where I sit sometimes for days doing nothing when I could be out helping someone else, all due to inefficient planning.

This is such a weird job… I signed up for JET to do teaching and the ever ephemeral “internationalization”. After I’m hired, the JET office is out of the picture, and my fate is determined by a local Board of Education, which often has limited vision about what a JET is and can do. “Teach English in my city when and where I tell you to” is a pretty common interpretation. Understandably, they’re worried more about the scheduling of their school districts, and using my time well can be more of an after thought. I am constantly asked to be flexible, as schedules change at a moment’s notice, or teachers ask me to put in some extra time after school to help them out with whatever. Which I do gladly… it’s usually fun… I just wish I could ask for the same flexibility in return to allow me to expand my role as a JET. This is definitely an area in which the JET program has been struggling for years, and will continue to struggle.

For example, several JETs, including one from my town, are going to India for winter break, to participate in a volunteer English camp for orphans. I am unable to participate, because I would have to miss 3 days of school. When I suggested that I could make up these one-shot elementary school visits on one of the 10 Mondays between now and then, when I have no class and nothing to do, I was told that the schedule is not flexible. I know that this is not strictly true, because my school visits have already once been changed around to accomodate the BOE’s schedule.

Later in the year I will have large swaths of time when the kids aren’t in school, but I am required to show up to work anyway. I know that there will be opportunities to teach at English camps during this time, and I am worried that my two choices will be taking vacation time to teach (of which I have very little when you take travel time into account), or else getting paid to go to work and mindlessly surf the Internet. Some lucky JETs are allowed to teach at English camps as part of their jobs, in the name of internationalization, but many must use up their vacation time to participate. It all depends on the point of view of your employer.

Upon my arrival to Noshiro, I didn’t even realize my boss was my boss, because the employer-employee relationship in Japan is so different from what I’m used to. As a foreign resident who is not proficient in Japanese, I initially needed a slew of favors; my boss made sure my utilities were set up, two of his co-workers lent us bikes to use, and he picked me up for work every morning for the first week. Though not strictly necessary, he went with me to the train station to acquaint me with the transit system, checking fares, and giving me detailed route and transfer information. He drove me to Aomori to retrieve my stolen wallet during the workday at a moment’s notice. Last weekend, he took my car papers somewhere to get the ownership transferred so I can someday drive the beast. I am tremendously thankful for his efforts, as they have made my transition to Japan much easier. Now that I am settled in Noshiro, he pretty much only calls when he needs me to do something, or he’s turning down a request of mine. This is the extent of our interactions, because we don’t even work in the same city, let alone the same office.

So I need to ask myself… do I try and fight these ideological battles that I am probably going to lose, to try and create awareness here for a JET’s breadth of purpose and inch toward an environment which is better for my successors? Or do I suck it up and roll with the system, and be thankful that I have cushy job, that I’ve got my best friend here to back me up, and chalk the rest up to culture differences?

Even though issues like these can be frustrating, if I take a step back, I can see that this is not a huge problem in the Grand Scheme, and that I ‘ve already had so many great experiences here in the last two months, JET is worth it. Even if the program still needs a little fine tuning.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 at 8:33 am and is filed under Thoughts, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.