What it was like being a foreign English Teacher in Japan: The stuff no one talks about.

Part 1: Arriving in Japan

Hello Friend. Welcome back. Thank for you being here. Today I’m kind of blending some travel with some emotional reflection. I’m going to tell you about my experience being a teacher in Japan when I was 24 years old until 26 years old. I lived over there from 2011 until 2013. My flight to Japan was two weeks after the major earthquake and tsunami that caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

And I was scared shitless.

Some context: I had been trying to figure out a way to go to Japan since I was in elementary school when I had learned enough geography to understand that Sailor Moon was a show that came out of Japan. My family didn’t have much flex money and we didn’t take any family vacations after my Dad left working at Pepsi to become a teacher. So funds for a family vacay to Japan wasn’t a thing in the slightest. (I don’t know many families where that would have been feasible so I get that.) My best solution was to study abroad when I went to college. Unfortunately, that didn’t pan out and I missed my opportunity to go as a student. I was at the receiving end of a lot of emotional manipulation at college and my grades dropped low enough that I no longer qualified for the study abroad program. My next best chance would be getting hired as a teacher in order to go.

AEON Amity Logo

I did not bother with the JET program. The steps to apply were way too overwhelming and I didn’t have the confidence that I could get hired if I applied to them, especially after failing to be accepted by my study abroad program in school. I couldn’t handle facing another rejection or being shouted at by my parents again for failing so miserably. Instead, I applied to and got hired by AEON Amity. The story of getting hired is a whole different can of worms that I will save for another post. But, like with most Japanese companies that hire foreign teachers, I was on my own to purchase my own plane ticket. The company would help me with my visa and provide a subsidized place for me to live and training so all I needed to do was purchase a ticket and pack my bag.

I fit the bill perfectly for AEON Amity. My skill set didn’t matter much to them, though I’m sure if anyone from the company ever saw this post they would protest greatly to what I’m about to say. But basically, they just wanted someone who looked like a poster child for “America” with a big smile and a bubbly personality. My degree didn’t REALLY matter and it was only a requirement because the degree is a marker of “accomplishment” and “adultness” in Japan. They also didn’t want to risk someone fresh out of high school teaching English to a Japanese high schooler and having the ages be too close.

So I fit the bill. I was fresh out of college, had the physical look, I was extremely bubbly and excited, had a neutral American accent, and was obsessed with going to Japan. The definition of cookie cutter foreign English teacher.

Short of being blonde, I fit the bill.

So, with having a dream to go to Japan since I was 8 years old or so and struggling to do it in other ways, there was a lot of stress and pressure to not fail again. And then a natural disaster happened. It just felt like no matter how close I came to going to Japan, even the earth itself didn’t want me to go. And I told the universe “I don’t care. I’m going.” But I was still scared shitless.

I flew from Detroit to Seattle and from Seattle to Osaka. AEON’s primary training facility was in Okayama. But we weren’t really informed of most of the logistics. It was just “Show up on one of these flights to Osaka.” No one really informed us about what was going to happen after that. I was utterly exhausted getting off the plane. I don’t sleep well at all on airplanes and even though our flight was almost empty thanks to the disaster 2 weeks prior, I was too anxious to get any rest. It was my first time traveling alone and my first time leaving the continent. (I had been to Canada before, but when you grow up in Michigan where the border is 30 minutes away, it doesn’t have as much impact.) Upon arrival and after getting through customs, I joined up with a group of other new-hire teachers led by a lead trainer. Our bags were forwarded ahead of us and we weren’t really told very clearly where they were going. Just to throw them on a cart with everyone else’s (Which made me very worried because I like to know things. But I was too young, too scared to make waves, and too tired to ask properly.) And then we had to basically sprint to the train station with our carry-on luggage dragging behind us to get to the bullet train before it left. We also weren’t really told where we were going. Just to follow along. Some part of me was worried that I was being abducted because of all of the rushing about with little to no information or welcome speech. I ended up falling asleep on the bullet train. Turns out the ride from Osaka to Okayama was a couple of hours and sleeping on a train is apparently not a problem for me.

I am utterly exhausted in this photo. But the girl sitting next to me ended up becoming like a sister to me and we are still BFFs to this day.

Upon our arrival in Okayama, it was a short walk from the train station to the small housing facility where our whole group was going to stay while we were in training for the week. Our luggage was already waiting for us (Because Japan is weirdly really magical at doing that.)  Our escort basically showed us the facility and our room assignments, then said we had to be ready by a certain hour on Monday morning (It was Saturday night when we arrived) and told us goodnight, and peaced out. It again felt rushed. At the time I didn’t have the vocabulary to express the emotional discomfort I felt with the somewhat lack of welcome. We were all also very hungry and didn’t know what was nearby and no one had a working phone because our branch managers were going to help us with that when we got to our branches a week later and the housing facility did not have wifi for our personal computers. I couldn’t even call or email my parents to let them know I landed safely.

We found a curry place nearby but I was so over stressed and over exhausted that I could barely eat more than a bite or two. My stress ruined Japanese curry for me for many years.

Overall, it was unnecessarily stressful and probably not well handled. You have a bunch of foreigners arriving in a country that they might have never been to before and might not know the language. They get rushed from the airport to a different city, separated from their personal belongings without knowing where they or their stuff is going, dropped off at a random housing unit and the leader in everything bounces as soon as their duties are over. It was definitely a bare minimum welcome that left me feeling really alone and scared. Even though I was in the same situation as about 8 other people, we were all strangers and cliques formed in our small group almost overnight.

I think if current me had been in any kind of control of the situation as the welcome party, even with the flights and all of that being outside of my control, I would have at least tried to speak with my group on the bullet train, or taken another 30 minutes after getting everyone settled to do an ice breaker with the group or share a meal. It would have diffused a significant amount of stress on everyone. I think it would have also changed the tone of the entire experience with this company.

The hard and not great truth is that Japanese companies that hire foreign teachers to teach English in Japan have been doing it since 1865. They are very well practiced at importing people and basically treating them like a purchased English teaching robot. The lack of empathy toward people experiencing challenges in Japan is systemic and foreign teachers are not immune to it either.  Honestly, in order to be a successful teacher in Japan, you need to have a lot of emotional resilience, which most new college graduates simply do not have. They don’t have the experience or the maturity for it. And that’s what most Japanese companies want. The lack of emotional resilience makes their teachers easier to control and have high turnover rates so they also have a fresh batch of new hires to use as their show ponies.

In Part 2 I’ll discuss more about my experience as a teacher, changing companies while living there, and why I ended up coming home. (If there’s room.) I’ll also explain more about how I came to such hard conclusions about teaching in Japan.

Thank you for reading, friend. I’ll see you next week.

The breakfast I cobbled together from the only mini convenience store open early enough for my messed up sleep schedule.

Kristen

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