Being a Foreign Teacher in Japan Part 5: Meeting Other Foreign Teachers!

Hello Friend! Welcome back! I’m glad you’re here today! Last week I really spilled the tea on my experience with my school branch while teaching English in Japan. I was basically dealt a really hard hand and everyone involved didn’t have the toolbox to be able to put a stop to the abuses. But not all of it was bad. I was able to meet some teachers from other companies and discovered that when you get foreigners together in Japan, we can be pretty loud.

Generally, what I noticed was that the companies that hire foreign teachers somehow keep track of other school’s schedules and purposely make it so that all the foreigners have different days off from each other. Sunday seemed to be the only consistent day amongst most teachers and there were still some who only got Tuesday and Thursday or other random weekdays instead. After what I had experienced with my branch purposely ordering their teams to alienate the foreign teachers, I believed that they also wished to alienate us from meeting each other too. But we still met anyway.

At an izakaya with my trainers from Amity!

From what I can remember, It started with mostly hanging out with the a couple of the trainers from the start of my employment. They were easy to get on with and one of them also enjoyed a lot of the same popular media that I did like Firefly and Star Trek (Let’s call her Molly). So we would get together on weekends and either binge watch Firefly or go out to a foreigner bar in Okayama where the owner was fluent in both English and Japanese (and a few other languages from what I learned later. He was a cool dude.) We went traveled together to Kyoto and met with a friend of Molly’s and we did a fun temple tour over the course of a weekend. Unfortunately due to our work schedules, we missed seeing any Geisha and this was long before the dress photo booth locations began. But we did see some really cool temples and hit the famous ones as well. I loved seeing the golden temple.

Molly was very camera shy at the time so I don’t have a lot of photos together with her.

Molly was gradually becoming more busy with trainings so our hangouts were lessening. I found out from Nicole that all of the local foreign teachers were going to attend the Hiroshima Sake Festival. Nicole found out from her boyfriend and they were trying to gather a large group. I have never been much of an alcohol drinker but I was on board to go! It turned out to be a really great thing that I went too because I made good friends with Layla who was exactly the kind friend I needed to make. She was also wanting to travel and was having a hard time finding someone to go with her. Layla and I got on great! She wasn’t overly wild and crazy and was warm and welcoming. We just seemed to communicate together really well.

Layla is on the left.

While at the festival I got to meet a bunch of other foreign teachers and I was really surprised to find so many. Our group stood out right away for obvious reasons. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Sake festival as I had never been to something like this before. You pay an entry fee and are given a sake cup which is also your souvenir from the event. Once inside the festival you just walk around and sample any kind of sake that is available. Think of the way a Renaissance faire might be laid out but instead, all of the booths are lined with sake vendors and each vendor has at least 20 different kinds of sake you can try. People are allowed to bring in food and non-alcoholic beverages which I didn’t know about at all, there were also food vendors inside grilling up their own delicious fare.

Layla and I had also somehow managed to draw the attentions of a man a few decades our senior and he started following us through the festival until we were literally running away from him. It is very unusual behavior for anyone in Japan to do that to foreign women but he was also drunk. While leaving the festival I did witness some not great behavior from our own group, a couple of the guys had still been trying to get more sake after the end time and when they were refused, they waited until the vendor’s back was turned and stole a few bottles of sake which they were openly drinking from on the train and hanging out of the train windows while it was in motion. Layla and I were unbelievably embarrassed to be associated with them at that point. Nowadays when I read stories of foreigners misbehaving in Japan I am not shocked in the slightest by it as I’ve witnessed it myself. It made me feel very cautious of these guys because they felt unpredictable to me and like they were trying to draw out their fraternity days past college or something.

However I did end up seeing this same group again a few times more. Once at a special foreigner friendly Thanksgiving event, and also at Hanami in April (right when I was leaving Okayama for a new job in Tokyo.) Things were calmer then especially since there was significantly less alcohol available.

Layla was volunteered to help with cooking

There was one other time I was together with a huge group of foreigners and that was when Amity had its company-wide training retreat. They split the trainings into the northern region and southern region so not everyone was completely together. (So I didn’t get to see my friend from training again.) It was off in some remote mountain area at a luxury onsen which I would have been able to enjoy more if I didn’t feel so much extreme distrust of the company at this point from the abuse at school. The foreigners' rooms and trainings were kept separate from the Japanese teachers and their trainings. It was almost completely segregated except for meal times and even then the seating situation was weirdly segregated with Japanese and foreign teachers sitting separate from one another. I don’t remember much from the “refresh” training itself, I just remember snippets from the party the foreigners had that night. Some people found a beer vending machine and once the word got out about that, everyone basically cleaned it out and started having drinking games in the foreigner common room. It got so loud that our trainers were scolded and told to make our side be quiet, to little effect. We were all adults working for a company that treated people poorly and actively worked to alienate and segregate their foreigners from everyone else. There was no way anyone was going to listen that night when it was the only outlet most people had found since starting their jobs.

Playing a drinking game. I think this was before I changed my hair color.

Just a candid from that night.

Aside from those larger events, There were also some small local festivals or holidays that I attended with Molly and Laya like a cultural festival with loads of different countries' foods and a few dress-up booths too! Unlike in the USA where dressing up is seen as appropriation, the locals are eager to share Japanese culture with outsiders. Molly, Layla, and I were at one of the booths just curious at what they were and then before we knew it we were practically forced into kimono by the aunties at the booths. It was both very sweet and very flattering. The same thing happened at the Korean Hanbok booth too. They waited very patiently for us to finish with the kimono and then suddenly I was in a Hanbok. We also noticed that the moment we were dressed up, people with fancy cameras seemed to come out of the woodwork and take a ton of photos. I really wasn’t kidding when I said that the locals are really enthusiastic about sharing their culture with everyone. It’s one of my favorite things about Japan. I love that they really just want to share so much about their culture with everyone and much of it is super delicious and fun.

Because of this kind of experience I had, it really carried me through my darker moments during this year of teaching. I learned that it can take a bit of time to meet people in a new place and build a community there. Unfortunately, because working at Amity was really pretty terrible for me, I found a new job at a company called Interac. They were one of the few companies hiring foreign teachers living in Japan already. (In case you were wondering, JET did not hire teachers domestically at that time. Only from outside of Japan.) Interac seemed very similar to JET but more city-based instead of out in the middle of nowhere, like JET. This new job would move me several hours north to Tokyo which I’ve found to be one of my all-time favorite cities that I’ve ever visited. So, after a little break from this series, I will tell you about what it was like working for Interac and going from having just 1 private Juku school to teach in, to having many classes in 8 different schools. Talk about whiplash.

Until next time. Thank for you reading and I will see you again soon!

Kristen

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Met a very drunk Kiki on Halloween.