Being a Foreign Teacher in Japan: The Stuff No One Talks About Pt. 2
Part 2: Playing a Part
Hello Friend, welcome back! So I’ve started diving into my experiences with being an English teacher in Japan. If you would like to read the first part about my arrival in Japan please check the post here. Now I’m not much for long introductions so I’ll just dive right back in.
The black one is similar to the first phone I ended up getting in Japan about 2 weeks after I arrived.
So when I arrived, I didn’t have a phone anymore because I canceled my American domestic phone thinking I would end up getting my own phone in the country I was living in. If I had been traveling on vacation, that would have been a different story, but because I was planning on spending at least a year or two in Japan, it didn’t make sense at the time to keep an American phone. Also, smartphones were still on the pricey side. At this time only about 23% of Americans were using smartphones (as recorded by oclc.org) and I was not one of them yet. Upon arrival in Japan, I and some other people in our group went out in search of a manga café or an internet café to use a computer to email our families that we had arrived safely. It was interesting having a group of complete strangers most of whom are fresh out of college trying to work together all with different worldviews and different backgrounds trying to contact our families. It seemed like a huge pitfall of the company not to have any way for their new recruits to contact home and tell their families that their children were alright. Yes, we were legal adults, but honestly, most people are still children until they hit at least 27 or 28 years old.
The outside of a random manga cafe via Japan Guide
The manga café we found had just one private room left that had a computer. As we were led through, I noticed that most of the people in the manga café were there just to sleep. Apparently, it’s acceptable to rent out a booth for the night and just sleep amongst the books. Part of me wanted to stay there instead of in the dorm but I am also a bit of a hermit and introvert and manga books feel like an element of home to me, but alas, we just sent out emails to our families and left to go to bed at the dorm. I remember waking up extremely early on my first night. My internal clock would not let me sleep for more than a few hours even with my complete exhaustion from all of the travel. It was very hard on my body. We had a day to be tourists and our first day in Japan happened to be the day that everyone in Okayama was celebrating Hanami, the cherry blossom festival. We chose to walk to Okayama castle and do a tour there.
I remember feeling very envious on our walk to the castle because locals had picnic blankets everywhere with food and grills all under the cherry blossom trees. It looked like something straight out of an anime. I wanted to join them all so badly for a relaxing day of picnic food and cherry blossom appreciation. My body was still very fatigued and the idea of a potato day under a cherry blossom tree sounded ideal. Instead, I got my steps in both walking to the castle but then also walking up the different levels of the castle grounds and all of the stairs inside. (So many stairs…) I was not very good at listening to my body back then and pushed myself to participate often and always sometimes to my own discomfort and detriment. I experienced a lot of FOMO and wanted to fit in with the group of new teachers (which I know now was probably never going to happen. People tend to love me or despise me instantly.) But I had a good day of touring and got it out of my system.
From Monday onward, it was a week of training. The methods of training us were basically to teach us how to do something and then make us practice it and do it. At the end of the week, we would be assigned material from the company’s proprietary lessons to make lesson materials for and to teach a mock lesson with children present. There were some craft supplies at the dorm for us to work with but it wasn’t a whole lot. I don’t have a ton of vivid memories from this week. I mostly remember that the classroom we were in on the first day was very bright and cheerful with large windows and a carpeted floor, but the workload and the speed at which we were trained was very fast and stressful for me on top of still not sleeping well the whole week. The other teachers in my group had split off into their own cliques and I wasn’t entirely sure where I fit in. I’m sure everyone felt their own level of discomfort and stress through the whole week, but at the time I felt like an outsider looking in on everyone around me.
Of the memories I can access of that week, one thing stood out to me that felt very inherently wrong to me down to my core. They had an entire hour-long lesson dedicated to the Japanese two-face theory of masking your inner self and projecting a “public” face. It’s basically you have a public face that is only acceptable by society and must live up to society’s standards, a private face that only close family and friends get to see, and your true authentic self that only you see. This was not the only company in Japan I worked for that had this as part of their official documentation, either. The current post-therapy me sees the insidious nature of this and understands now why Japan has a problem with suicide. People who feel that their true authentic selves will never be accepted by anyone tend to feel rejected by everyone. “Society” tends to be wrong when it comes to what is acceptable for a person to show and what isn’t. The people who live in their truth publicly tend to be the ones who excel and become extremely successful in their endeavors. The idea of a public face where one’s authentic self isn’t considered appropriate doesn’t encourage healthy acceptance of the people inhabiting that society or of the brilliant ways those people could contribute to their community. Hiding is not the answer. If you put it into the context of Brene Brown’s shame research, face theory outright tells people that who they are is something to be ashamed of and never spoken about. Shame lives and grows in silence. Face theory tells an entire society to be silent and live in shame. Back when I was doing this training, I knew nothing of this research. (It was brand new and hadn’t made it to me yet for a long while.) So instead of having the emotional fortitude I needed to withstand this “training”, I absorbed it and tried to do my best to adapt to something so extremely wrong being labeled as “cultural difference.” It sat inside of me for a long time and made me believe that I wasn’t enough. I already struggled with emotional regulation and now I had an entire country’s culture telling me that I wasn’t adapting well enough or trying hard enough to mask my dysregulated emotions. It made for a very hard contract for me.
On the flip side, shame also cannot survive being spoken about. I may be the only voice right now that says this but 3 face theory is wrong. If I am understanding it incorrectly, then please comment on what it’s supposed to mean. But for me, this is what both of the companies I worked for essentially told me it was and every part of me knew it to be wrong. It just manifested as stress and emotional episodes at the time.
At the end of the week, after we got through our practice lessons in front of kids and instructors, we were all shipped off to our schools throughout the country. Out of a group of about 10 new recruits, I managed to make one friend. The other teachers cliqued pretty hard and seemed very disinterested in being friendly with anyone outside of their clique. One of the nights during the week when we had a moment and were hanging out in the common room in the dorm, I got into a bit of a liberal vs. conservative debate with another new recruit. This was back during Obama’s presidency so the HUGE rift in political viewpoints hadn’t been carved out yet and things were much more moderate. It was a fun debate and I honestly was having a good time chatting with my debate partner, challenging him, and being challenged back. The tone of the debate and conversation shifted when another teacher whom my debate partner had become friends with interrupted us and made it sound like I had been attacking his friend. He missed the entire vibe of the conversation and got super defensive of the person I was debating with making it sound like I was aggressively attacking his friend’s viewpoints. Even when my debate partner said he was fine and was enjoying himself, his friend didn’t listen. The energy of the whole room shifted and the other teachers looked at me like they felt the same way his friend did. The conversation died pretty quickly after that and I just remember really intense feelings of alienation and of being vilified. Even though I had connected with some of the teachers on social media before we all went our separate ways, not a single one of the teachers who were present in that conversation ever contacted me again.
There were a couple of people who did not join us that day on our outing but this was most of our group of new hires.
And so, being separated again after just a week of sort of acclimating to the time difference and the lifestyle difference and attempting to make friends (and failing miserably), and trying not to offend anyone for merely existing, I hopped on a train with my luggage in tow this time in a business suit ready to meet my new manager and got off 20 minutes later in my new town of Kurashiki. Where no one was waiting for me.
To be continued!
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Thanks for reading!
Kristen
