Being a Foreign Teacher in Japan: Part 4. Mixed Messages.

Hello Friend! Welcome back! I am writing this in advance because this weekend I am attending a friend’s wedding! It is a non-traditional wedding and I am looking forward to how much fun it will be. I hope with their permission, to report to you about it in the future!

At the end of last week’s post, we ended with how quickly a fellow new teacher (Susan) I went on a day trip turned cold on me after what I thought was a lovely day of sightseeing together with her and her parents during Golden Week. I initially thought perhaps she was also having a difficult time finding her stride in her new position and was fully focused on making sure she did a good job.

What I hadn’t realized at the time was that I was walking into a situation where I was set up to fail. Ellie and the previous teacher before me (renamed Owen) were a dynamic duo. They had been in Japan for a few years and had made friends with the teachers in the school. They were thick as thieves. Owen’s departure from the school led to unwarranted resentment placed on me from those who preferred Owen. The teachers who were close to Owen showed no interest at all in becoming friends with me. From what I experienced, Japanese culture leaves little room for people to process their emotions in a healthy and open manner. I saw a therapist while I was in Japan because I had been misdiagnosed for bipolar disorder and had started on medication for it 2 weeks before leaving for Japan. In order to continue with my medication plan I had to seek out an English-speaking therapist and check in with him once per month. However, the meetings were only 5 minutes long and he always saw me about 30 minutes past our scheduled appointment time. While in the meetings he only ever asked me if I was eating and sleeping normally. He showed no interest in trying to the source of my problems and just wrote the script and dismissed me. Based on that experience, I have little faith that therapists in Japan treat their own citizens much better.

Myself and the dynamic duo

Another factor that I hadn’t been informed of until I had already arrived, was that the district manager (Also known as “Shibucho”) really loved making our school branch her main office of operations. Instead of visiting different schools on a rotation and giving each school equal amounts of time, she spent nearly the entire year at our branch. There were only a few weeks total where she had been to a different branch. This woman was not a nice woman in the slightest. She was a professional at putting on an extremely disingenuous slimy smile akin to the kind you would seen on a yokai right before it eats your eyes out. She was also extraordinarily threatened by anyone she thought was prettier than her, and she HATED foreigners. (Seems pretty strange since she worked in an English private school.) Shibucho was the source of nearly all of my manager’s anxiety. I realized that the other reason why my manager was been chosen for her promotion was also because she could be easily bullied by Shibucho and was completely unable to stand up for herself or for the teachers she was meant to lead and manage. My manager’s anxiety was so intense that she had developed a finger-picking problem that left all of the skin around her fingernails torn up and bleeding regularly.

Shibucho was also the person who told the other teachers in the school that they were not allowed to become friends with the NETs (Native English Speakers).

It was well concealed though. There were welcome and farewell parties, and Ellie had come from the old guard and was also a lot more emotionally resilient than I was. She had well-established friendships and invited me to dinner or karaoke with her friends. Whenever Shibucho was out of town, the energy in the school changed dramatically and everyone was a lot more cheerful, but most still kept their distance. I held out hope for the next teacher who was coming to replace Ellie. We found out that it was a female and that she was from Texas. I was really looking forward to meeting her and my hopes rose again that I might become friends with her. I hoped that she would be interested in sightseeing Japan with me when we had time off. In truth, I made too many assumptions and had too many expectations. This was just a failing of my own inexperience.

A Welcome/Farewell Party

“Ellie” on the far left and “Nicole” w/ her boyfriend on the far right.

The new teacher (Who we shall call Nicole) had arrived fresh from a contract teaching in South Korea. She had also come to Japan with her boyfriend whom she met during that contract because they were interested in exploring Japan. Her boyfriend had been assigned a school in Okayama and she had been assigned to our school in Kurashiki. Because of this situation, she was only interested in exploring Japan together with her boyfriend. And I did not feel comfortable injecting myself as a desperate-for-friendship third wheel. She was also pretty direct in telling me that they were only interested in doing their own thing and didn’t really want to try and do anything together with me. We all went to a Biergarten together once, and while everyone got along well, I did notice that most people generally didn’t interact with me much outside of polite talk and I still felt too unaccepted to be comfortable with asking personal questions and feeling like I could bond closely with anyone.

I tried having my hair dyed blonde right before the biergarten. It didn’t work out very well.

So, between the teachers being forced to give me the cold shoulder, bullying from Shibucho (She commented regularly on my performance, my appearance, on just about anything she could think of to pick and and took away storage space in the building that was specifically assigned for the NETs to use), the veteran NETs not having any interest in connecting with me, and the new NET not having any interest either, and my lack of experience with this kind of abuse, I felt more alone and worthless than I ever had in my entire life. And I was made to feel like it was entirely my fault for feeling this way. If my mask cracked and I showed my true emotions via crying (which happened more frequently than I would have liked because I have an emotional dysregulation disability) I was told that it was my fault that I couldn’t put on a professional face. (This is why I hate 3 face theory.) I worried that my medication wasn’t working and didn’t know where to seek resources from since the therapist I was seeing didn’t give two shits about my well-being either. I think I considered stepping in front of a train about 3 times in that one year alone. Every time my thoughts went that way I took the day off from work for myself and I was still asked to come in to teach later in the day. I refused because I didn’t trust myself to cross the train tracks on my way to the school on those days. It also upset me that my manager did not respect my need for a day off and tried to have me come in anyway.

photo borrowed from wikimedia commons

Another thing to note: If you take a day off from work, they make you feel guilty about it. They try to convince you not to do it. And then months later when the school is about to get in trouble for you not taking any days off, they force you to take a day without notice. So you can’t plan a trip or anything for yourself. Your days off and sick days were not explained in training either so there is no way for you to know what you are entitled to. Pretty messed up if you ask me.

Aside from all of the massive workplace abuse, the kids were mostly wonderful. They were a challenge to say the least, but the good outweighed the troublemakers. Kids are also a lot more open to becoming friends with foreigners. It made the job much more tolerable.

The staff at my school minus Shibucho. All parties happened when she was in another city.

The other shining light I had during this one year was a lone teacher that also felt like the “do not be friends” rule was utter bullshit. (Let’s call her Mary) Mary was cautious when she was opening up to me. But after a while she saw what was going on and had decided to quit the school (and also quit Japan and leave for Canada) and said “To hell with it!” Mary was my secret whistleblower on the dumb rule Shibucho made the Japanese teachers follow. She commuted into the city for her lessons, so she did not live close by, and getting together was challenging and infrequent. But she was a light in the dark that kept me going when I really needed a friend to feel close to. We are still friends to this day

During this crazy year in Japan, I did travel and go sightseeing on my own. I wasn’t so hung up on touring Japan with another person that I didn’t go at all. In this year I learned to date myself. No one wanted to hang out with me so I took myself on really nice dates and treated myself to anything that pleased me. I would have preferred to share the experiences I was having with a friend and grow a best friendship with someone, but clearly, that doesn’t always happen. This year in Japan taught me to enjoy doing stuff on my own and not to let having no company at all hold me back from doing whatever I want to do. I saw and did a lot and enjoyed a lot of my time off, but I still had hard times with loneliness too. The two kind of went hand in hand together for me.

Next week: Meeting foreign English teachers from different companies! What happens when the foreigners are finally able to get together!

Thanks for reading!

-Kristen

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