Where I'm At

I’m not sure who’s actually going to read any of this, but I should probably start off by mentioning that I am really excited about going to Japan this August. I leave August 1st from Vancouver and arrive in Tokyo on the 2nd. We’ll be having 3 days of conferences there before we get shipped out to our respective prefectures. What’s important for me here is that I get to go to Tokyo. I’ve heard that one can start driving from the downtown core for 30 minutes in a strait line and not reach any boundary to the immense skyscrapers and masses of people. Eventually however, I will end up in Iwaki, which is in Fukushima prefecture and is located about 200 kms north of Tokyo on the Pacific coast. Here I will be teaching at Iwaki High School as well as two others that I don’t know the names of yet.

I’ll be going to Japan via the JET Programme, which has involved quite a long process to get into. The deadline for applications was last November and I didn’t receive a letter for an interview until sometime in January. Then the interview was in mid February and I didn’t find out that I was accepted until sometime in April. Upon being accepted, I still had to wait until the end of May to find out where I had been placed. I am still waiting for them to arrange a place for me to stay. It will hopefully be within biking distance to my schools, as this will probably be my primary mode of transportation.

In the meantime, I have just over 5 weeks left in Vancouver before I fly out. The school year has ended, so I have very few obligations over the next little while. There are a few seminars that JET is hosting this weekend, and then another the day before we leave for Japan. Other than these, my major preparations will involve figuring out what/how to pack and learning as much Japanese as is humanly possible in this short amount of time (which has proved a very humbling experience and also one that I should probably devote more time to). I think that I will also try to finish watching the Shogun television series – actually, I think I might watch some of it now.