ESID

The other day, a teacher told me a story about an experience she had with an ALT in her past. I’ve tried to write down what she shared with me:

The JET Programme first started 20 years ago. I was 15 years old and still a junior high school student. We had an ALT come from Canada. I can’t remember her name. When she first came to our class, she asked my friend a question, but my friend would not answer. We all waited for 10 minutes, but she stayed silent. She didn’t like to speak English.

The ALT was only here for 1 year before going back to Canada. I think she was very tired. She did not like to speak with the Japanese English teacher. She had to live with him in his house. We lived in a very small town, so they lived together in his house. It was a very traditional house, so it was too much for her. My other friends spoke English very well and they would speak to her during class. The ALT would come to class with the teacher and then sit with my friends. The teacher would teach the class and the ALT would speak English with 2-3 friends for the entire class. They had learned English in their after-school study-school. I envied them. I wanted to speak with the ALT.

After living with her teacher for about 3 months, my friends helped her to find a new house. Her supervisor that she lived with would not find her a new place to live. And she did not speak any Japanese. So my friends helped her to find a new place to live. She lived with another family until she went home.

I found this story fascinating. The experience of this ALT seems so primitive compared to my experience with the JET Programme. My teacher mentioned that the town she was living in was very small and that there were no apartments that the ALT could live in on her own. I wonder if there are ALTs living in their supervisor’s houses as of today? Otherwise, the blatantly inadequate use of the ALT seemed like such a waste of resources. I’ve heard that in the 20 years of the JET Programme, the ALT’s salary has yet to increase. My salary is quite reasonable for what I’m expected to do here in Japan, and with inflation, ALTs 20 years ago must have been living very comfortably. For a school to pay so much money to have someone sit in a room and talk with 2 or three students in a day seems like a waste of everybody’s time except for the 2 students who spoke with her.

When I think back to the months leading up to my departure for Japan, I think the most useful information that I received were the stories that previous JET participants shared with us at the preparatory seminars in Vancouver. While the mantra for all of these seminars was the seemingly unhelpful “ESID,” or “Every Situation Is Different,” it seemed like every speaker was trying to shirk any responsibility of explaining what Japan would be like. I can remember people asking questions like: can I get yogurt in Japan? will the clothes fit me? can I wear a skirt to work? How big was your apartment? Having lived in this country for almost 1 year now, I feel confident in being able to answer these questions – in my case, the answers to these questions would be: yes; sometimes, but mostly not; yes; and pretty big. Now however, I can appreciate the ‘ESID’ conditioned responses from these Q and A sessions. I would hesitate to suggest that any of my answers will be representative of anyone’s experience in Japan. The country has over 130 million people, and they are as varied as anywhere else in the world.

Being able to hear of these individual experiences from ALTs who lived and worked in different parts of the country at different types of schools not only reinforced this idea that everything is different for each person, but reminded us that the most important thing was to keep an open mind. Every work situation has its challenges whether in Japan or at home. The best advice that I remember from these seminars was, “just enjoy it.”

I don’t know if I could have been able to enjoy living with my supervisor in the same house for a year, but I think that at least in today’s JET Programme, this was a very extraneous situation. For the most part, there is more to enjoy than can be taken in within a year. So, let’s enjoy Japan.

Adventures in Bicycling... and Fukushima Orientation

I arrived back in Iwaki last night from our Fukushima orientation where JETs from around the prefecture were gathered to attend several seminars about anything from teaching to Japanese pop culture. It was a long two days and my exhausted mind and body was looking forward to a hot shower and a warm bed.

I had left my bike parked in a bike lot near Iwaki Station, where we caught our bus the previous morning. In this lot, there are probably about two thousand bikes parked at any given time, but I was pretty sure I knew within a reasonable area where my bike was parked. Of course, upon arriving at the lot last evening, I could not for the life of me, find my bike. It was dark out and the lighting in the lot is not particularly good so I spent a good amount of time checking and re-checking the area where I had left my bike. Then I thought that the bikes looked much more organized than when I had originally parked my bike and figured that maybe someone had arranged the bikes – or maybe I had put my bike in the wrong area, or maybe it got ticketed and placed somewhere else. I progressed to checking all of the bikes in the lot with no luck. So I checked again – still no luck.

The lot is beside a taxi depot and so I asked one of the taxi drivers if it was okay to park my bike overnight. They said it was and that was all the communication that we could manage in Japanese. He suggested I go to the police station down the block.

My first experience with the Iwaki police was an excellent one. Although our communication was very broken and lengthy, I eventually managed to communicate that I was an ALT at Iwaki High School and that I had lost my bike in the Iwaki Station parking lot and that it was very dark and that I might have missed it and that I came from Vancouver and that the Winter Olympics would be held there in the coming monthes and that I thought that my bike was a mix between purple and brown.

Our solution was that I would walk to the lot with three police officers with flashlights and take one more look before pursuing our next option. Within 3 minutes I found my bike and discovered that its colour was actually black.

I dropped off some British Columbia pins and some candies for them today as thanks for finding my bike – and also as a bit of an apology for being a dumbass. I also lost my bike outside of the supermarket the other day. It turned out I was looking on the wrong side of the building.


Another story of note involves my initial journey to the bus station two days ago. It was a rainy morning, but usually when it rains in Vancouver, one needs only carry an umbrella to keep themselves mostly dry. I walked about 3 blocks with my umbrella and I was soaked up to my chest.

I only had one change of clothes and I knew that I would not be able to survive a 2 hour bus ride, a day of seminars, a night out, another day of seminars, and a day back. I ran home, quickly grabbed another change of clothes and put on shorts and a T-shirt and rode my bike to the station.

Most people that I was meeting at the station were smart and took a taxi, but I didn’t know where or how to call one – or how long it would take. Needless to say, they were a bit shocked to see me arrive soaked worse than – well… anything. After wringing out my clothes in the toilet and drying myself off with toilet paper (Japanese washrooms seem to be devoid of any paper towels whatsoever), the only articles still soaked were my shoes. I spent most of my bus ride raising my core temperature and catching a bit of sleep after the whole earthquake debacle of the night before.


Overall, the orientation was pretty good. Lots of good info on Japan and teaching. The night out was a lot of fun – we went to “the Big Apple” for another all-you-can-drink night. This made the next day pretty rough though. Most of us spent the morning seminars trying to stay conscious. I think many of us are eager to start the school year so that we can stop drinking.

Didn’t take my camera to Fukushima on account of the rain. Instead, these are two photos of my apartment as lit by the lightning from the other night. The other is of a skull, which is a representation of how I was feeling last night as a result of fatigue and shame.