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.