ひさしぶり
Long time no see. I figured it’s time to write something about how life is over here. I think it’ll be easier to work backwards to the beginning I suppose. Hopefully this entry isn’t too long and full of unnecessary details.
So let’s start with where I’m now working. I’m working at a Junior High School, and two Elementary Schools as an Assistant Language Teacher, or ALT. I spend most of my time at the JHS. Unfortunately these schools are out in the boonies so it takes me about an hour on the train to get to them. The reason for me not getting a job closer to where I live is primarily because of shading hiring practices by various ALT Recruitment companies. Schools prefer to deal with recruitment companies rather than directly hire ALTs. One thing I’ve learned about Japan is that almost every company that employs foreigners here to do any kind of teaching will try to bend the rules and exploit their employees, such as not giving them their legal minimum days of paid holiday, or taking more money out of their salary for one day of missed work then you would get for working on that day, etc. They do this because most foreigners can’t navigate the legal system, and because they don’t want to get fired for causing a stir. One company basically promised me the job and said they would call me closer to when I would begin working, but alas they didn’t. After calling a bunch of times, and after they kept mysteriously forgetting who I was, and telling me to call back later I realized it was all a bunch of bullshit. Thankfully I had interviewed and got the job for a lesser paying company, so I had a backup. But I think in the end it worked out for the best, because my job is fairly easy and for the most part I like my schools. Most of my days I have enough free time to study Japanese and relax, unless I’m at the Elementary School where I have to actually teach by myself. At JHS I’m just helping the main teacher with pronunciation, sentence creation, general usage, and creating and carrying out games in the classroom. At the ESL I either have some kind of lesson plan to do for each class of the day, or I get a general topic that I have to create materials and make a general lesson plan. The best part of working in a school is that the working environment is a lot more relaxed than at a Japanese business, so I can wear khakis and a polo shirt everyday with sneakers. Every teacher wears indoor sneakers, which they are suppose to only wear inside the school. Something about schools being temples way back in the day, so they had a kind of holy status.
There are very obvious differences between public schools in Japan and the States. The first one that I experienced is the morning teacher’s announcements. There’s a specific time, and specific transcript that these morning announcements follow. Everyone stands up and says “Good Morning”. Each time a different teacher becomes the kind of morning announcements announcer, this is the person that introduces each person that is about to make an announcement. First he/she asks the Principle, then the Vice-Principal, and then the third in command. Then it follows from the first grade and up, after which the announcer asks if there are any extra announcements, and then it ends with each grade doing its own inner-grade announcements. Each grade has an inner-grade announcer, usually someone who does not have a homeroom class. This all takes place in a giant teacher’s office where all the desks are arranged hierarchical, with the front desk seating the principal, and then in descending order of status to the third in command on the other end of the long desk. Physical positions have a lot to do with power positions, examples of this can be seen in elevated platforms, front, back, and side doors, and so on. Same can be said of most cultures, but in Japan it seems even more prominent and important.
Everything is all about form in Japan. Students that need to come into the teacher’s room have a certain door they go through, and they have to say “しつれいします(shitsureishimasu)”, which means “excuse me” but is closer in meaning to “Excuse me for being rude”, then they have to state their class and name, and before they leave they have to say the past form of shitsureishimasu, which is shitsureishimashita. They have this hammered into them from first grade of elementary school, and if they make a mistake they have to do it all over again. This is of course a mild example of a set of procedures that need to be followed by the letter. Breaking form is the worst in any situation.
Anyway that’s what I have to say about jobs, and form. Form will be a constant theme in these little entries.
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