To Stay or Go

I’ve signed a contract to stay here another year.

When I was on JET, the contracts there were always August to August, which was a little bit odd because the Japanese school year starts in April.

The company I work for now tries to follow the Japanese school year. I started in September, but that was only because a position opened up mid-year. Come this spring, I had to decide if I was going to go home in March, or stay another year.

If I had to decide in September whether to stay or go, it might have given me pause for thought. But since I must decide now, it seemed like a no-brainer to stay on for another year. To stay for less than a year would not have been worth the financial investment of moving and furnishing a new apartment. Not to mention the emotional investment of having to get used to a new place and make all new friends. (And I’m not a very outgoing person, so it is a bit of an effort for me to make new friends in new situations).

So I’ll stay another year until next March. But I’m pretty sure that will be it. I think I’ve been doing this Assistant English Teacher gig for more than long enough.

Which brings me to the topic of Japan: the benefits of staying and the benefits of leaving. It’s been kicking around in the back of my head to write about for some time now, but it’s one of those big messy topics that is hard to write about in a succinct way without getting side tracked into all sorts of tangents. It’s also sometimes difficult to separate my feelings about my job from feelings about Japan. There are times when I think I want to stay in Japan, but I’ve had enough of teaching English. And there are times when I think I want to continue in education, but I’ve had enough of Japan. But most of the time if I’m feeling negative about one aspect, it tends to feed my negativity about the other. And also the reverse when I’m feeling positive. So for the purposes of this blog entry I’ll just lump both aspects, the country and the job, together.

I was an education major in university, so it would be likely that if I was back home I’d be involved in education anyway. It would be different of course. I’d probably be teaching history instead of ESL. I’d have more responsibilities, and more control over the class. But it would essentially still be education in a school setting, just like I’m doing now.

So on days when things are well, I think to myself I’m doing same things with my life now that I’d be doing if I were back home. I’m teaching during the day. And I’m meeting my friends at night and going out to play pool, or bowling, or to the bar, or whatever. So it’s essentially the same kind of things I’d be probably doing back home at this time in my life.

Only it’s a lot more interesting in Japan because I’m in a foreign country, where all sorts of weird things happen. There is the challenge of learning a foreign language, and the excitement of learning about a foreign culture. I stick out like a sore thumb wherever I go, so a lot more interesting things seem to happen to me here. I get a lot more attention from girls in Japan. And yet I can still meet up with other ex-patriot friends in the evenings and speak in English and relax.

So at those times I feel like Japan is the perfect place to be while I’m still relatively young and in my 20s. Sometimes I even feel sorry for friends back in America who are missing out on all this.

And yet there are other times when I feel like I’m wasting my youth here. The job of an Assistant English Teacher is a pretty easy job, so it lends itself to boredom sometimes. Also I’m not really developing a lot of skills that are would be useful for my professional development. Because I’m in a foreign country, the opportunity for social activism is almost non-existent, and I think to myself that while I’m young and have energy now is the time of my life where I should be pouring myself into social causes.

And more than anything, it is the sense of isolation I sometimes feel at school. I can meet up with English speaking friends in the evenings or on the weekends, but for 8 hours 5 days a week I am in a Japanese school. I speak a bit of Japanese. Some of the teachers, especially the English teachers, speak a bit of English, but it is always labored communication either way. If someone wants to explain something to me, it is an effort, and so I’m always the odd one out in the teachers’ room.

One of my JET friends from England once told me the thing he missed about home most was the way his friends used to make him laugh. “I rarely laugh in Japan,” he said. I feel the same way, at least during the workday. Other people are laughing, but I rarely know what the joke is, and even when I do often I don’t find it funny (humor differences between cultures perhaps? Or perhaps the fact that if you have to work to understand any joke, it loses its humor?)

Sometimes I feel like I don’t care what job I do in the US as long as the people around me speak English. I could work at McDonald’s in the US as long as I could speak to my co-workers in English.

In spite of the fact that my “foreignness” makes me an object of interest for the students, the language barrier limits how close I can get to them. I often envy the close bond the Japanese teachers seem to form with the students, and the ease with which they communicate back and forth about trivial matters. And when I hear stories from teaching friends back home, I often get the same feeling.

Oh, and well I’m complaining, some days I’d like to be able to turn on the radio and have it be in English, to watch TV and have it be in English, to go to the bookstore and have the books be in English, and the magazines on the rack be in English.

Anyway, don’t worry too much about me. I have good days over here and I have bad days over here, just like any other job or any other situation in the world. And, even on a bad day, I’ll have moments of goodness. So I’m not dreading the coming year by any means. I’ll be able to make it through one more year easily.

But I’m pretty sure next year will be the last.