Tonoharu (Parts 1 and 2) by Lars Martinson

(Book Review)

A couple years ago, someone pointed me to the website of Lars Martinson, a comic book artist who, among other ventures, details his adventures as an Assistant English Teacher in Japan in comic strip form.
Since I'm a former Assistant English Teacher in Japan myself, many of his experiences reflected my own, and I wrote a blog post in which I linked to several of his comics, and interspersed my own reflections in with the links.

Now, I find myself in possession of Lars Martinson's graphic novel: Tonoharu--a whole graphic novel based on the experiences of an Assistant English Teacher (W) in Japan.  And, as with before, feel the need to chime in with my own comments.

I don't normally review graphic novels on this book review project.  In fact, normally I make a policy of not reviewing graphic novels.  But this one made enough of an impression on me that I thought I would break my rule.

The first volume of this book came out in 2008, when I was still living in Japan, and I remember at the time reading a review of it in the Daily Yomiuri (English newspaper in Japan to which I used to have a subscription).

The gist of the review was: "Well, any person who was ever on the JET Programme (W) will be able to identify with almost all of this.  But the life of an Assistant English Teacher is so completely, utterly boring, that it will be of interest to no one who wasn't on the JET programme.  And even then, it will probably even bore former JETs."

Unfortunately, I can't find the review online.  (It's no longer hosted on the Daily Yomiuri website), but an excerpt from that review is available on line [Over Here] so I'll take the liberty of quoting it:

Every year, thousands of English-speakers flock to Japan to teach their native language, many of them on the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program. For better or worse, working on the program and living outside of their own countries provide various life lessons. Scattered from one end of Japan to the other, JET participants all share the same mantra: “Every situation is different.”

Except that so many of the situations seem to be basically identical, as shown in the painfully familiar story of Daniel Wells, the protagonist of Lars Martinson’s graphic novel Tonoharu: Part One. He shows up in his new, rural town, with no Japanese skills and no friends, faced with a largely unresponsive and uninformative staff of English teachers whom he is assigned to assist.

Each day of his life is boring as he struggles to figure out his job, figure out the Japanese language and figure out how to make friends (or, better yet, find a girlfriend). He spends his time alone watching TV or trying to connect with the other local assistant English teacher, who seems to have a built-in social life and language ability.

For many JETs, this may already sound too familiar. For non-JETs, the storyline may just sound too dull. And they would both be right. Though Tonoharu–named after the Kyushu town where Dan lives and works–is planned as a four-part series, with Part Two slated for next year, I can’t imagine why people would want to subject themselves to the subject matter.

 Yes, fair enough.  Why would anyone want to subject themselves to this subject matter?

And yet, as I read through the book, I was hit with such a strong wave of nostalgia, both positive and negative memories, from my own experience on the JET Programme.  I almost felt like I was reading my own memoirs.  (If I get hit by a truck crossing the road tomorrow before I have a chance to write down my own memoirs, just read Tonoharu if you want to get a sense of what my life in Japan was like.)
Yes, it is all painfully dull.  And yet...this was my life!   And since everyone takes an interest in their own life and their own experiences, when you see something written down that captures these experiences, you can't help but react to it.

So allow me to go right down the line and list everything that I identified with:

First of all, when the new Assistant English Teacher first arrives, there is the conversation with his predecessor.  The predecessor obviously has a lot of things he wants to complain about, and a lot of things he wants to get off his chest, but alternates between giving full vent to his feelings on the one hand, and on the other hand trying to guard against giving the new guy too much of a negative impression before he even gets started.  (Although I never met my predecessor face-to-face I had a somewhat similar interaction with him via emails and phone calls.)

Then there's the interaction with the bitter expatriate: the guy whose "response was light on advice and heavy on anger and self-pity.  Every word out of his mouth was dripping with venom. Japan was shit, his job was a joke, all the other teachers were incompetent jerks."    (p. 21, Part 1)
We've all been in those conversations.  (In fact I've noted recently in two separate posts--here and here--the tendency of expatriates to complain about whatever country they're in.  I used to think this was just unique to the expatriate community in Japan, but experiences in Australia and Cambodia have taught me that this is universal to any expatriate community anywhere.)

Although, as the narrator of Tonoharu notes, it's a fairly predictable reaction to the situation in the Assistant English Teacher program, in which every year thousands of young Westerners are isolated out in the Japanese countryside, given very little to do, having very little social network (at least initially) and with very little support system: "Sometimes it seems like the AET program was designed to ensure discontent.  There's the countless hours of idle time...The geographical remoteness, the language barrier, the thousand  little cultural differences.  Allow all this to stew for a few months, and it's enough to drive anyone a little crazy." (p. 23, Part 1)*

Tonoharu does a good job of highlighting the mundanities of the life of the Assistant English Teacher: the fact that you are underworked and overpayed, which sounds great at first.  But can get very boring very quickly: "The work is pretty easy.  It's telling that no prior training or experience is required.  My job could easily be done on a part-time basis.  I rarely have more than two or three hours of work on any given day.  No one seems to care what I do for the rest of my time as long as I am physically present at school for eight hours a day.  I stopped pretending to work outside of class a long time ago.  I could probably set up a hammock and no one would say anything.  My friends back home can't understand why I'd even consider quitting at the end of this year's contract. Most of them are working grueling jobs for slave wages, so I can see how my job must seem ideal from their point of view.  High pay, low stress, an abundance of free time...on paper it sounds great.  But the reality of it isn't so pristine.  The devil is in the details.  Never knowing what is going on gets old pretty quick, for example.  After eight months of blood, sweat and tears, my Japanese still amounts to little more than caveman talk." (p. 15-17 part 1)

The isolation the Assistant English Teacher feels, when everyone else in the office is speaking a language he can't understand, is shown very clearly in this graphic novel.

The relationship with the main Japanese teachers that the AET is supposed to assist is perfectly illustrated here as well--as Tonoharu indicates, at any given school it almost always runs a spectrum from Japanese teachers who are very friendly and eager to integrate the foreign Assistant English Teacher into the class, to Japanese teachers who are very distant (or sometimes even coldly hostile) to the foreign Assistant English Teacher.  (The majority of Japanese teachers I worked with were really great, and yet, at every school, there would always be one Japanese teacher who wanted nothing to do with the Assistant English Teacher, and was very cold and distant.  This was not only my experience, but seems to have been a universal experience among all Assistant English Teachers--indicating that it's not so much an individual issue as some sort of larger cultural issue in Japan.)

There also a great scene near the end of part 1 which every former Assistant English Teacher will be able to identify with: the foreign Assistant English Teacher pronounces a few words of dialogue from the textbook script and then, his job done, he stands in the front uselessly for the rest of the lesson as the Japanese teacher explains all the grammar in Japanese.

Another scene that I think absolutely every former Assistant English Teacher will be able to identify with is on pages 51-53 of part 1.  The Assistant English Teacher arrives a week before school starts, is shown to an empty desk, and is simply told to spend that week "preparing" with no indication whatsoever of what kind of classes he should be preparing for.
And then the self introduction lesson, and all the pitfalls that go with it, were another area of part 1 that I identified with.

And what else did I identify with?  There's the awkwardness of trying to make conversation across the language barrier "when some nice shy teacher works up the courage to strike up a conversation with me"   (p. 18 part 1)
There's the teacher's party in part 2, which ends up in a Karaoke booth, while the foreign Assistant English Teacher sings one English song, and then just listens to hours after hours of Japanese songs.  (Okay, the hours after hours aren't explicitly shown in the book, but trust me, it goes on for hours.  Lars Martinson does a good job of conveying the boredom of this in just a few panels.   If I never end up in another Karaoke booth as long as I live, I won't have any complaints.)

The protagonist of Tonoharu does meet a few other expatriates in the Japanese countryside, but they don't seem as isolated as he is.  In fact, they seem to have a thriving social life already.
I suspect this isn't universal for all Assistant Language Teachers, but might be more based on certain personality types--us introverts, for example.  But this was something I often felt, especially during my first year in Japan--the feeling that the other expatriates, when I did meet them, were all having much more exciting lives than I was.
The main character in Tonoharu, by contrast, spends a lot of time wandering around his small Japanese town by himself.  (As I did).  And then contrasting his boring existence with the wild lives that other expatriates seem to be having in Japan (as I also did).

I suspect the author of this book and I have very similar personality types.  Or at the very least, I have a very similar personality to his main character.
Even the main character's habit of not replacing his lights when they burned out was similar to me.  (For many of us Assistant English Teachers fresh out of college, Japan was the first place we ever lived alone and were solely responsible for the upkeep of our living quarters.  Like the main character in this book, I also lapsed into laziness and did not replace lights even when they had been out for months.)

All of this book portrays a very grim and lonely picture of being an Assistant Language Teacher in Japan.  And all of it I identified with.

And yet, on the other hand, I said on this blog before that my first two years in Japan were possibly the best years of my life.

So, how do I reconcile the fact that I identified with all the bad things in Tonoharu with the fact that I consider those years among the best in my life?  Well, in any situation in life, there are always going to be positives and negatives.  I'm not saying the negatives weren't there.  They were definitely there.  But when it all came down to it, the positives outweighed them.

As someone who had never traveled much or spent any time away from home before, those first few years in Japan I always had the feeling that I was on some sort of epic adventure.  Even during the boring times, even when I was just wandering around my town on my own, I felt like I couldn't believe I was all the way on the other side of the world, and that this was all just one big adventure.
Plus, the Japanese countryside is gorgeous.  The scenery was just so utterly unlike anything I grew up with back home.  (Go ahead and take a look at any of my pictures on my project to document the towns in my prefecture.)  And although the Assistant English Teacher does feel a bit isolated and lonely sometimes in the Japanese countryside, they are always regarded as a constant object of fascination by the local Japanese (who are completely unused to foreigners in their small town).  It's kind of thrilling always being the center of attention everywhere.  And, although it took me perhaps 6 months to make connections, once I did make good friends with the other expatriates in the area, I felt like my social life eventually did take off, and my loneliness and isolation came to an end.

Looking back on it all, I somewhat regret staying as long as I did in a job that required absolutely no talent and developed me in absolutely no way professionally.  (I'm still stuck in the TESOL industry, but I'm actually doing real teaching now, instead of just being a human tape player--which is what I was during most of my time as an Assistant English Teacher).  But I enjoyed it enough at the time.  (In fact, to a large measure, I enjoyed it at the time precisely because it was so undemanding.)

So, to sum up, it's important to remember the good with the bad.  I identified with just about everything in Tonoharu, but the good memories outweigh the frustrations.

Other notes:
* Because being forewarned in forearmed, this book should be required reading for all future Assistant English Teachers before they go to Japan.

*The graphic novel is as of yet unfinished. (The author is still working on the final volume--see his web page HERE.)  But as this struck a chord with me now, and as the final volume won't be published yet for some time, I decided to just dash out some thoughts now.

Footnotes:
* Ellipsis (...) are all in the original text

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