I am sitting here at my desk, trying to explain to myself why I haven’t blogged anything in the last three weeks. I would assume the one thing that keeps me from doing so is my absolute lack of desire to blog about Japan at this time. It’s not that there hasn’t been anything to blog about. I am just finding myself in a position of complete disillusionment.
As the summer months crawl by, I keep asking myself the same old questions. “Why I am still in Japan, when so many have moved on.” “Why I am still single, when so many my age have married and started families?” Or better yet, “Why I can’t seem to settle on a career when I am 31 and many are already well entrenched in their ambitions? ” It’s not that I am envious of those who are “successful” in the oxford definition of a happy life. Yet I can’t help but feel the ALT lifestyle is leaving me stretched thin. I love many aspects of Japan, yet feel I can never really amount to anything if I stay here. But then I ask myself, what is this “anything” I want to amount to in the first place. Is it worthwhile? Will it leave me satisfied? Can I really say that digging myself into a mediocre career with a wife and kids will give me anymore satisfaction than what I am doing now?
But there lies the problem. What am I doing now? The life of an ALT is a strange one indeed. I am there to assist my teachers with lessons, and I even make my own lesson plans when it comes to elementary school? Sadly, there is little that changes year to year. I am always making flashcards and finding songs. I am always using myself as a human tape recorder when I am in the Junior High classes. There are no promotions and no raises. I am not a human here. I am an ALT, and that is something I will always be. I am highly expendable, and that bothers me. As much as I enjoy this job it is not something I can do for rest of my life. When it comes to being ambitious, I am not Howard Hughes, but I am also not Kleatus, the slack jawed yokel. I feel like some days I am force to choose between these ridiculous extremes.
Which brings me to the next step. What that is, I’m not sure, however, I need to find it as soon as possible. I delayed this decision last year by moving out into the middle of nowhere. I fear now that if I don’t make it soon, I’ll be relegated to the vast rice-fields of Japan for years to come. In the mean time I will resume my blogging ways, and finding ways to make Japan enjoyable for all of you on the outside. Thanks for sticking around.
It is a strange life we have here, but if you stop to look at it from the outside once in a while, it is also quite an enviable one. I too go through bouts of “what the &*$# am I doing in Iwate?!!”, but in the end we have a decent amount of money for a fairly easy job and we are being paid to subconsciously learn a new language. I agree it isn’t something you can do forever, but I really don’t think we need to be so desperate to move on. With the amount of career mobility that we see in the modern workplace, I don’t think being in our 9th year of a 40 odd year working lifetime is really that much to get het up about.
Relax. Enjoy the moment. We will never have this chance again.
I have just come across your blog.
I believe that what brings you to the next step, that is to pass the Japanese Proficiency Tests Grade 2!! I suggest to you that ‘at this point (of your life?)’ or ‘before you go further’, you should conquer ‘Grade 2′! I will help you to prepare for the examination. Now that I have just read your blog and I really, really feel empathy for you and understand how someone like you feels about the present situation, who is talented, energetic, and has can-do-spirit in anything artistic and creative but not focuses on money or on ‘the success in the oxford definition of a happy life’, I have just decided to give you some more free lessons! If you are that determined, I will help you to make drastic progress. I am sure that you will learn a lot of Japanese through my lessons.whether you will pass the test or not. Test is test, you know.
Don’t hesitate to go ahead!! The path you have been coming down till now leads to your own success story!!
I would love to lend you a hand. :-) Your Japanese teacher,Tomoko
Hi Jason, just stopped by to see what you’re up to. Sally and I will be in Japan in a month or so, so we should definitely catch up. Sadly, I’m sure we will echo your sentiments as we will not even be working as ALTs this time but as eikaiwa monkeys. Still, it’s only for a year and only for the chance to be in Japan a while more so hopefully having that light at the end of the tunnel will help. The lot of the gaijin in Japan is an odd one–both liberating and confining at the same time. Secure, relatively easy work and an opportunity at a great lifestyle relatively free from social pressures you might feel at home, but the goal posts of fitting in and feeling normal always seem to move away when you think you’re getting close to them.
Anyway, we must catch up. We will most likely be in the Nagoya area this time, and I hear rumors that you might be in the Tokyo area. Somehow we will definitely meet up. Take care!
Isaac
Hello Jason, it is Sally adding to Isaac’s post. I didn’t mind the work in Japan to tell the truth, and am even looking forward to working for Nova. I like chatting with people, so teaching English works quite well. Unlike Isaac, I got a ‘proper’ job in Australia, and the similarities between it and the JET program were striking. I don’t know if getting a career is really all that is cracked up to be, I really don’t. My job certainly had opportunities, and I learnt a lot, but then again living in Japan also gives opportunites and you learn a lot. I was impatient to do a ‘real’ job, but it seems a case of the grass is always greener.
That said, it might be about time to at least take an extended holiday in an English speaking country, and see how that suits you. It is nice to be somewhere where you are understood and you can understand without too much effort, and of course your opportunities expand enormously.
Hope to catch up with you once we’re over there.
Sally
I feel your pain!! I have spent years going through the never-ending cycle .. what I’ve done so far, where I’m at now, where I want to be …. In the end, I don’t know that we ever get the answers because it seems like our answers are always changing.
I guess the questions you should be asking are the ones we hear entirely too often: where do you want to be in ten years and at the end of your journey, what do you want it to look like? From where you’re at right now, what will it take to get there?
Are the wife and kids what you want to come home to at the end of the day or is that just a bonus / option to another life you have in mind? Either way is the life you want in Japan? What you’re doing now, do you consider it a job or career? Can this be something that you’ll always do or at least plan to do in the long term? What are the sacrifices that you have to make by staying there? What will you give up if you move elsewhere?
I have even boiled it down to a list before .. marking what I want, what I don’t want, why I actually want those things, and what things are ‘negotiable.’ Probably very archaic, but it really puts things in perspective. For instance, I have been contemplating moving to a bigger city but I’ve never broke down the whys behind it. What are some of them? I like big cities, I like the excitement, there’s always something to do, and it will boost my career .. mostly things that, at the end of the day, are not decision makers for me. Kinda silly actually. So something that was stressing me out so badly is no longer having that impact.
I don’t know if we will ever get the answers we need, but maybe by deciding on your path and getting on it, the stress will fall away and hopefully ever thing else will fall into place too. At least that’s what I hoping for … for both of us :o)
Take care!
If you’re serious about teaching, come back to Canada and do your education degree.
If you’re serious about living and working in Japan… well, to be honest, you’ll need to pass your JPT level 2 or you might as well forget about it.
The underlying thread in your message is the creeping feeling that there aren’t that many options available to you in the future. When people say “career” what they mean are working jobs with experience that open up new opportunities, whether that’s seniority, more lucrative positions or cooler work. It seems that your current experience may only be opening up possibilities of more of the same, unfortunately.
Hey Jason,
Seems to me that it’s that you’re afraid of making a decision about what you want to do with the rest of your life because you might be thinking… what if it’s the wrong decision? You seem to be ready to move on to something else now. If you feel that you have mastered all that you can in your current position, then it’s time to move on to something else. I say, think about it a bit more, and decide something, and go with it, regardless of the outcome.
I had to make that decision after deciding to quit being a lab tech and find something else. I had no idea what the heck it was that I wanted to do. I just knew that I needed to do something different. Hence why whenever I explain that I had a BSc in Chemistry and say ya I work in radio, people give me a funny look. I took a chance, had the support of my friends and family, and it’s turned out to be the best years of my life. I wasn’t sure when I started taking radio at NAIT that it was going to work out for the best, but I’m glad that it has right now.
The way I see things:
1. you stay in japan take your level 2 and see what that gets you.
2. come back take photography
3. come back get your education degree and teach
No one says that what you decide to do next is what you’re going to do for the rest of your life. You take it as it comes.
Big-O