Tokyo Orientation – Let the actual Japaness begins.

Tokyo Orientation for the Jet programme is held at the Keio Plaza hotel in Shinjuku. The Keio Plaza I believe was, when it was first built in the 70s, the tallest building in Japan and the place all feels rather shiny and posh. The sort of place where I just knew I didn’t belong and felt I was spending money just to breath in the lobby.
On the bus ride from the airport to the hotel we were told that we would have to wait a while before we could get our keys which was a huge downer to me, I needed a shower, I needed a change of clothes; I had to become civilized again! When we got there though, luckily, this warning proved false and it was straight to the room and straight in the shower.
Contrary to the super posh appearance of the hotel in general the rooms were actually rather bland, they wouldn’t have looked out of place in Skegness, yet out of the window you had the shiny lights of Tokyo…hmm….
My orientation living arrangements turned out to be surprisingly good, a decent sized room sharing with only one other guy who I had met previously, he had been one of the people sharing a corridor with me at London orientation and we had spoken a bit on the long journey from Edinburgh. Speaking to other people it seems everyone wasn’t so lucky, one guy at least was the third man in a two person room and had to sleep on a sofa, a girl I spoke to one morning moaned of her grossly overweight, heavy snoring roommate.
My first order of business in Japan: Japanese TV.
Oh how disappointing it was. Nothing but baseball, talk shows and documentaries about small rice packaging plants in Ishikawa. There was nary a tentacle rape anime to be seen. Oh well, it was 3pm.
Or was it?
This would be a big problem with my time in Tokyo and even my first days once I got to my placement: My sleep cycle being totally messed up. At first I don’t think it was jet lag, it was simply that I had gone for over a day without having a nice lie down in bed. As the days moved on and I rested up though…then jet lag became the clear culprit. But anyway. That’s boring. Back to Tokyo Orientation.
…
Which was also largely boring really. Lectures about stuff I already knew and things that were totally non-relevant to me. Lots of formality and pomp…yeah.

On the first day I recall me and some others decided to go adventuring for food. We ended up in a small Japanese restaurant where nobody spoke English and I was probably the best Japanese speaker of the group; oh deer.
I ordered some sort of fried chicken, the Engrish menu advertised it as one of the most popular dishes in Japan, it finally came and….it was KFC style fried chicken. Ah. Well…I had heard they loved KFC over here, but….that was sneaky.
One big problem we had was that one of the girls with us was a total vegetarian. With my pathetic Japanese I tried to explain this to the waiter to try and see what was safe for her “Niku…IE!...err….Sakana….IE!”, complete with hand actions to indicate the no-ness.
I really feel for vegetarians in Japan, even the stuff without actual meat in it is normally made in a meaty broth. There really is nothing for them here, this scene sums things up well:





On a few days I went for a walk and soaked in the neon night life of Japan. You know….it was kind of cool, the feeling of “I am in Japan, yey!” but at the same time…it was a bit lacking. Not quite so fantastic as I had hoped. True, I was sticking to one small area, but this small area was right by Shinjuku station. Hmm….

Another night I recall there was the reception at the British embassy. It was the night before heading to our prefectures I believe. At the embassy was a taiko performance. And there was free beer. Some people were being paranoid sour pusses with this. Others were going all out and taking advantage of the free stuff. I…landed halfway. Well. Three quarters towards the latter. I was screwed up enough with my jet lag, what was a small hang over? I shouldn’t be doing much on my first day in my prefecture right? Just straight to my flat to sleep until tomorrow…
Straight after the embassy my plan was to head to bed but…I couldn’t help but give in to temptation as old timers from my prefecture had turned up to take the newbies to karaoke. Ah.
Karaoke…we better leave that story till another day.

All in all Tokyo orientation was rather lame. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who felt like death all the way through it, no way were we on top of our game and able to ask the questions we had to know the answer to and that sort of thing.
Tokyo orientation really felt like a relic of the Jet programme`s early days back when Japan was on top of the world, lighting cigars with 1000 yen notes and the Jet programme was still some great new and untested initiative. Considering most of what we were told I at least already knew I really question its purpose somewhat. Is it all just to act as a sort of airlock between the west and Japan? Bringing you to Japan with all these friends from home and letting you poke it a while together before you’re sent off alone?
Is it all just a networking opportunity, a place where you’re meant to make friends with people who are placed in places you want to visit?
Who knows.
It was and it’s done.

Pictures
Obligatory photo of a Japanese toilet which for the longest time I was sure did everything but flush, then I found the chain hidden on the wall. Ah.



The room. Very Fawlty Towers no?



It came out badly but it was meant to be a photo of Japan by night as it exists in the stereotypical mindset. Minus the sin industries.



Tokyo was the first time I`ve seen skyscrapers, probally the highest I`ve ever been (in a literal, not druggy sense), yet I was strangely not so amazed.

Journeying to Tokyo. Woohoo?

My parents insisted on taking me to Edinburgh airport themselves so rather than taking a train on Friday night and sleeping at the airport a little I instead set off at silly o’clock in the morning for a long car ride up to Scotland.
At the airport there seemed to be one or two others who had got there before me, I recognized one from London orientation. Quietly sitting in one corner of the terminal, amidst the holiday makers ready for their Ryan Air flights to the land of sun and cheapish booze (who else flies so early in the morning?) was a smartly dressed Japanese guy who I just knew from looking at him had to have something to do with the Jet programme.
At the appointed hour he sprang into action, tickets were dispensed and that was that. We had a strange short haul flight to Heathrow, during which we were given breakfast- airport food, now there was a blast from the past, I had never had such a thing since I was a kid, in my adult life I’ve been solidly a budget airline man, none of this BA fanciness.
The wait at Heathrow for our next flight to Japan was long, dull and drawn out but eventually, with much glee, we boarded the plane. Our hell was just beginning.

The design of long haul aeroplanes is very cruel. Some real sadists must be behind the designation of seating arrangements in those aircraft. We entered through the front door and so through first class we bounced.
First class looked absolutely lovely, the people there seemed to have little cubicles of their own and chairs which seemed to be able to convert into full beds. Mega jealous but alas it was not to be, no way would Jet even in its glory days of the late 80s ever pay the big money for us plebs to fly in such style.

Through the plane I walked…next came what I believe is called business class. Cushy chairs, plenty of leg room and nicely sized gaps from your neighbours…ah if only Jet still flew folk on business class. But no.
Scum class it was to be.
Like cattle we packed our bags into the over head lockers (Like cattle? OK, bad comparison) and squeezed into our chairs. I was in a middle chair with young Japanese women either side of me. One proved rather decent and we chatted a little a few times during the journey. I was certainly fortunate in getting such small people surrounding me. The place was cramped enough without the thought of having chodders taking half your seat.

Those seats…man. They were so cramped I couldn`t touch my feet on the floor. It was just impossible for me to bend over enough. When it came to lunch time and the trays were down…I was trapped. Completely trapped.

I will say one good point of the flight- the entertainment. As previously mentioned I haven`t flown with a `proper` airline since I was a boy. Back then entertainment generally consisted of having to buy some special earphones and then you could listen to a small choice of radio stations or the audio track for whatever was showing on the communal TVs (usually Mr. Bean).
Here on this flight though we had some sort of little computerized media centre built into the chair in front of us. It was really rather good, the games were lame but it had a decent choice of films and TV series to watch.
During the flight I managed to watch Lost in Translation (better than the first time I saw it but still meh), Paul (first time I’ve seen it. Not as good as expected at all) and Hall Pass (another first time film which was totally different to expected. Where the hell was Stephen Merchant`s bits?) and a few TV bits and bobs.

Despite the cramped conditions I also managed to get a little bit of dozing done, during one spell of which I managed to get a bit of red wine on myself somehow. Oh joy.
But the flight was so long…12 hours I believe. Unfortunately the amount of time I was unconscious during it was but a mere fraction of that. The rest of it…a sticky, nasty mess.
Something I had eaten didn`t agree with me, some of the plane food was a bit dodgy I believe. Thus there was a spot of Montezuma’s in play、which let me tell you was quite horrific in those cramped conditions.
Then there was the sweat, so much sweat… I could literally FEEL how awful I must have smelled. With the length of the flight, my long journey to the airport before hand and my general stressedness and forgetfulness in not taking a shower after I’d been to see my friends, by the end of the flight it had been two whole days since I had washed. Nasty, nasty, nasty.

When I got to Tokyo and retrieved my baggage (after a long and agonising wait to get through customs) the first thing I did was changed my shirt. Which helped a little, the core stench was still there however.

So yes. In conclusion; flying long haul SUCKS.
Even putting money issues aside for a minute I really don’t see myself visiting home too often I have to go through that again. One of the worst experiences in my life.

Home, packing, university work and stress

Busy, busy, busy. It has been a month in Japan and only now am I getting around to updating my blog despite there having been several blog post worthy events over the course of the month.
So….hmm….
I guess the best thing to do would be to start at the beginning and to work forward, hopefully I`ll catch up with the current day before too long. So without further ado….the journey to Japan and Tokyo orientation-


Usually I am quite good at preparing things in advance, when it came to getting ready for my trip to Japan however I was anything but.
My last week in the UK was not taken up with seeing friends, doing my last xxxxx for the next year (or two…or three…or who knows), etc… instead it was taken up with university work.

Though I have had my bachelor for a while I had been having some pretty big problems with getting my masters; long story short a few of my credits were invalid for my degree. Despite there being months of nothingness in waiting for Jet it was only in mid July that I was finally able to get started on a small course to get these final credits.
Considering that I knew much of August would be a write off for me due to it taking a while to get setup in Japan, it thus worked out that the backend of July involved me working like a bitch to get as much of this course done as possible before I left. When I say that I worked like a bitch I am totally not kidding, I absolutely bloody toiled.
The course would have been hard enough as things stood but considering I had as little as a third of the time as was meant for it and was stressing over my impending move to the far side of the world it was agony.
What makes things all the worse is that the whole time I was paranoid my lack of a masters degree would ruin my Jet chances- I said back in the application documentation that I was expecting my Masters within a month or two. Come the interviews…I’m pretty sure I said there had been problems but that it would only be a few months more. I was uncertain on this though. All the while I was looking through my contract at the bit where it said if anything in your application is proven to be untrue you can be sacked. Man, super worried was I. I was all up for Japan, my life for the past 2 months had been reliant on Japan being just around the corner, for it to be snatched away….
So yes. July was not a happy month. Stress and work was the meat and potatoes of my Summer in Britain.

The last week itself…well as I say I was busy working. The impending unofficial deadline of my journey to Japan was spurring me on, making me work all the harder. Then there were other commitments. I needed to do a last little night out with some friends, I had to say goodbye to various relatives, I needed to dismantle my computer so I could pack the thing up for Japan, I needed to actually pack!
In the end it all worked out that I ended up doing pretty much all of this on Friday night; a night when I already was not planning on sleeping due to having an early journey to the airport.
That night…mad dash into Newcastle to see friends, trying to have fun whilst stressing and trying to keep track of the time, mad dash to my aunt, mad dash here, mad dash there. Dismantling my computer whilst covered in sweat and shaking with stress, trying to make everything fit in my suitcases. ARGHHHH!

Somehow…I prevailed. I was unsure if I had done everything right. The stress would continue right up until…well just the other week actually, when I finally did get my home desktop up and running and finished my Uni work -I actually had very little indeed left over to do in Japan, which is a very pleasant surprise. It seems my stressing out and killing my last weeks in Japan paid off.


And….Wow I’ve wrote a lot about nothing. Looks like Tokyo Orientation will be….at least a post away. Maybe two. I haven’t even mentioned the journey yet. Blimey.

Placement information!

The placements are out!
Well…as I write this now it has actually been a bit over a week since they came out, but its not like they then retracted them. This post remains valid.

A little over a month until I set off for Japan and thanks to a beefy letter from the Japanese embassy in London I now know where I’ll be going in Japan. When I opened the letter and saw where they were sending me I was so happy I started jumping around the passage way…knocking over a pint glass, which then smashed and slit open the bottom of my foot. There was much blood.
Why was I so happy? Not only am I not being consigned to Okinawa but I actually got my first choice of placement! Huzzah!

The only information given to me at that point was a little line saying which prefecture I was going to. No further information. Cue: Another week of slight worry whilst I pray I’m not being sent to the boondocks of the prefecture. This worry was eventually released when I got a letter directly from the prefectural board of education saying I also had my first choice of city. Yey!

At the moment I know my school, and via a quick email from my predecessor a few rough basics of my situation: I’ll be teaching in just the one high school (quite a good one apparently) and living in a rather lovely, spacious flat in the city centre. Cost wise it seems to be somewhat towards the top end of what Jets pay at 50,000 yen but I guess one must pay for quality.
Somewhat worrying for the time being is a note about my flat- the ceilings are a bit low and could be troubling for someone who is tall, ‘like, 6 foot or something’, I am 6 foot and 3….so….I just have to hope she is only referring to doorways or somesuch there.

So yeah, I’ve got my placement and it’s my first choice. And....all is good. Yeah. I’m really, really looking forward to going there.
Yet…in my research about my placement I am uncovering some rather negative factoids about it. For instance the weather is not as good as I had hoped but rather very, very hot. I am not a man who copes well with heat so this is offputting.

At the same time as I am uncovering the bad side of my placement I am reading about other placements on various Jet communities and hearing things which make them sound really quite awesome. Did I make a mistake in choosing my placements options?
I’ve never been to Japan before so when I made my choices for placements I was doing so without much knowledge to go on, I pretty much just browsed Google earth and Wikipedia, found some likely candidates then investigated them.

Don’t get me wrong here.
I’m not really negative about my placement before I get there. I’m fully aware what the problem is here- I’m just seeing the superficial information about all these other placements, so of course they seem great, with my placement however I am getting right down into reading the nitty-gritty and so my mental image of it is one of a far more realistic place.

Yet still…Though I have a good placement I am sad about not getting some of these other placements.
I'm in an inland placement, a very mountainy area; Which is cool.
I've never lived amongst proper mountains before (what we have in England doesn’t count) and my stereotypical mental image of Japan is very much one of the mountains. When I was a kid I had an atlas which had a photo for the more interesting/important countries it listed, whereas the photo for China was some poor rice farmer in a Mao suit (this atlas was a hand me down from a much older cousin, it was old……), the image for Japan was of the Shinkansen going past Mount Fuji… Considering I was a total train freak as a kid this image burned itself in my memory as defining Japan- advanced technology and pretty mountains.

Yet...wouldn't it be cool to live on the coast?
Sure, I’ve a bit of a phobia about poisonous animals (jellyfish, brrr) and this year paranoid tsunami fears have struck me, but still...Japan’s coasts are very important to its very being. Also I would get the live on the seaside. How awesome would that be? Going down to the beach whenever you fancy?
But no beaches for me, I’m up in the mountains…

Another main feature of my placement is that I am in a city; a city which contains several other Jets and apparently quite a few other foreigners besides...Which is nice, it gives me people to talk to without a big communication barrier standing in the way. It’ll be almost like being an exchange student again.

But….is that what I signed up for?
Wouldn’t it be cool, in a way, to be the only white man for miles around?
I would stride amongst the Japanese like some sort of alien from another planet, amazing them as I do that which comes naturally to me like…drinking an entire pint of milk from the bottle and…that sort of thing.
It would really throw me into authentic Japanese culture, and with the removal of the temptation of English speakers my Japanese would improve drastically- it would have to, it would be either that or I go mad!

If you’re an inaka-jet you could well be reading this and be thinking ‘You ungrateful git! You’ve got a city placement and you’re moaning? You wanna live an hour’s drive from the nearest combini?’
Well….no. I’m happy with my city placement, it was my first choice. I’ve enough of small town life in the UK, it sucks, its boring.
Yet…there are some aspects of country life which would be really cool….

What’s my point here?
I guess it would be one of ‘You can't have it all’.
Even the shittiest placements I’d imagine would offer something that the placements everyone wants don’t have. Even a tiny little island in the middle of nowhere would have its plus sides which somebody placed in downtown Kyoto just wouldn’t experience.
My point is not so much one of ‘the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence’ but...why does there have to be a fence? Can't we like…knock down the fences and have some magic teleportation technology let us be everywhere?
...
No, of course not, that’s silly. It’s impossible. And if it was possible then everyone would be doing it and the unique special factors of various places would be lost as tourists seeking the authentic experience piss all over it.

Logically thinking about things I am very happy with my placement. All the positives and negatives added up I do think I would be much happier in the city than the country. As to the seaside vs. the mountains….Well that’s disappointing but then the cities on the coast I could have been placed in are either a million miles from the action of the big cities or greatly oversubscribed with people wanting to go there. They also generally don’t have such cool mountain scenery.

Anyway, there’s my second post, yet another glance inside my strange mind.
As I said earlier the countdown is on, in a week and a month I shall be in Japan. It just doesn’t seem real; I quiver with excitement whenever I force a bout of realisation through my synapses.
When I do get to Japan hopefully I will be able to put up considerably more interesting posts than this one, posts filled with strange and wonderful Japanese stuff!


P.S: You may have noticed I haven’t actually mentioned where my placement is in this post. That is very much intentional.
I have no idea what sort of guy my boss will be yet and I have heard that some do not like Jets to be keeping blogs.
I pray that I have a nice laid back boss and can safely reveal where I am shortly after arrival, if it transpires that I cannot post that information then it would really drastically limit what I can post on here!
For the time being I am staying on the safe side and being conservative. We shall see what the future direction of this blog will be….

Waiting

There’s a famous saying about waiting. Though I can’t remember exactly how it goes. “Life is what happens when you’re waiting….” For….. Something. I don’t know what.
But certainly at the moment my life is waiting.

Our story begins way back at the end of April when I received a letter to say I was shortlisted for the Jet programme. Due to events in Japan this notification was understandably quite a bit later than was originally intended…the due date to get all documents in however was not pushed back along with the notification.
To make matters worse Britain was faced by a glut of bank holidays around the end of April/beginning of March- how about that? Bitching about too many holidays…wow I’m out of sync with the world at large!- which meant getting my medical form in on time proved to be a crazy mad dash of a situation. Due to my Doctor not having my tuberculosis vaccination on hand, and possibly my idiocy in saying to my doctor that TB was a big deal in Japan, I was forced to get an x-ray to confirm my lungs were fine. Luckily Jet proved to be flexible and I was granted an extension to get my medical form in- something which I eventually managed to do!

In the months before receiving my notification letter I had been looking forward to/dreading that moment. Yet when it actually came…nothing really hit me. I’ve read that shortlisted does mean you are 99.999% accepted but as of yet it just didn’t feel real. Maybe it was the medical fiasco, maybe it was the long wait before I would be going to Japan, maybe it was that I was already pretty set on being in Japan this year; For whatever reason short of a little ‘yey!’ things just haven’t felt real for Jet yet….

And they still don’t, for though I have been notified of my acceptance I am still waiting.
The first thing I’m waiting for is my police reply. Now, the deadline for getting this into Jet isn’t until the very end of June. The police have to get it back to you within 4 weeks of receiving the request (I sent in my app a day or two after getting my shortlisted letter), yet still…other people have their replies already. Why don’t I have mine? Maybe something has gone wrong? This is me afterall…. Wouldn’t that be just my luck?
I also had to request a foreign police reply and despite the major problems I encountered in applying for that my reply came within a week or two of posting it….
So why are the British police, taking so long?
Did I commit a crime at some point without realising it? Is that time my friend smashed up a car when I was four years old on my record? Will it doom me? Am I actively under investigation for something dodgy? Aggh!

But anyway.

The second thing I’m waiting for- placement notification!
Since the deadline for getting documents in to Jet wasn’t pushed back I guessed they would be on time with placement notifications and we would know by mid May….nope. Some people know; through unofficial channels. But I’m not one of them. Official notifications aren’t due till the beginning of June apparently.
I’m really quite worried about this. Its nothing I can control of course, but still…maybe my saying I could adapt in a super rural place and the fact that I am from a small town will mean they’ll put me somewhere ultra rural? Perhaps they will even put me in Okinawa- this is my biggest fear. I really, really don’t want to go to Okinawa at all (a hellishly hot island cut off from civilization at large, covered in America soldiers and deadly animals…no thanks)
I’ve got my fingers crossed for getting one of my placement choices. I think I was quite wise with them. Or at the least somewhere in southern Honshu.
But….well this is me. The worst could happen.

So yes. Welcome to my blog where I will be detailing my adventures in Japan.
I’m not always a nervous wreck. Honest. Even here bare in mind when I say ‘worried’ its not a quivering in fear worry, just a ‘I hope not…’.
But then that’s the trouble with my life right now…nothing to do so too much time to think. No job, rural area so not much to do, not many friends I can go out with living around here. Life is quite lame at the moment.
So roll on Japan!