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….