July 2003
Saturday-Sunday, July 26-27, 2003 — Flying to Tokyo
I woke the morning of Saturday, July 26, feeling distinctly unrested. I had spent the night before doing some last-minute packing. I went to sleep around midnight wondering if what my dad had said — that I wouldn’t sleep much anyway — would turn out to be true. It was. I tossed and turned, the magnitude of the journey before me eating away at any possible relaxation I could have gotten.
The family and I loaded into the car with my luggage and we headed to Intercontinental Airport. I think I did a pretty good job packing, considering I had to bring a year’s worth of stuff: a 68-pound suitcase (the limit was 70 pounds each), a 50-pound suitcase, my laptop and a carry-on bag.
Part of the space in my suitcases was taken up my omiyage, gifts for my future supervisor and the faculty of the schools where I’d be placed. Again and again JET literature had told us to bring gifts for co-workers and bosses as a way of upholding Japanese tradition. I brought books on Texas and Houston for my supervisor and the school principals. For the staff, I brought cookies. I had heard of JETs bringing chocolates only to find they melted in the summer heat.
Just before going through the metal detectors, I said goodbye to my family. It was hard, knowing I wouldn’t see them for a long time, but I was eager to embark on my JET journey. For two years, the possibility of going to Japan had resided in my head. Now I was finally going.
I boarded the Continental plane with the 55 other new JETs from the Texas-Oklahoma region. The direct flight from Houston to Tokyo’s Narita Airport lasted 12 agonizing hours. I really don’t like flying, especially trans-oceanic flights. I tried not to think of my beloved green 2000 Honda Civic, which had served me well the past three years in Abilene. I had just finished paying for it, but decided to sell it since I’d be away for so long. I wondered what my apartment would be like, if my assigned city, Tokushima, would have better weather than Houston (boo, hiss), how skilled in English my supervisor would be, and what my two assigned junior high schools would be like.
I tried to spend as much of my time sleeping as possible on the flight. One of the JETs took it upon himself to tell me he'd taken a Xanax and woke after 10 hours feeling “refreshed.” I was envious and intrigued, but as miserable as I was, I don’t know if I’d take a sleeping pill myself…
They fed us frequently, first a snack of peanuts and a drink, then a full-blown meal (I had shrimp scampi), then another snack of ramen and a sandwich, followed by breakfast (an omelet).
When we touched down at Narita, there was a feeling of disconnection with reality. Was I really in Japan? The airport sported signs in both Japanese and English. I stopped to take a picture of a “Welcome to Japan” sign that included a cheerful-looking anime family. (“Tourist!” yelled my fellow JETs as they passed me by.)
We ended up in a room with several booths and one excruciatingly long line: the immigration line, where our passports were checked and stamped. After much standing around, an airport employee approached the latter third of the line and gestured for us to go through the exit sign. “Freedom!” I thought, thinking we’d somehow won a lottery to get out of the immigration line … but they were really just herding us to another room of immigration booths.
At the baggage claim, I gathered my mountain of luggage and exited, only to find Tokyo Orientation Advisors — returning JETs helping with the orientation for new JETs — placed every 10 feet directing us to the buses outside. Some of my fellow JETs who had told me Tokyo’s weather would be worse than Houston’s (really, is that possible??) were woefully wrong: The air was cool and clear. It felt like spring. The refreshing temperature even managed to put some bounce in my exhausted steps.
I handed off my biggest suitcase to have it delivered directly to my assigned city and brought the rest of my stuff with me on the chartered bus. As the bus began heading to Shinjuku, Tokyo’s financial district and the location of our hotel and orientation, I got my first glimpse of the city.
Some observations: People drive on the left side of the road. The Honda Civic is not nearly as popular in Japan as it is in the United States. The road signs are in Japanese and English, but some signs just have kanji. Although there are lots of mini-cars, there are also lots of SUVs, vans and luxury cars. No pick-ups in sight. Tokyo has lots of high-rise apartments with laundry flapping on clothes lines on the balcony. While some of the buildings have visually interesting architecture, by and large most are concrete boxes. Because space is at a premium, some parking garages do away with the driveways inside and instead use lifts to place cars on different floors.
Altogether, there are 6,226 JETs this year. Half of those are new JETs, which they — the sponsoring government agencies — broke into two waves. My group of 1,500 people arrived first. Most stayed at the Keio Plaza Hotel, where the orientation took place, but some — including me — were placed at the Tokyo Hilton down the street.
When I finally arrived in my room on the 14th floor of the Tokyo Hilton, I saw my roommate had already come and gone. I set my stuff down and explored the room. The room was small, with less than half a foot of space between the two single beds, but the pristine white comforter and sheets and pillow looked quite luxurious and comfortable. We had a great view of Shinjuku out our window, including the tennis court on one of the rooftops below us. I flipped through the channels on TV and found most in Japanese, except the Discovery Channel, BBC and CNN. The drawers of the dresser included two yukata-style robes. The bathroom contained a wealth of toiletries: razors, toothbrushes, toothpaste, shower caps, Q-tips and hair bands.
I rested for a bit before meeting up with a fellow JET: Paula, a Dallas designer who’d been placed in Gonma-ken in western Honshu (the main island). We went in search of food nearby so our weary feet would not have to carry us far and ended up at a Denny’s. Another thing I noticed: a lot of Japanese restaurants have jumped on the wireless Internet bandwagon. The wait-staff carry around a personal digital assistant of sorts and punch in your order, which is sent to the main computer and tallied for the bill. No scribbling involved!
The Denny’s in Japan do not have the same kind of food as those in the U.S. Paula ate grilled eel and rice. My stomach was not feeling so adventurous and so I ate a peach sundae. It was good and contained a delicious, tiny berry I'd never had before. Thankfully, the restaurant had pictures of its food, so our lack of Japanese-speaking skills was not too much of a problem.
Then I went back to my room and collapsed, unable to stay awake any longer. It was 8 p.m.
Monday-Tuesday, July 28-29, 2003 — Tokyo Orientation
My first introduction to my roommie, Sally Kendrick, was when she shrieked in the middle of the night and I bolted out of bed, thinking someone else was in the room with us.
Sally had come in to the room soon after I’d passed out and she, too, fell asleep. I guess I woke her up when I rose briefly around 3 or 4 a.m. When I laid back down on bed, Sally got up, too, but when she made her way to the bathroom, her reflection in the mirror on the bathroom door started her and she let out a scream. I bolted up in my bed and gasped, “Are you okay??” She was. I dimly registered that she had an English accent. We both went back to bed.
Around 6:30 a.m. neither of us could sleep anymore, so we both got up and chatted for a bit. It turns out Sally, who just finished “university,” as they call it over there in England, was also assigned to Tokushima City like me. All right! A fellow Tokushima-ite! Sally is from Cornwall, although the way she says it made me think she was from “Cormoore” for the longest time … While Sally got ready, I went to breakfast. The Tokyo Hilton had provided quite a nice array of food for the next three mornings: fresh fruit, cold cuts, smoked salmon, cereal, donuts, yogurt, eggs and sausages. I would be confounded the next morning by sounds of birds chirping in the dining hall, apparently a recording played over a loudspeaker.
Desperate for some Internet access, I tried the Keio, which was reputed to have computers set up for JETs, but the waiting list didn’t have any slots until the next morning. There was a Kinko’s at my hotel, but the computers there, too, were taken. So I set out to find another Kinko’s nearby. It worked, too! I used my meager Japanese vocabulary at an underground convenience store asking where the Kinko's was and the clerk, though he didn’t speak any English, drew me a little map and I found the Kinko’s. I was quite pleased with myself.
Orientation began at 10:30 a.m. at the Keio. I walked into the fifth-floor ballroom and was floored to see all 1,500 JETs in the same room. There are people from 40 countries — including the United States, Canada, South Africa, England, Ireland and France — in JET this year. We sat with our prefectural groups, and Tokushima-ken’s was at the front right-hand corner. A second-year Tokushima-ken JET, an Australian named Dave Cowland-Cooper (who goes by “Dave CC”), greeted us and told us he'd take us out that night "for a wander" (as the Brits say).
We spent the day listening to speakers from the Council of Local Authorities for International Relations (CLAIR) and the different agencies involved in the JET program. We also had sessions on teaching, living and traveling in Japan (as well as traveling abroad) during orientation. One of the unexpected highlights was a video about a typical day for an assistant language teacher (that’s my job — ALT). It was so painful, and yet so entertaining to watch.
The video showed footage of three ALTs. I don’t know if the video was scripted or not, but the dialogue was horribly cheesy. In one scene, the first ALT and an English teacher at his school pass by the choir room and the ALT asks, “Who’s that singing?” The English teacher says, "It is Miss so-and-so and the ALT replies heartily, “She has a beautiful voice!” AND, later, when the ALT heads out after school, he meets some school girls out front. They depart the school together and then you see him ask one of the female students, “Do you want me to carry your books for you?” WHAT?!
One of the funniest parts of his footage was when the ALT draws a picture of mountains and the sun and sky on the board. He asks what color the sky is and if the student answered correctly, the student got to color that part in. But when the ALT gets to, “What color is the sun?” a student answers definitively, “Red!” That took the ALT totally off-guard. Boggled, he looked to the English teacher for back-up, and the teacher apparently said something to the effect of that’s what color Japanese assign to the sun. Finally the ALT rebounded with, “Well, in AMERICA, we color the sun YELLOW.”
The second ALT had better teaching-related footage. You see him working with one of the teachers on a lesson when some students come into the office and ask if he wants to play basketball. He says sure, and then looks at the teacher and asks, “Are we through here?” What?! I know it wasn’t intended to come across that way, but I was horrified how rude that came across.
The third ALT in the video must have been hard-core vegan. There were several scenes in which she was administering an English test to her students, and the questions ALL revolved around such topics as, “Is it hypocritical for people to eat the meat of an animal if they, in fact, did not butcher the animal themselves?” It was quite surreal. I’m surprised the JET program allowed that kind of random footage in that video. Well, it was made in 1993.
The Tokushima JETs met up with Dave CC that night in search of a bar and then a karaoke place in Kabuki-cho. I found this amusing, as the Lonely Planet travel guide calls that neighborhood, “Tokyo’s most notorious red-light district” before adding, “Kabuki-cho is not wall-to-wall sex; there are also some very straight entertainment options, including cinemas and some good restaurants.”
There were 12 of us total, including a friend of one of the ALT’s. First we went to a bar called “Hub” and then we went in search of a karaoke place. Apparently karaoke places send out messengers to scavenge the main streets for customers, since a lot of these places are tucked away in alleys that most people would never be able to find on their own. One such “messenger” got wind of our karaoke interest and Claire Kinder, our lone CIR (coordinator of international relations, a JET position that requires fluency in Japanese), got us all set up.
I had always thought karaoke places are like bars, but apparently you get a private room with your own TV, karaoke machine, microphones and song books! It was my first time to do karaoke. In case you're wondering, I sang “Sparkling Diamonds,” from Moulin Rouge (“A kiss on the hand may be quite continental …”) which was a little obscure, I think. It was more fun to watch people. Clair belted out a song in Japanese, impressing everyone. (None of us, except Dave CC, spoke Japanese). Dave CC was quite enthusiastic about singing, too, and took the mike several times.
The next day was full of more sessions. One speaker, a Brit named Huw Oliphant who worked for the Japanese government’s International Education Division, had some amusing anecdotes of his time as a JET. His first year, he was placed in a small, rural town and at the supermarket, an old woman would always follow him around and watch what he would place in his basket. She would make noises of approval and disapproval based on his choices. Oliphant spoke of learning how one seafood dish involves the fish still moving on the plate. He warned of the Japanese approximations of our food, such as once when he bit into a donut filled with curry and another time when he bought a sandwich filled with cream and strawberries.
At a session on travel in and around Japan, the two JETs leading the talks spoke of typical travel methods such as by plane, train, ferry and carpool. They also broached the subject of hitchhiking — how safe it was and how easy it was for foreigners — especially Caucasian foreigners — to hitch a ride from Japanese people, who are eager for the novelty: “A gaijin! Stop!” They also spoke of going to trucking stations and, if we could read kanji, read the board with truckers’ destinations and hitching a ride with them, too.
I do not think I will travel that way.
Wednesday, July 30, 2003 — On to Tokushima
We packed up our stuff today and boarded a flight at Haneda Airport, Tokyo’s domestic airport, to Tokushima. I was relieved that by night’s end, I would finally be stationary.
We had an hour and a half to kill before our departure so a lot of the JETs went off in search of food. I try to keep my food intake to a minimum before I fly. I did discover, however, during that time that even airports use the old-fashioned plumbing in their restrooms: toilets recessed into the ground. Yikes! I hoped that my apartment in Tokushima would have a Western-style toilet.
At Tokushima Airport, as we gathered our baggage, we could already see the welcoming parties just outside the doors. I was both looking forward to and dreading this part. I wanted to meet my supervisor and move on to the next step, but at the same time, I was reluctant to leave my group. We had done a lot of bonding in the past few days. I likened us to college freshmen: a diverse mish-mash of people suddenly dumped together with a common purpose, JET, but without a clue. There’s a lot of camaraderie to be had in that sort of situation. Now we were going to be separated so we could fan out to our various assigned towns and cities in the prefecture. I was comforted that at least Sally and Tashi, a former PR guy from Seattle, were assigned to Tokushima-shi with me.
Martin’s convoy (Martin was one of the two British guys in our group) had a big sign with flowers around his name. There were some other signs too, but it’s all a blur. Someone said they were hesitant to be the first out of the baggage claim area, so I forged ahead out into the group. But when I got into the receiving area, I didn’t see any sign at all with my name! I walked to the very back of the room, where the doors to the parking lot were, and just kind of stood there, nonplussed, watching my fellow JETs receive warm receptions from their welcoming parties.
Had my supervisor forgotten to come get me? But then I saw Tashi talking with a two men and a woman. We had the same supervisor, right? So I went over and asked. Yes, the woman was Takeuchi-sensei, my supervisor, too. They just didn’t have a sign. I wonder how Tashi determined she was the right person. The taller of the two men was Yamaguchi-sensei and the other was Mike, a departing ALT from California. Mike was fluent in Japanese and had volunteered to greet us with Takeuchi-sensei at the airport to help overcome the language barrier.
The heat and humidity outside hit me like a wall. I hadn’t left Houston at all, I thought in dismay.
Because we had to much luggage, we split into two groups. Sally and I went with Takeuchi-sensei. Tashi went with Yamaguchi-sensei and Mike. I found out on the ride to the city’s board of education office that both Takeuchi-sensei and Yamaguchi-sensei were elementary school teachers. She was assigned the role of supervisor for the Tokushima JETs, and this was her second year doing it. Her English was relatively good, but she preferred having Mike around to help out, though he was leaving.
At the Board of Ed office, Takeuchi-sensei’s boss handed us some sort of official-looking document. It was in kanji, so I couldn’t read it, but I think it was basically a confirmation that we would be working as ALTs for the school district. Her boss said he was impressed by the how “international” this year’s Tokushima JETs were — I guess because Sally is British, I’m Vietnamese-American and Tashi is Tibetan-American. Mike is Filipino. We had to fill out a bunch of paperwork and apply for our alien registration card, known popularly as a gaijin card. We would use that as proof of residence rather than carrying around our passports.
Takeuchi-sensei said originally a welcoming dinner had been planned that night but Mike had suggested moving it to a later date because we would be tired. I’m glad. I was exhausted. The jet lag and constant moving around and traveling were getting to me.
Finally, the three of us split us to go to our respective apartments Yamaguchi-sensei, who spoke very little English, drove me to my place. I admired his attempts at conversation, though. He asked where I was from and I said Texas. He said his impression of Texas is of cowboys and John Wayne. He really liked John Wayne movies, he said.
At my apartment, we were met by my landlady, Matsumoto-san. She went and got Mike (a different Mike), an American living on the floor above me who’d been notified of my impending arrival so he could help explain things to me. Mike is a private ALT who also works for the Tokushima City school district. Eventually, the gas man came too, so there were four people altogether in my tiny apartment. They then spent the next two hours showing me how to work the air conditioning, the stove, microwave, rice maker, washing machine, fans, kitchen sink spray and shower. Keep in mind three of the four only spoke Japanese. This was quite bewildering, but gestures go a long way.
That I wouldn't have air-conditioning 24/7 was not that much of a shock, but more of a disappointment. The air conditioner is located in my living room. I have a fan in my bedroom. I wondered how I would fare in the Tokushima warmth.
Finally everybody left and I had the apartment to myself, at least for a bit. I collapsed on my bed — a futon on a mattress (usually you have one or the other, but I got both) — for about an hour and half before dragging myself up again to meet up with Mike for dinner and a quick neighborhood tour.
He showed me where my city-issued bicycle was kept. It's a white three-speed with worn tires, a bell, basket and light. Pretty standard. I nearly killed myself getting on because the seat was far too high for me. After Mike lowered the seat for me, I nearly killed myself — several times — just trying to ride the bike. I hadn't ridden one since my freshman year in college, five years ago!
We ate at a udon noodle place around the corner and then Mike showed me the video store (I couldn’t get a membership yet because my gaijin car wasn’t ready) and home-appliance store down the street, as well as a 24-7 convenience store and grocery store. After buying some breakfast (yogurt; that looked safe enough) for the next day, I went home and fell asleep at about 9 p.m. to the buzz of scooters and the rumble of the train passing my open window.