where the sun rises

I may have mentioned that Ryan and I lived in Japan for two years teaching English. Well last night, we were looking at a website that was all about Niigata Prefecture, the area we lived in. We came across a link to ALT ("assistant language teachers") blogs, and looked around. It was so nostalgic! Seeing the photos of our town, Shibata, reading about the ins and outs of school and ALT life, and remembering all the funny things that would happen when you placed a westerner in an eastern setting. We even managed to find and email someone who is teaching at some of the Jr Highs I taught at, experiencing the same things and liking (or not liking) the same parts of the job that I had.

When we left for Japan, we had been married for three weeks, knew how to count to ten in Japanese, and we had no plans for what I'd be doing once we got there. Ryan had a contract set up with the J.E.T. program (Japan English Teaching...?), but I not having gotten a degree, couldn't have applied, so I just went along on a spousal visa and hoped to find work once there. Ryan knew that he'd be teaching in three different highschools in the area that we were to live. He knew that we'd be given an apartment, he knew that he had a month until school started, and he knew that his supervisor was going to pick us up at the "shinkansen" (bullet train) station when we arrived. That was it. We knew nothing more. We had tried to get as much info on the job/city/life as we could from Ryan's predecessor, but he was in a rush to try and move to Tokyo so it was tough to know what was coming. In the end, no amount of info would have helped us adjust better. It was a crazy time.

To begin with, it was nearly 40 degrees and really humid. Getting off the air-conditioned shinkansen was like hitting a wall. We met Ryan's supervisor, Miyazaki Sensei, ("sensei" means teacher, sort of a way to say "Mr.") and headed off to be treated out for lunch. We sat down and for the first time discovered how nice it is that in Japan the menus have photos of the dishes (seeing as we couldn't read anything!). We both chose things that looked like spaghetti and meat sauce, and started chatting. When the food arrived, however, it was nothing like spaghetti and meat sauce. I don't remember what it tasted like, though I remember a distinct seaweed flavour, but I was only able to gag through half of it. If only we knew what other things would be placed in front of us during the next two years, and even more surprising, how normal it would become to just eat anything we were served....but I digress...

Miyazaki Sensei was a wobbly older man with thick glasses and a very serious expression. He seemed nervous and although he was an English teacher at a school Ryan would teach at, his English was so weak that we had to strain to understand anything he said. One of the first things we chatted about was work for me. Ryan mentioned that I'd be looking for work and asked Miyazaki Sensei if he thought I'd be able to find a job in town. He looked at Ryan, interjected his constant "hai hai hai hai hai....(yes yes yes yes yes)" and "sou sou sou sou sou....(ah yes, ah yes, ah yes...)" and said, "No." My heart sank. Oh my goodness, what was I doing here? Then he interjected, "...maybe in a factory". AAAAAH!! I'm very thankful that he was wrong - as wrong as he could have been.

We arrived in August, and were brought to Ryan's base-school to sign some papers and meet the "Kocho Sensei" (principal) which was very formal and ceremonial, complete with bowing, low Japanese murmurs, and little to no eye contact between Miyazaki Sensei and the Kocho. We were then whisked off to our apartment which, we were told, was a new building and a very nice apartment. We were happy to hear that. We entered and wow. I didn't think it could be hotter than outside, but the apartment was baking. We had beads of sweat just pouring off our faces. They turned on the A/C and we got to take a breather while we looked around. It was a teensy space - though quite sizeable for Japan. Maybe 500 square feet, a smallish kitchen area that consisted of a little table with two chairs, a fridge that stood about as high as my rib cage, a microwave, a stove and a sink. there were about 6 little cupboards full of the predecessor's dollar store dishes. There was a toilet "cubicle" and a shower room, a space that had our washing machine and sink for brushing teeth etc, and there was a tatami room. The smell of tatami still brings me back to that room, with shoji paper window shutters and sliding paper doors. There was also another room (we learned soon enough that this was really a bonus room - most places only had the kitchen and tatami room) It had some furniture in it - a teensy black faux-leather sofa that was a "corner unit" and that was so small that only 1 and a half of us could sit on it at once. Then there was a kotatsu, which is a low lying, square table that has a heat lamp built-in underneath it for the winter. There was also a TV and a phone. And that was about it! It was pretty crazy. We were left alone without a clue how to call home, get around, get ahold of any of the teachers, or anything else that we may have needed to do.

I'll have to stop here for now, for fear of rambling on too much. I will continue, but another day....