In the first ever Japanalicious Topics Show, we talk about the JET programme.
Links
The JET Programme
Official website, and BigDaikon.
Takashi Miike (4:37)
Takashi Miike and Audition on wikipedia.
Full Transcript
Ali:
Welcome to the Japanalicious Random Show I'm Ali
Matt:
..and I'm Matt
Ali:
And today we are going to talk about various vaguely Japan-related topics, including the Jet Program, untranslatable Japanese (and we have opinions about this that we will share with you in a few moments) and as of yet an undecided subject that we will talk about that we will riff into as and when it comes.
So, to begin with let’s talk about the Jet Program. So, the Jet Program is a government funded way for people who are interested in Japan and who have a degree of some sort, have a degree they don’t have to work, and move to Japan and work for the Japanese government and that is how I went to Japan for the first time
Matt:
From our point of view that is what the Jet Program is for, from the Japanese governments point of view, originally started in the 80’s. It was a way of promotion internationalization and getting people aware of foreign countries, and foreign cultures and getting an influx of native speakers of English that was kind of their original logic behind it.
Ali:
Yeah so this is true and from our point of view it is just a great way to get to Japan. And it is surprising at the actually number of people who treat it as such.
Matt:
Yeah it has sort of made me kind of sick to my stomach. That’s a big of an exaggeration.
Ali:
Well I think that I was one of the people that made you feel sick to your stomach. Yeah so, that is, so if you would want to talk about your Jet experience and how it went and we can sort of talk about how it-
Matt:
Yeah it is funny how nowadays when I meet people and I tell them how I used to teach English in Japan, and they are like “oh were you in Tokyo or Osaka were you any where interesting?” And I said no that’s not how it works.
(Laughter)
Ali:
That’s not how it works at all.
Matt:
In general the reason that they are getting the contract for the English speaker is, there is not any one living in that area that is a natural English speaker, and it is not normally a place that attracts normal…
Ali:
So when you apply for the Jet Program they ask you put down three options…
Matt:
Yeah theoretical top choices
Ali:
What did you put down?
Matt:
To be honest, I can’t remember and at the time I don’t think that I knew where those places were.
Ali:
And you know it’s really dumb, if you actually say some random countryside area, and there no chance of knowing anything in that place. So I say I want Tokyo, Osaka, and Sapporo. Which you have three places in Japan that are really separate from each other. And they gave me some place kind of North Japan but there is no chance that you can…
Matt:
I can’t remember if you have to justify with logic your rationale for choosing those places. Did you have to give a reason for choosing those places?
Ali:
Yeah I think that I remembered that I did, and I think that I completely bullshitted it, and I had no idea on what to say on that.
Matt:
And that is odd because I have been a bit of a Japanophile when I was a teenager and I thought I knew a little bit more than the average Joe on Japan. But at that point when I had to say, and look at a list of prefectures and say where I would want to go, and I felt I knew a lot about pop culture and I had no idea where to put…
Ali:
And this is a big difference between… I think that this is going to be a recurring topic that is going to come up in various ways. I think there is a difference between wanting to go to Japan and sort of liking pop culture and actually going there and experience the culture and the actually interesting stuff that actually happens over there.
Matt:
There is a gap, a kind of cultural, there is export culture and there is indigenous culture and there is a big gap between the two.
Ali:
And I argue that the indigenous stuff, the stuff that is actually the way that things are in Japan and way more interesting than the
Matt:
Massive, massive….
Ali:
And the export culture isn’t just Japan saying hey have all this stuff, it's also the stuff that we have kind of manufactured overseas, anime conventions and stuff like that.
Matt:
It’s funny though isn’t?
Ali:
I don’t despise those that, that side of people who like that sort of stuff from Japan that much. All I am saying is get over there it is much more fun over there than you think that it is.
Matt:
And there are so many different ways that you can see that. There are two different ways that you can see that, the Japan that you find say in the UK and the one that you see there. Looking at movies for example. The movies you see here and the animated movies you see there, they have this kind of weird stuff that wasn’t very successful over there that are worth more for DVD dollars…
Ali:
Absolutely…
Matt:
Over here….
Ali:
Absolutely…
Matt:
Even more normal movies…
Ali:
I get the feeling they are targeting these internationals. And first of all the one person that I keep bringing up that is stupidly famous, and you know who I am going to say….
Matt:
(Laughter)
Ali:
Takashi Miike. If you haven’t seen anything by Takashi Miike is a very prolifically Japanese director, he makes like seven or eight movies a year…
Matt:
I would describe that as suspiciously prolific…
Ali:
Suspiciously prolific, that is a good way to put it, but anyways one of his most famous films is called Audition and that one, like the last 20 minutes of that one I couldn’t sit through it, and at screenings and at film festivals people are screaming and fainting and stuff and it was really, really hardcore violence.
And in the West he is really famous and people have heard of him blah, blah, blah. And I was talking to my wife asked have you heard of this Takashi Miike? Dare who is this guy? And they are like what is your favorite Japanese movie? It’s like Takashi Miike movie.
Matt:
And they are like we have no idea who that is.
Ali:
And then people watch that movie and they think all Japanese movies must be this fucked up. They are not. The ones that do very well in Japan are nice movies like Hula Girls and stuff like…
Matt:
It sucks that the Japanese movies that we are familiar with like byword for Japanese movies or Korean movies even are typically screwed up movies with violence and masochism and it is not representative of the majority of the films over there. There is a whole world of dramas, comedies, period dramas, there is loads of stuff that we would not get.
Ali:
So, part of me wonders should we continue with talking about the Jet Program or do we just stay on this path that we are on?
Matt:
Oh, yeah…. (Laughter)
Matt:
Oh, yeah that was quick.
Ali:
I told you that this was going to be a good idea. So with the Jet Program, applying to it was pretty easy, you have to choose two or three places. Strangely a lot of people that I thought that were qualified for it were rejected and somehow they managed to hire me and you as well.
Matt:
I was a reject initially. It is rather an odd protracted, process. In the UK it works that you apply in November, and then you hear initially about whether you’ve been successful - well you go for an interview in January and hear if you are successful in April.
And they might keep you as a kind of back up saying you weren’t successful this time but if anyone pulls out you would be able to go out, and that period is about a few months. From November to say about May or June when you actually find out. So it’s about seven months that you are kept in suspense and it is very difficult.
Ali:
Yeah and after all your friends are sort of investing, sorry, not investing. Applying for jobs at ibanks, and they are all doing something. It’s like, am I sure? If this doesn’t pan out, I am screwed.
Matt:
Yeah it is very difficult to plan that around your…
Ali:
Yeah it is a big gamble.
Matt:
Yeah it’s very difficult to plan out a University exit strategy.
Ali:
Yeah, we managed to get selected for this Jet Program.
Matt:
You know, I wonder what the criteria are, you don’t have to be a Japanese speaker. In fact, they like it if you are not. It forces you to use more English, in theory.
Ali:
Well, the thing is I sold it at my interview I was like yeah I do Japanese and Kendo and all that stuff and they seemed to eat it up, they seemed to like it. I think that it really depends on the interviewer you get. I think that they do have you on some score card, and they score you on certain points, and the questions are all the same.
And if you go to this website bigdaikon.com 7:25 it is were a lot of Jet Program participants and former or people who have finished it sort of hang out, and there is a list of all the questions that they could possible ask you.
Matt:
Really?
Ali:
Yeah and you can go there and…
Matt:
I wish that someone had told me that. (Laughter)
Ali:
Yeah, I knew that they were going to ask me, so a Japanese teacher makes a big English mistake in the lesson what are you going to do? Are you A.) going to tell her about it in the lesson, B.) talk to her about it later, C.)
Matt:
Yeah public embarrassment
Ali:
Yeah do it the Japanese way. Yeah that’s obviously the anti-Japanese way. Anyway...
So, once you got to Japan it would be good to talk about your experience there.
Matt:
Yeah, it was really kind of funny, because I didn’t really know what to expect. Once I knew that I had been accepted in May before the August that I would fly out, and they sent me a little pack with information about my area and it was basically out in nowhere. There were really no distinguishing marks it’s the countryside, and at first you might feel a little let down, it’s like oh the most exciting thing is pottery music like in a candle factory.
Ali:
Oh, you felt let down?
Matt:
Well, you might feel like there is nothing that interesting going on just from the outside.
Ali:
Really? Yeah, go on…
Matt:
Yeah like in our materials, yeah and I can honestly say that I don’t remember anything that interesting that I could kind of focus on. I felt like I was going into the unknown in that way.
Ali:
Yeah it was definitely the unknown, but I think that is what appealed to me. But I think that all Jets are in a similar situation, they get put in the ass end of nowhere. Maybe it was because I had a little bit more Japanese, but basically… I don’t know how to describe this except that you are in this countryside there is nothing for miles around….
Matt:
I was talking about when you got material describing where you were going to go. It might seem a little like, it didn’t really say all that much. But once you actually go there obviously the experience changes a lot of that. You realize …
Ali:
And as soon as I got there it was like okay there are the epic mystical temples and shit. And there are trains, bullet trains connecting all these bits up. So the first thing I did was, okay I have three days off and they give you these like starting bonus of like 150,000 yen or something like that…
Matt:
I never got that…
Ali:
Oh, I got it and I was like oh fuck yeah I am going to get my back pack and trek around this whole prefecture and I went nuts.
Matt:
Good idea.
Ali:
And I had just been through three years of University and you are focused on one thing and then suddenly you have this freedom to explore this magically wonderful strange place. So for me it this was, it was my introduction to Japan. And I has so many excellent adventures which I will eventually write up into blog posts, that was my experience of Japan, up at that point.
Well, I was talking more about arriving up there and orientation and stuff like that.
Matt:
Yeah it’s funny actually, you arrive and your orientation is with a load of other people who are similar age to you and a different demographic, I mean there are all colors represented. Many who will be American and you’ll start off Tokyo and go drinking with them, and then go for some karaoke, that is an awful mispronunciation, karaoke.
Ali:
But we are speaking English now. So it is karaoke, it doesn’t really matter now…
Matt:
It gets really mangled in pronunciation. So, anyways, you start off there and you are still in your kind of comfort zone even though you are in Tokyo. It is kind of exciting but you’re surrounded by other Westerners.
Ali:
Yeah okay.
Matt:
But then at that point in my case we went on a bullet train on the countryside and gradually we all peeled off until eventually I was the only one remaining going up in my direction.
Ali:
Yeah that’s kind of what it felt like. Yeah, everyone kind of peels off until you are the only one left.
Matt:
Yeah and then you end up next to a field somewhere. That’s a fair bet, a rice paddy.
Ali:
Maybe I don’t know, maybe I had a different, maybe I don’t know maybe I am sold by lots of money basically. I mean they put you up in a nice hotel in Tokyo.
Matt:
No, that’s true. Isn’t that the place used in Lost in Translation, was it used it that?
Ali:
It might be in the Keio Plaza Hotel...
Matt:
And even though you are sharing three of you in a room, it was still quiet swanky.
Ali:
Yeah, there were only two of us, and it was a really nice hotel. When you got, I don’t know what it was like in your prefecture but in Morioka, which is like the capital of Iwate prefecture that they had our prefectural orientation.
Matt:
Really?
Ali:
Did you have one of those?
Matt:
No, I mean we did, but we didn’t get accommodation.
Ali:
Well, we didn’t, well it depends on how distributed you are. Well, for us Morioka is a two hour journey from anywhere. And they put us up for the night there, and they seemed to take care of us there quite well.
Matt:
It’s a suspicious amount of money and you really wonder how they justify how they can spend that kind of money on a bunch of college kids, who…
Ali:
Well apparently, well I don’t want to say too much, but the Iwate prefecture was known for having one of the worst behaved Jets. Degeneracy, pretty much, you don’t know how accurate that is. If there were some like…
Matt:
Oh, but I do.
Ali:
Oh, you do? Yeah we were famously bad and I was involved.
Matt:
I think that it is a funny situation, because you got these, everyone is 20 something,
Ali:
But they are not, there are a lot of people who are in the 30’s and 40’s… There are, But I think that they are the minority, the majorities are quiet young you know the college grads, and…
Matt:
I’m not sure. I can’t really say, and I know the ones from the US it is really the first time that they have gone abroad and their first time allowed to drink even.
Ali:
I found the ones that tend to be really reserved stay reserved. The ones who are like me, who are not reserved or borderline, just went buck wild, went crazy. We just went nuts, it was like we, it was ultimate freedom, and you were basically a celebrity in your town, and….
Matt:
Yes, it’s a combination of factors. You are a celebrity you get a lot of attention, and people fawn over you and you get a lot of preferential treatment and you are also out of your usual moral context. And it sounds a little you know…
Ali:
Exactly, I know that is exactly true, and I understand that entirely. Because things that were not okay back home, have become okay, like when you are …
Matt:
When you’re an ex-pat of whatever or not part…
Ali:
We should actually point out that the Jet Program that the purpose of it is for you to work as an assistant language teacher in a high school or junior high school during the day, and during the day that is what you do. And then there is another Jet Program called a Coordinator for International Relations, where your language has to be quite good because you have to translate things and you work with international relations.
Matt:
That is kind of hard, working with the counsel, organizing internationalization events and such, and on paper that is what the job is. But as it turn out you are a foreigner trapped, trapped is not a great word to use, but it is kind of what is going on, like in this countryside place and there is like, even if you are this normal introverted person back home, you go to a convenience store, a supermarket and all eyes are on you. It’s like boom there is this gaijin, and they don’t speak English so in, okay fine in Gifu which is probably going to be like Australia or Sydney compared to where we were.
Ali:
Gifu was quite, yeah, there wasn’t much English speaking going on, it is quite countryside.
Ali:
And at this point it was like you were in this alien place. I had a friend there and we would go drinking a lot and pretty much every bar he went into he got this feeling that as soon as he walked in it was no, no it was not only that but kind of like Star Wars cantina that would go off in his head because it was like this weird alien place. But it’s true; we did go drinking a lot.
Matt:
And some people are more conspicuous than others, and I would say from the back I don’t look that foreign. That was quiet an advantage that I didn’t stand out that much. But you have a 6 foot 5 Canadian guy with really light blond hair, he will get a lot more attention than a regular dark haired person. I had a friend who was Irish and he had red hair and really pale skin and as he passed people on the streets people would just really crane their necks as they went past to get a look at this weird exotic object as it passed.
Ali:
That reminds me of a really interesting story. I was reading this book. This guy, I forgot his name, but he wrote a book called Roads to Sata. I wrote a review on the book, but I will link it, where he basically hitchhiked from one end of Japan to another.
Matt:
That is actually quiet popular to do in Japan. There’s another guy who did that as well.
Ali:
He actually walked. And he had this one experience where, this was like in the 80’s, where this was more kind of before the internet, and less exposed to foreigners than they are now, and he was walking through this little sort of tunnel. And this truck driver that looked out the window and yelled “Haro!” you know as Japanese people like to do.
And crashed this truck into this and there was this kaboom and explosion every where. And he waved back at that time the explosion, and he thinks to himself, well if I hadn’t been here as a gaijin, but everyone one was alright, nobody died or anything, it was just a funny story. But that’s a pretty epic gaijin story. Pretty hard core. But anyway.
So anyway, yes, so the Jet program was a really, really, good way to go around and to get to Japan. I just don’t know, I don’t know if it exactly…
Matt:
meets its brief….
Ali:
Well, foreigners when they go over there they are actually exposing other people to themselves
Matt:
by default…
Ali:
by default, by just being there. And there are some really smart sensible people who do go into the Jet Program, who aren’t these drunken misfits
Matt:
out there to exploit the process and get paid.
Ali:
So no. I think that there are parts of it that does work quiet well.
Matt:
To be honest, and I think that this is inevitable that you get kind of cynical once you have been in an organization for a length of time, I started to question this logic of shipping in these unqualified, these people are not qualified to teach, and you don’t have to have a degree in teaching English
You're just a carbon rod. Inanimate carbon rod with a degree and you can speak English. English speaking carbon rod. I mean, would it even make more sense to send over Japanese teachers of English over seas, do the opposite in effect, send Japanese teachers on one-year placement over seas for one year.
Ali:
That actually is a really good idea.
Matt:
And it makes more sense because the teacher is an asset that remains in the public school system for years, where as the ALT comes for one year and then leaves.
Ali:
And this is really key, comes from my experience. Interesting you brought this up. The way that I met my wife was one of the teachers at my school introduced me to her, but the point is that she came to visit us in the UK for couple of months a few years ago, at some point in the past. And it turns out that her English wasn’t as good as my wife’s. Like her spoken ability for her to articulate her actual thoughts…
Matt:
But you mean once your other half had been living in the UK for awhile,
Ali:
Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, the problem is that they have lived in Japan their whole lives, they are interested in English, they want to know more about it, but they are not going to get that sort of passive undercurrent of English in their everyday lives…
Matt:
Instinctual English.
Ali:
unless they are actually living in an English-speaking country. And for that I think that for the purposes of Japanese education would be better than a bunch of drunken college students.
Matt:
But having said that, there are advantages to that too. Students, our pupils would get very excited I think, very energized by it by having this young cool westerner there. It might help them pay more attention than they would to their usual teacher, and sometimes that is an argument; I wouldn’t say that it was true in the majority of the cases, but some times it is true.
Ali:
There’s another point and that goes to a deeper issue is that in Japan the idea of racism, or the concept of racism or discriminating between the races is a touchy topic. My personal philosophy is that the more exposure you have to somebody of another race or origin is the less racist that you are going to be.
Matt:
It’s hard to build up a stereotype when you have specific examples of people in your brain,
Ali:
And if you have enough examples then you realize that while human beings are mostly the same, it’s just the differences are apparent in our race and any other race. That is not a variable that you should be looking at. And if you take away this exposure to foreigners at this young age, then you take away one reference point from them.
Matt:
Yeah, and that is very easy to polarize into like an 'us or them' sort of mindset.
Ali:
Yeah and in Japan that is already kind of there.
Matt:
It’s quite funny really. I mean, the whole concept of racism is almost no concept. It’s almost a given.
Ali:
In homegenous society. And one of the problems with Japanese racism is that is almost all positive racism.
Matt:
I hadn’t thought of that before.
Ali:
And it’s true, you go over there and foreigners get lots of attention and people like them and blah, blah, blah. So it is really just all positive, it is still racism, it is just all positive. And so it is okay, because we don’t mind it.
Matt:
Most of the time it’s positive.
Ali:
So sorry.
Matt:
That can definitely be the backbone of suspicion and paranoia and unpleasantness, which one can definitely encounter. But I would about 99% of the time.
Ali:
There’s no situation where you sort of walk into a store and everyone looks and says oh no it’s a foreigner let’s run away, actually that is not true, that's actually happened to me before.
Matt:
No, no, that is not paranoia, that is more like confusion not hostility. Do you think that is a fair way of describing it.
Ali:
Yeah, I think that is quite fair. But it was like the guy wrote that book, I have got to find out the author’s name, he died, shortly after he wrote his book, but he would be able to speak perfect Japanese and he would go to ryokan and places like that and they wouldn’t have him because he was a foreigner.
So, what he would do which was very tricky, because his Japanese was so good, he would phone them up and make the appointment, and give them a very Japanese sounding name and then turn up with the reservation.
Matt:
And that doesn’t always work.
Ali:
Well it didn’t work.
Matt:
We once did that together to get a rental car to take to Fuji, we phoned up, we got the most natural speaker among our group of gaijin to phone up and he ordered the car, everything was fine. We got our invoice number, turned up, and we got these hurried up glances, and there was a lot of panic. And they were just like we don’t think that we can rent you this car. The reason was never explicitly stated, but it was because we were foreign.
Ali:
Yeah, and it is not like you can go to the police and say hey this man was just racist to me, Because it would be of course we are racist to you, you are foreigners. And the thing is when you translate it into English it sounds really harsh, but in Japanese - and we may be guilty of cultural relativism again, but oh well, in this general sense, I don’t feel this overwhelming negatively racism, but most of the time it’s positive.
Matt:
It is either positive or matter of fact, non-hostile even if it is inconvenient for you, and that kind of sucks.
Ali:
But yeah, it’s not like an die foreigner die. It’s just like, of course we are not going to serve you here. This is for Japanese people only.
Matt:
It’s a complicated thing there, isn’t it? You can imagine a traditional run hotel that is run by a family and they are very confident in being hospitable to someone who speaks their language, but it would be a lot more difficult if they are trying to get over a language barrier. They might feel self conscious there is a lot more going on there.
Ali:
Yeah, it’s also, and this is illustrated by children more than anything, it is also an emotional reaction to something that you haven’t experienced before. If you go to Japan as a foreigner, and a lot of kids, in Tokyo for example, they will be like [23:55], they will be amazed by this kind of thing.
Matt:
In Tokyo?
Ali:
In Tokyo.
Matt:
They seem them all the time there?
Ali:
I know. That’s why they can deal with it. But if you go to the countryside, kids will just start crying or just run away. Or maybe that was just me.
Matt:
I never made a kid cry.
Ali:
I made kids cry all the time. And it was like, what is he? Is he some kind of demon? The best example is in Tokyo. I was literally on the tube on my way to work, and this little kid--I’m sorry, not the tube, what is it called? The Metro. And this little kid comes up to me completely there is no inhibition what so ever, he comes up to me, I think that I told you this, he grabs my face like this, and he goes, and I am going to translate this into English, he says “Mom, mom, this gaijin isn’t watery like you said he was going to be. This guy is completely normal. He is a real gaijin. You can touch him and everything.”
Matt:
What the hell?
Ali:
And I was just in hysterics and I thought this was crazy. And then his mom was like “moushiwake arimasen, I am so sorry. I am so sorry.” I was like no, it’s okay. That’s alright.
Matt:
That was very weird.
Ali:
I said to Mom, “None of us are that watery.” Like we are all completely normal, you know.
Matt:
Watery?
Ali:
mizuppoi, I don’t know.
Matt:
Moist, like they sweat a lot?
Ali:
I have no idea I think that he was actually convinced that I was made of a watery surface.
Matt:
I can imagine if you saw a lot of over weight American guys, it would look like a lot of fluid mucking about.
Ali:
Perhaps.
Matt:
That would kind of make sense.
Ali:
We have been very, very successful in avoiding almost entirely the topic of the Jet Program, in this little discussion here.
Matt:
I thought that we got a lot of that topic in.
Ali:
Yeah, we did. But I think that it is fine.
Matt:
I think it’s useful to talk about what your actual day to day work was like on Jet. I think it was very different for different people. For me it was a normal’s day work. I felt like an actual employee, but for some of my friends there were some days that they didn’t have any classes and they wouldn’t have anything to do, and sitting at their desk.
Ali:
So, I would be in that second group. And if I did have lessons then it was just like read this out…
Matt:
like a human tape recorder…
Ali:
But I will add that I was very, very lucky in the place that I got. For me I would have to say were the schools that were the Dangerous Minds of Japan. The ones where the kids just kind of washed out, who weren’t particularly [26:32]. I don’t think that it was an explicit things that the smart kids go here, and the dumb kids go there. But the entrance exams are just harder. And the people just know that if you don’t end up in this school in town, you will end up in that school. And in ended up in that school rather than this school.
Yeah, it was a little rough, and nobody spoke or were even interested in speaking English and I literally spent most of my time playing with my computer and learning how to do the job that I am doing now.
Matt:
A lot of people had that experience; one of my friends didn’t seem to connect very well with the other staff that he had would have to work with in the English department. He would have basically have about two hours of work for a week and the rest of the time he’d be reading.
End of Transcript
