The Beginning

This is my not my first attempt to keep a blog, but it's my first attempt to keep one with a specific purpose and theme. My purpose is to disseminate information, greetings, and stories as efficiently as possible, because as much as I love all of you, I am terrible at keeping in touch via email or phone. My theme, rather than just the semi-random and largely-uninteresting happenings of my daily life, will be the still-random-but-hopefully-more-interesting happenings of my daily life in Sendai City, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan.

Perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. For those of you who might not know, I am leaving from Boston for Japan at 5.30 am this Saturday. I was accepted in April to the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program. The Program is run through the Japanese government (as opposed to the private English schools all over Asia that also hire new grads). The “Teaching” part of the name is the most straightforward: I will be working as an Assistant Language Teacher in a public middle school. The “Exchange” part means that we are expected to act as “cultural ambassadors” of a sort, learning about Japanese culture and teaching the students about our native cultures.

The first question I am usually asked when I explain my plans is: Do you speak Japanese? The answer: No, I don’t. Not at all. It’s actually not a requirement of the Program, or of most of the programs I looked at. Since being accepted, I have bought or been sent three books to try to help me learn to read and speak. I can say a few phrases at this point, and recognize a few letters and a very few words. I am counting on a.) immersion to teach me more quickly than books, and b.) people’s ability to speak English.

But back to the basics. In May, I was placed in Sendai City, which is the capital of the prefecture. It’s a small city by Japanese standards: only one million people. This is less nerve-wracking than I thought it would be. I figure that this entire experience is going to be utterly terrifying no matter what, so I might as well add in a large city to the mix. Plus, I wanted to try city living at some time in my life, so why not now? (Understand, I say all this with the utter naïveté of a born-and-bred small-town girl.)

Sendai, along with being large, is also beautiful and very culturally lively. They have more festivals than any other city in Japan (except perhaps Tokyo): a jazz festival, a dance festival, and a Christmas light festival called the Pageant of Starlight every December, along with several others whose names I do not understand. The city has theatres, second-hand English book stores, and a Western shopping district that includes an L.L. Bean.

It’s also a wonderful place to be a JET. Their Board of Education hires seventy of us as part of the city-wide Hello World Program. We are each placed in a single school, instead of having to hop between several schools as most JETs do. They also hire a General Advisor and an Educational Advisor to help us out. I don’t know much about the specifics in other cities, but this seems pretty idyllic to me.

I think that’s enough for one day. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll bore you with the details of packing and other pre-departure preparations.