Year 5!
It’s been a little while since I’ve updated, so I’m gonna make up for all the blank space on my page by rambling away today.
Hope you don’t mind! 
Ok, so today marks exactly 4 years since I arrived in Japan. Four years ago today I got off a plane at Narita airport and cluelessly made my way out to some small podunk town in the middle of Chiba somewhere. I remember clearly the bicycle parking garage just outside the station – it was huge! If I remember correctly, there were something like 4 stories to it and countless bicycles everywhere. At that time I was working for a company called American English School. I had done a phone interview with them while staying in a 고시원 in Seoul, and set up the job before coming out to Japan. They set me up in their kinda reception house there and I started training soon after. I don’t remember much of that time except one of the trainers teaching me how to order sushi at a nearby shop. He told me to say “hitotsu” if I wanted one or “futatsu” if I wanted two. Somehow that stuck.
I was anxious to get into the actual life I would lead, so as soon as possible I made my way out to a company apartment that was waiting for me in Ayase, Tokyo. Coming from Chiba, I got completely lost in the area between Oshiage and Kita-Senju – an area that I now know to be one of the most confusing sections of Tokyo trains. Eventually I made it out there and settled in for my new Eikaiwa job (English conversation school). A few days later I found a roaming Brit on the streets, and the next few months were spent discovering that area, taking the Chiyoda line to Harajuku for late night walks, and drinking in the local park until the wee hours with my new Brit friend. I also discovered 24 and other US dramas during that time – I remember spending many days in TV marathons. Not so long after, I had my first Japanese girlfriend and I was experiencing a very typical eikaiwa teacher life. Go to work from afternoon to evening, go drinking after, hang out with your Japanese girlfriend, pick up some Japanese here and there, travel around with your gaijin friends on occasion, hang out in Yoyogi park on weekends, etc, etc… It was great, but somehow unfulfilling. Just wasn’t my thing.
I was doing a great job at the school and every time I had a trial lesson, the students signed up for the school. The only downside to that was that I wasn’t getting paid any extra, but my lesson load was increasing significantly. Not cool.
I discussed the problem with company staff and my school’s manager, and the general consensus was that it’s tough, but that’s how it goes. I asked for more money or less hours – they refused. I said that’s not cool, so I’m gonna leave. They said ok.
In the end, it was a really cordial split. I gave them one month to find a new teacher, moved to a roomshare house in Kita-Senju, and started planning for what I’d do next.
I was full of spirit and excitement – fully confident in my abilities as a teacher and ignorant of most everything else.
Around that time, my girlfriend went to the US to work a job she had been hired for a year before at Disney World. We knew it when we started dating, but just had ignored it mostly. In the end, the long-distance thing didn’t work out, and we broke up. The Brit friend that I had spent so much time with got a girlfriend and turned out to be one of those losers that just ditches everything as soon as he has a girlfriend, so I didn’t keep much contact with him.
I found myself once again alone in Japan, with nothing but two roommates I’d recently met, skills for teaching English, and a visa that wouldn’t run out for about 6 more months. I was loving it!
I tried all kinds of things. I decided I was gonna kill the middle-man that took all my money. No more working for schools that take huge amounts from the students and give me crap in exchange. No more working for companies that just give you more work if you do a good job without any added benefits – pay the same to crappy half-drunk teachers as professional ones. I’d had it with that world. So I made a website and put on my good suit and went in front of the station to hand out fliers. I was as polite/formal as could be and spoke in the broken Japanese that I knew, but not a single person responded. The website wasn’t getting any hits, and my saved money was quickly disappearing. It didn’t seem like I was gonna succeed that way, so I started signing up for online sites that connect private teachers with students. At the same time I was signing up like mad to acting agencies around Tokyo to try to get back into the acting world. I’ve always loved acting, and the thought of getting paid to do it was really exciting.
After about a month of working my head off every day and getting absolutely no inflowing funds, I finally got my first student through an online site called Teacher-Student.com (my profile). I was to teach a young, newly married Japanese lady English at a large Dotour cafe in the heart of Ginza once a week. I’ve lost track of time now, but I’ve been teaching that same student until now – almost 3 1/2 years I guess? Don’t know if I should be ashamed or not, but she’s one of my students who has improved the least. She comes at least 30 minutes late to every lesson, and doesn’t really get much into studying. I’ve run out of ideas of what to do to teach her many times over the past 3 years, but we still meet every Monday morning, and I’m glad to say that I still teach my first private student ever.
After I got my first student, a very very slow trickle of students started coming in and I started to build up myself as a private teacher here in Tokyo. I worked hard to teach the best I could, always tried my best to make it to lessons on time, thought up creative new ways to teach, and most of all developed relationships with students, managers, agents, and everyone else I came across. I quickly realized that the only way to succeed in Japan on your own is to build relationships. Some acting jobs came in, but those turned out to be just crappy extra jobs with huge packs of foreigners – many of which were the lowest scum of the gaijin barrel. I didn’t find a lot of fulfillment from those dinky acting jobs, so focused on my teaching mostly. That’s where I was really building something I could be proud of.
After about the second month, things were starting to flow a little, but I realized that it would all be meaningless unless I could renew my visa when it came back to that time. So I started searching for something that might help in that department. I found an agency that outsourced teachers to different schools around Tokyo. It wasn’t an ALT system, where I would simply be an assistant to the “real” Japanese teacher like most of the school jobs in Japan. It was a real teaching position, where I would have my own class, make my own curriculum, and be in charge of everything. Of course that requires a lot more responsibility, but I was up for it.
The pay wasn’t nearly as good as what my privates were bringing in, but there were paid holidays, and most importantly – they agreed to sponsor my visa! I had hit the jackpot.
I negotiated a little hard with them. They wanted me to teach at 3 different schools, for 4 full days a week. They were desperate for a qualified teacher, and the school really liked me. They needed a teacher who could start teaching literally the next week. Finally they agreed to take care of my visa and let me teach only a day and a half a week at only one school. I didn’t ask details, but they said they’d take care of the visa. Three years later when the company went bankrupt because of some kind of tax issues, I wasn’t too surprised, but very grateful that they had put themselves out on a limb to help me out just when I needed it.
That job started one week later, and before long the privates started rolling in. I don’t know how long it took – maybe 4 or 5 months? – but the next thing I knew I was overwhelmed with requests from new private students. The agents at the company had gotten to know me and liked me it seemed. They’d left good references, and suggested me to new students. I raised my fees up twice to a price that actually I personally thought was a little high, and finally the number of incoming requests became something I could handle.
After just over a year in Kita-Senju, my roommate got a boyfriend and decided she wanted him to move in. She kicked the rest of us out. I had never really liked the way she ran her house – like an angry landlord rather than a roommate – so it was fine with me. At first she wanted us out right away, but we convinced her that was a little over the top, and she gave us some time to search for apartments.
Not long before, I had met a Korean girl online through a language exchange program. I was interested in trying to maintain my Korean and maybe pick up a little Japanese along the way, and after a year of not having a girlfriend, I wasn’t at all against the idea of meeting girls for lunch every now and then. At first we didn’t hit it off amazingly, but enough to keep in touch for a while. Sometimes we scared each other by saying the exact same things or weird stuff like that – there was some kind of odd connection. One evening, she had invited me over to her place as she was gonna cook me Bude-chige, one of my favorite Korean dishes. I was really looking forward to it, but she was running a little late. Then I got a phone call – she’d been hit by a taxi two stations over. Her boyfriend found out and freaked – breaking up with her almost immediately. Suddenly this cool chick that I’d become friends with became the center of my free time. For the next couple months, anytime I had free time, I made my way out to the hospital to hang out with her. We discovered that that odd connection we had was even deeper. It was the kinda connection that if nourished the right way develops into one of those few, rare lifelong friendships that are almost impossible to come by. Despite having just met a few months before, all of a sudden I felt like I’d known her for years, and I couldn’t think of anything more appealing that the idea of finding an apartment together and making a ‘home’ in Tokyo.
The apartment search process is a long, stressful, tiring bit of my Japanese history, so I’ll spare the details. There were MANY roadblocks along the way, but eventually a few months later, I found myself in an amazing 2LDK apartment in Takadanobaba with my new best friend chatting until wee morning hours in the living room, waking up a few hours later to work my head off with the huge amount of privates, acting jobs, school jobs, etc… that I was managing at the time — loving every second of it! That was basically most of 2007. It ended with a bang when my brother came out from Switzerland and spent a few weeks in Japan and Korea with me. The three of us had a great time in Tokyo, traveling through Kansai, Korea, and a little bit of Kyushu.
Looking back at that year, I have to say it was one of the best of my life – definitely one that will always hold a special place in my mind.
2008 rolled around and things changed. Life is always flowing like a river, and the flow moved on to different places for myself and my roommate. In Spring of 2008, she moved out and I stuck around. Another Japanese guy moved in to fill the empty room, and another year of excitement and Tokyo life passed. That year seems like a whirlwind now – I almost don’t know where it all went. I met a group of mostly Japanese people that love having parties. They basically revolve around one guy that calls himself “party animal” and is always organizing some party or another. I got to know a lot of them at parties, and soon my circle of friends was multiplying rapidly. All of a sudden I went to parties with 150 people and I knew pretty much everybody there. They’re all really great people – some of the nicest people I’ve met. I hosted house parties myself or helped host some of the other parties. Working like mad, partying with good friends when I wasn’t working – the year just flew by into 2009…and now it’s almost halfway through!
But within all that, there have been some really big things that have happened internally for me. I decided 100% that I will pursue a dream that I’ve had for a long time. It consists of 2 parts: I want to travel around the world, and I want to meet people doing good everywhere I go. That became the focus of my life – the goal that I reach towards no matter what. Throughout all the craziness of Tokyo life, clinging to that dream gives me vision and keeps me from getting lost in the whirlwind that threatens to eat me up. It would be so easy to wake up from a party one day and realize that I’m 40 years old and still in Tokyo, still doing the same thing I was 15 years ago. I see plenty of aging foreigners out here in that group, but that’s not gonna happen to me. 
In my mental planning for my dream, I’ve come across two things that have become my main hobbies over the past year or so.
One is video. I decided that I don’t want to only learn about people doing good, but I want to also share that information with others. I can read and see pictures of places all over the world, but there’s something about a well-made video that presents the place that gets across a believable message in a short time that words and pictures never can for me. I think there are probably many of my generation that feel the same, so I decided I’ll learn the art of making video and use that skill to tell the stories of the people I will meet. That adds a lot of cost and difficulty to my trip, but I think it’ll be worth it in the end! Now I’m on the path to becoming somewhat of a traveling journalist, roaming the world making videos everywhere I go.
The second thing is a website that I stumbled across in my research. It’s called Couchsurfing. Couchsurfing is this amazing community that connects people with each other all over the world. It’s basically a pay-it-forward system where people host travelers, and there’s the prospect that you’ll be hosted as well when you travel. If you’re interested to know more, visit the website or watch this video.
So….now I find myself on the anniversary of my 4th year in Japan.
I’ll be here for just over 1 more year (as it took 2 months to make a visa when I got here, I’ll leave just before my visa expires at the end of my 5th year here). I’ve gotta work hard and make the most out of this next year!!
