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 |  The beauty and horror of what I have seen and felt in 11 years of teaching ESL in Japan. |
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After 11 years of teaching English conversation in Japan for the biggest money-grubbing school, which went bankrupt through very corrupt business practices, I feel the time has come to either share what the beauty and horror of this experience, or sink further into the desperate frustration of the misunderstood. What will follow are descriptions of the students I have taught, my observations and thoughts of them, and tidbits of their conversations with me. Names will of course be changed to protect identities. It is my hope that through reading these descriptions, people interested in learning about Japan and its culture will find new, unexpected insights into its people. So, without further ado, I need to start. But who to start with? The good or the bad? |
| Male. Maybe 16 years old. Skinny. Small, round glasses. No-nonsense haircut. Spotless school uniform. Two notebooks, two pens, one pencil, and the textbook, all ready to go. I sat down across from him. He looked at me briefly and gave me one of those sitting half-bows the nervous first-timers always do. "Hello," I said. "Hello," he responded. "How are you?" "I'm fine. And you?" "I'm fine. And you?" The standard, knee-jerk response taught in schools. "What's your name?" "My name's Yamamoto Hiroki. And you?" "My name is Charles. Hiroki, what are your hobbies?" "Sleeping." His voice is monotone and tense. He avoids eye-contact. "Do you like music?" "No." No facial expression. Just concentration. Such a nerd. "What do you do in your free time? I like watching movies." "I like watching TV." Nerd, nerd, nerd, nerd, nerd! You are such a nerd. God, you need to get away from your books and get out and talk to people. "OK, Hiroki, why do you study English?" "University." "Which university do you--" "I want to be a brain doctor." OK... "A brain surgeon? Wh--" "My mom has brain cancer." |
| "They are office workers. Young women. They come in together. This is their third lesson. Be nice. Smile. Okay?" That was the manager...God, I've forgotten his name. Beat me at arm wrestling first week in Japan. Nice guy wrapped in a corporate-climber suit. Anyway... He was giving me a brief breakdown of two new students. It was more information than I needed. The first thing every new student is taught is the basic ice-breaker: What's you name? What is your job? What is your hobby? By the second lessons, they should be able to answer the questions no problem, and are ready to move on to more difficult questions or, if the teacher thinks so, into regular lessons. That's what I'd been told. That's what I'd expected. No one told me otherwise before sitting down across from the two girls in their early twenties in matching suits and nervous smiles. Hair to their shoulders and no further. Attractive, but not sexy. No confidence. "Hello," I said. "Hello," they said. OK. So far, so good. I thought. "What is your name?" I asked. They stared at me, slightly alarmed. OK. They don't understand the question. Maybe it's your accent. Slow it down a bit. "What ...is...your...name?" Stare. Stare. "Your name. What ... is ... your ... name? Stare. Stare. Deer-in-the-headlights. I smiled. Time to break the rules: throw them a bone. Try Japanese. "Onamae?" What's your name? Both jerk as I speak the word and look at each other, before returning to shocked stares. What the hell? They don't understand. My Japanese must really suck. s***. File says they've done the ice-breaker three times. Give 'em an example. Placing my hand on my chest, I say, "Hi. My name is Charles." And then, gesturing to them, I ask, "What is your name?" Stare. Stare. One more time. OK. Don't kill 'em. They're young. Nervous. Probably never seen a foreigner before. Bulls***! There's no way anyone couldn't get the point by now. What the hell? Are they idiots??? That's not possible. They've come to a school to study English. No. It is possible. Just look at 'em. They aren't here to learn English. They're here because it's cool to talk to foreigners, and they've probably had the cool male teachers already, and now they're being harassed by the scary foreign teacher, Charles. Screw 'em. Crush 'em. They don't care about education. They're just throwing money away. Grind 'em into dust. No. Try. Try harder. Swallow it. Keep your patience. They're just kids. Look at them. Look at them. Give them one more chance. I looked at them. You can't hear any of this going on in my head, can you? Because I've heard Japanese people excel at reading people's faces and body language... Stare. Stare. Placing my hand on my chest, I say, "Hi. My name is Charles." Gesture to them, ask, "What is your name?" The one with dyed-blond hair brightens and nods her head. "Yes!" I breathed out, relieved. "Go ahead. What is your name?" Thank you. Thank you, Patience. You've seen me through. Only thirty more minutes to go. It'll be smooth sailing from here on out. The blond one leans forward and, with noticeable effort, declares: "Hi! My name is Charles!" The auburn haired one, taking consolation from her partner's apparent victory, speaks up: "Hi! My name is Charles!" Stare. Stare. Stare. |
| "Do you like tofu?" "No, not really." "Let me tell you about tofu. There is three kind of tofu. Hard, medium and soft. The hard tofu made in Gifu prefecture. They make tofu for hundreds of years, so they are pro tofu maker. Medium tofu is made in blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah..........." For forty minutes he would go on about the types of tofu, where they were made, what went into them, how they were made, and what they were used for. He asked only two questions, and those only at the beginning of the "lesson": "Do you like tofu?" or "Does your country's people eat tofu?" Tofu Man was my first real indicator that I did not have the temperament suited to this work. After twenty minutes of just being talked to about tofu, without a pause, a question, a smile, or even a change in tone or facial expression, I found my face growing hot with the growing tension in my body. After the fifth or sixth session of him repeating verbatum what he had told me each time before, I began to imagine myself leaning over and strangling him while I screamed: "I'm here, you mother f**ker! I'm right here! Stop ignoring me! There is no more boring food in the universe than tofu!!!!" It wasn't personal. He'd a script memorized, and he gave each and every teacher to the same treatment. He took three lessons a week. Each lesson: tofu. Tofu. Tofu. Oh, GOD! It would've been better if he'd been, like, some kind of tofu maker himself, or a food critic, or a government tofu inspector. But no! no no no. What was he? No one knew. We asked the Japanese staff if they knew, and all they could tell us was that he requested Man-to-Man lessons only, so he must have a pretty decent paying job. He was in his mid-fifties, and usually wore a suit, so he must've had a job, but he never let us know, even if we asked. Actually, most questions he just ignored. If pressed, he would just stare at you for a bit and then continue talking about tofu. You see, or you will see: I don't have good filters when it comes to dealing with people. I experience their personality with very little buffering or fading. Definitely not a positive attribute in this job. I began to wonder about Tofu Man's personal life: Just what did this guy do in his free time? Why did he study English? Obviously, it wasn't to converse in English. Was he trying to get some job explaining tofu to the barbaric races? Did he love tofu? or did he merely obsess over it? Did he eat it every day? Did he rub it all over his body? What kind of relationships must this guy have? Months passed. It got so I dreaded looking at my schedule in case I saw his name there. And when I did see it, even if the lesson was hours in the future, my insides would clench up and depression set in. I know that, by now, you, reader, must be thinking I am exaggerating this. Frankly, I don't care if you believe me or not. I know what I went through, and the Tofu Man was not the worst. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being Wonderful Human and 10 being a Living Nightmare, Tofu Man might've ranked about a 5 in my experience. He was just as bland and uninteresting as tofu. And he wouldn't be the first or last Japanese person to take English lessons just so they'd have a conversation partner who couldn't politely excuse themselves from the conversation, say they remembered a meeting they were late for, get a phone call, or run out of the room screaming. Tofu Man, Tofu Man, if I met you tomorrow and told you I'd been living in Japan for eleven years, would you still ask me if I'd ever eaten tofu? I bet you would. I bet you would. |
| She smiled so sweetly... Before coming to Japan, I'd never had an attraction to Asian women. I'd been divorced for about five months before washing up on these Eastern shores...a very dry five months. Soon, I would be bedding a coworker, but for those first few days of teaching, any smiling woman of even moderate attractiveness had my hormones in a rage--and they were all smiling at me. That was new--I may have been a 6'2", 180lb athletic type with mildly handsome features, but my personal oddities (intense bookishness, a tendency to ramble on endlessly about quantum physics and post-modern literary theory, and the inability to put delicately what was always in the forefront of my mind: to whit, sex) made small talk a grueling affair for me. I just hadn't had the practice. Kuri had the best smile, and she always seemed genuinely interested in me. After forty minutes of talking with her, basking in that smile and flirtatious banter ("Are you married? What kind of girls to you like? Do you have a girlfriend?"), I'd have to put my books in my lap before standing up. For me, she was everything I'd heard a Japanese woman would be: petite, with dark black hair, soft-spoken, kind, and beautiful. And Kuri was all those things...except for one. She wasn't Japanese. She was Korean. Well, her parents were Korean. Kuri'd been born and raised in Japan. Didn't speak a word of Korean as far as I knew. For me, that made her Japanese. But the Japanese people around here didn't seem to think so, and Kuri was very aware of that. "I'm American," I said one day when it was just the two of us in the Voice room. "So, for me, you're Japanese. Don't you feel Japanese?" "Most of the time, yes. Until someone asks me if I am." Her English was level 5 on our school's grading system of English ability, putting her squarely in the middle at our branch. "How can anyone see the difference? Your name is Japanese, right?" "They see. We look different. Don't you think so?" "No. You look Japanese." I'd almost said "You all look the same to me," but luckily managed to cut myself off in time. In hindsight, I'm not sure if she would've taken it all that badly. "I don't notice it much. When I tell people I'm Korean, they always tell my Japanese is good. Anyway, tell me: why don't you have a girlfriend?" It went on like this for months. I considered asking her out--we had great conversations, and I seemed to be able to make her laugh. One night, outside, she asked me if I would like to have dinner with her. I blushed. "Um, thank you. I'm honored, but..." "Honored? What does that mean?" there was anger and suspicion in her voice. "It means I am happy you asked me. You are very beautiful, but I don't date students." "That's just school rules. You don't have to worry." "No, Kuri, that's my personal rule. It's just a bad idea I think." "Well, who said it was a date?" A few more awkward sentences were exchanged before she walked off. Months later I learned she had been dating one of the teachers. When she'd asked me out for dinner, it was during a time when he'd returned to his country to find work before sending for her. She must've been lonely. She hadn't really been attracted to me. She'd just been kind and sweet and gentle, making me feel attractive and worthwhile. Kuri married the guy, and they had a beautiful girl together in Australia (they sent a picture to the school). Her smile, and that of her baby, lit up the gray filing cabinet in the corner until the day we were suddenly locked out and told the company had gone bankrupt. |
| Who to start with? I guess I better start with myself. The year was 2000. Clinton was still president. The Tower's hadn't fallen. The mood of the country was still upbeat--the stock market bubble hadn't yet burst. I am not the usual person who comes to teach English in Japan. The company (let's call it MOVA) let me know that straight up at the interview in Chicago. "You know, we don't usually get people with your level of teaching experience," one of the pair of interviewer's told me. I was still sweating from running to make the interview on time, because the map they'd provided me of downtown Chicago indicated the wrong building. Nonetheless, I felt a little chilled by the comment. "It says on your resume you've been teaching English at universities for four years," said the other. "Yes, that's correct." They and all the other interviewees wore suits, I noted, while I only had a sweater. "Is that a problem?" "Well, I think we've got to warn you that you'll only have ten minutes to prep each lesson." "Ten minutes?" "Less than that, actually," said the other. "You'll have ten minutes between the end of one class and the start of the next. In that time, you'll need to write comments from the previous class, and then plan your next lesson. So, all told, you'll probably have about six minutes to prep your next lesson." I stared at them for a moment, not knowing what to say. Finally: "And the other teachers find that to be enough time?" "Oh, yes. But I just wanted to warn you because you're probably accustomed to much more preparation time." Yeah. Try hours, not minutes. "I think I can adjust," I said. "Great! Because we want to hire you." They stood up to leave. "Wait a minute. Is that it? Don't you have any other questions?" "Nope. You'll just need to sit through the orientation session next and fill out some paper work. Welcome aboard," he added, smiling and extending his hand. And that really was it. Six weeks later I was sweating buckets in Immigration at Kansai Airport in Osaka, having been told to arrive in a three-piece suit during the hottest time of the year. That was 11 years ago. In that time, I have talked to hundreds, if not thousands, of students. I wouldn't use the word "teach" because, quite frankly, the majority of what I do is not teaching. I even go up the management's nose about this once I became a trainer, telling them that we shouldn't be called teachers because that just created a false sense of purpose in new employees' minds. Instructors is a better word. Counselor, perhaps. Paid Smiler, Cheerleader, False Friend, Listen-and-Nodder or Aural Prostitute have all been applicable at one time or another. 11 years. Most people quit after 18 months. The company ran at a higher than 60% turnover rate--probably one of the only companies in the world to be able to do that and still make a profit. But the business ran--and runs--on fresh new faces, people who haven't yet burned out, smiling, chipper youths who come to Japan full of hopes. Even in my small school out in the sticks, I saw dozens quit in the first couple of weeks. Why? Let me share my best possible description of what it is like sitting in an English conversation class long after you've gotten over your initial enthusiasm and the horror of what you're being asked to deal with on a daily basis sets it (I shared this description with several newbies before deciding it just wasn't worth the effort): Imagine you are in one of those sky-diving simulators, the ones that are built in an old silo or something, with the huge B-52 propeller whirling away underneath you, keeping you aloft with gale-force winds. Usually, you wear protective goggles and ear muffs because of the wind and noise, but you've lost yours , and you are screaming to be let out, but no one cares. And you are screaming in fear because the mesh screen separating you from the propeller is nowhere to be seen, and you have to keep balancing carefully or you will plummet into the blades and be chopped into bits. But no one cares. They only want to see that you are enjoying the simulator. And whether that look on your face is really a smile or really a grimace doesn't matter, so long as the people in the observation window feel you are enjoying yourself. And you'd better hope they feel that way, because if they don't, even for a moment, they'll turn off the power, and you'll hit the blades long before they've stopped spinning. Eleven years of this feeling. It hasn't all been bad. Indeed, there have been moments of terrible, heart-rending beauty. And I have fought, constantly, against the mandates of the company. I kept my standards high. I never let myself become just another cheerleader. I have been reprimanded so many times, I lost count. I've been threatened with dismissal on several occasions. I was continually harassed by management for almost two years so that I would tow the party line, and refused. Then, the company went bankrupt and collapsed around me, lurched from the ashes, and begged me to come back. I needed the money. I knew the system. My family needed stability. That was three years ago. Nothing has changed. Have I? I'm not sure. I'd like to think so. I'd like to say I have learned patience and compassion, diligence and fortitude. Hell, I'd just like to say I haven't wasted eleven years of my life. I'm not expecting accolades or money--just understanding. |
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