Wordle

Click on the picture below. I made it using all the words in this blog about Japan. As I read through the words I remember different events and parts of my great travels in Japan.

I'm going to print it large and hang it on my wall.

Going

Well, after a lot of thinking and debating I've decided to go back to Canada in July. I'll leave the job at GABA and look for work in Calgary. Summer's the only time I'll be able to find a job in Canada. Since there is so little time, I am now running to get everything done before then, airplane tickets, selling furniture, packing things quickly, canceling water, gas and electricity... I'm sad to leave Japan so quickly but there are some things which we must sometimes do. I still have many articles to write and pictures to post, so I'll still be updating this blog for a while.

Well I finally figured out where there are free public wifi spots. Although there are quite a few inside cafes, many are inside buildings or shopping centers, meaning free wifi is just around the corner from the front door.

http://www.freespot.com/users/map_e.html

Western Japan trip

Well today we leave for our great western Japan trip! It's currently pouring rain in Yokosuka, however it looks like it's going to be fairly warm and sunny for the rest of the time in Hiroshima, Osaka, Kobe and Kyoto!

Everything is packed, the house is clean and I'm just making the final preparations.

Kabuki

WE saw a play Japanese style, Kabuki. Kabuki is classical Japanese dance-drama. Kabuki theatre is known for the stylization of its drama and for the elaborate make-up worn by some of its performers. All performers are men, women are portrayed by men wearing white masks.

Kabuki plays can last entire days but we went to see only a small hour show. The particular show we went to see had as a star a famous kabuki performer of women roles.

It was very interesting and very different from other theater. Unfortunatley there were no pictures allowed once inside so the only shot is from the outside.

Teaching English in Japan

TIME for a look at what being an English teacher in Today's Japan is like. I want to dispel the myths still surrounding this business.

When considering this path there are a few things that you must know:
1 - Teaching English does not pay well.
2 - Teaching English will not be easy.
3 - Getting a job teaching English will be hard and require a lot of work.

If you're not ready to deal with teaching English in Japan with this mindset, stay home. If you're ready and can believe this instead of what you've read and been told elsewhere, then read on.

There are 3 major kinds of English teaching jobs available out there:
1 - Institutions
2 - English schools/companies
3 - Private students

To make by, almost all English teachers teach at no 1 or 2, AND have to teach at no 3. What does this mean? It means that you're going to be teaching many hours a day, with little time to yourself, no paid vacations and you'll have to budget very carefully and be thrifty if you want to survive.

If you're good with working hard and often, budgeting, and being creative with what you have, read on.

With this said, there are some pretty good paying jobs out there teaching English, they are the ones where you work in institutions, read government schools, the prerequisites:

What you need to have to land a cushy (3000/month) English job:
1 - BA in education, psychology, ESL, or earl childhood teaching.
2 - Master degrees in the same fields if you want to teach students older than elementary (2-12).
3 - At least a year or two experience teaching English to students in institutions.
4 - Be comfortable living in a more remote place, up to 1hour to 6hours outside Tokyo.
5 - Knowing Japanese would be a big plus.

Then there are the jobs for people who want to live in the cites, see no 2 and 3. for this:
1 - Associate degree or BA in any field.
2 - Be already living in Japan (i.e. get your own VISA to live in Japan).
3 - Be ready to work Monday to Friday from 7am to 10pm and Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 8pm.
4 - Know business Japanese if you want a higher/decent pay (JLPT level 2 or 1. Japanese learned from watching anime is not near good enough).

Does this sound good to you? If so keep on reading.

Good jobs are open for application 3 to 6 months before the job starts, if you want to go to Japan right away, you're out of luck. All jobs have a very high number of applicants. For these kinds of jobs expect 2000 other people to be applying. There are perhaps 5000 jobs like this in all of Japan every yearn, and that if there's only one opening for all of those, many many people won't get this kind of job. If you manage to land one, congratulations, they will take care of the paperwork and you can sit back and relax. You'll be teaching English in Japan in 3-6 months.

English Schools and Private students require you to already be in Japan. So if you think you can get a job, better go overseas now.
Before you do this though consider these conditions if you want to make it there and back:
1 - You need an airplane ticket there and back.
2 - You need to get a VISA which will allow you to work, no one hires people on holiday VISAS anymore, even the Working Holiday VISA is not great.
3 - You need about $4000-$5000 saved up in a bank account which you will use while you're trying to get a job.
4 - You must have a plan B in case you're there, run out of money and have to go back from where you came (i.e. if you're broke, how will you be able to find a job, food and apartment when you come back?).

I'll probably be adding to this as more things come to mind but it's a pretty good start. If you're in Japan and want to find work. Looking at Gaijinpot and Googling English schools in areas you'll be willing to work in is the best bet.

NOTES:
- You'll be paying up to $10-$20/day out of your own pocket for train/travel expenses (think $300-$600 less than your calculated paycheck).
- You'll have to budget in the price of fruits and vegetables as well as meat, which are about 2-3 times what you'd pay for wherever you live.
- You will be taxed 5% on your paycheck too.
- Learn Japanese customs and stick to them! You are the minority foreigner here.
- Enjoy Japan, it's a great place!

Persimmons

THE other day I finally worked up the courage to try a pretty strange looking fruit which Japanese people seem to love. They're in season right now so their price is (relatively) cheap.

Persimmons come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from egg shapes (popular in China) to a flat tomato-ish shape (popular in Japan).

I've tried Persimmon in two different conditions, just under-ripe and very ripe.

When it was under-ripe the taste and texture was very close to that of a peach or apricot.
But the real flavour of this fruit is revealed when it's ripe, it tastes and the inside texture feel like a very ripe mango! Pretty interesting fruit, two different textures and flavours which are both good but would not normally be thought of as similar.

Okinawa

OKINAWA was great. It's small island off the coast of Japan, and it's been influenced by the Chinese. Okinawa is a blend of both Japanese and Chinese architecture and traditions.

Any trip to Okinawa is very expensive. The one we took for 5 days, including air fare, car rental, hotel and breakfast was US$1100/person. The hotel was very nice with a bunch of swimming pools and a great view of the ocean.

The flight was pretty quick and uneventful. It takes 1 1/2 hours to fly there. The train ride to the airport was as long as the flight!

When we got there we went to the car rental company and I got a small (actually the smallest car they have) Vitz, a nice little car, very small and with what seems like a 60-70 Hp engine. Of course this wasn't really a problem since the top speed anywhere in Japan is 80 km/h. The road I took however was quite a bit slower, maxing out at a breakneck 60 km/h... I think that when Japanese people come to other countries it must make them very nervous to be driving at 100 km/h, they're not used to it! I was pretty nervous at first because I was driving on the other side of the road, but I got used to it pretty quickly.



Getting to the hotel took 3 hours because we thought we'd take the "scenic" route. It was a mistake, we didn't see much "scenic" anything except for other cars and buildings.

The hotel was very nice and had very good staff. The view from the room was great. And the room itself was pretty amazing. Some pretty fancy furniture and decorations there.

Okinawa has it's own kind of citrus, it's small and green, very sour and makes an excellent juice. It was our drink of preference while we were there.

We went and spent some time in the ocean just swimming and relaxing, reading books.


We also went and visited the Okinawa Churaumi aquarium, it's the world's second largest and has whale sharks, manta rays and many, many more things to see in their aquariums. There was a big tank with thousands of fish, small big, huge and also sharks and eels. We also saw turtles and a dolphin exhibition. It was amazing to see even the large dolphins jump up into the air 6-8 meters(20 feet)!

A little south of the hotel is a place famous for it's cliffs and beautiful views. We went and explored this of course. :)

On the way back to the airport we took the expressway ($10) and this time we trotted along at 80 km/h. The trip back took only 1 hour.

Since our flight was at 8:30pm we spent the day in the city. We first visited Shuri Castle. Shuri Castle is a gusuku (Ryūkyūan castle) in Shuri, Okinawa. It was the main palace of the Ryūkyū Dynasty. In 1945, during World War 2 in the Battle of Okinawa, it was almost completely destroyed, with only a few walls standing. In 1992, it was reconstructed on the original site based on photographs, historical records new and ancient, and the memories of people.

Then we went down into the shopping area and walked around for a few hours. There are many items from North America, in fact more than in stores specializing in such in Japan, due to the large USA army/navy base which is a big part of the economy there. But there were also some rather odd souvenirs which I would have (had the price not been ridiculously high) sent to friends.

Our flight back landed at 10pm and we got back home by midnight. Thankfully it was saturday night and we got a chance to relax and rest from our vacation. :)

Japan, driving me crazy?

SINCE I'm going to Okinawa next week, I needed to get a Japanese driver's license. The hotel where I'm going is 2 1/2 hours away from the airport, by car! There is no shuttle to get to the hotel from the airport, of course there's public transportation, but it's only 1 bus which goes each way once a day. This meant I had to get a Japanese driver's license and fast.

A quick Google search will pull up many pages of different people explaining different methods and required papers. For Canadians (and some other places accepted by the Japanese driving bureau as acceptable) the requirements as of 2009 are: Canadian driver's license, translation into Japanese (by a certified office) of the license, Canadian passport, Japanese Alien card and proof of residency in Canada for at least 3 months after you got your license. And of course the license fee.

For the whole of Kanagawa province, which is about 1/8th the size of Japan, there is only one office which does this. The admissions office is also only open from 8:30am to 9:00am and from 1:00pm to 1:30pm. There is also a limit of 13 people who can do it in one session. This is a pretty short time for any public office I've ever seen, and it might just be the world record.

The office only accepts applications to do the paperwork for those two 30 minute periods since there are only 2 staff and every country has different requirements. So I grabbed all the things I could think of, airplane ticket to Japan, Red Cross certification in Canada, Canadian passport, Canadian driver's license, the translation, a letter I used for my mortgage from my employer stating hours, date I started and salary, the Alien card, and I took it all there. It took me about 1h45 on the train to get to the station.

I got off the train and realized that the bus stop had so many people waiting I would never make it on time on the bus. So I walked/ran for 15 minutes and got to the office just at 1:15pm.

When you get there you have to go to the window, there the two officers review your papers and see if you have the paperwork properly done to their satisfaction. After some questioning and talking between them they finally gave me a number on a big blue card. I was in! Whoo! No 7, No 8 was the last person to make it on time before they closed.

At 1:30pm they closed the office, leaving everyone sitting outside wondering what would happen next. I talked with another guy who was there doing the same thing, he was Australian. We chatted and compared different papers for a while.

At 2:30 they reopened their window and started calling people in. However not everyone was called by number in order. As I watched other people go to the window, they sent them in different directions, seemingly for different papers.

They finally called me to the window, they took my no 7. I was told to go around the corner and get 4 small pictures taken. I went to the back of the building and got the pictures taken, it cost 600yen. Then I came back with the pictures, handed one in and waited some more. They called me back and gave me a pile of forms, one big one with 3 pages and my alien card. I was asked to sign a waiver saying that I only wanted my car license for now and that if I wanted my motorcycle license I'd have to go through the process again.

I was then told to go to the building next door. I went and in the back of the building I paid 4500yen for 4 stamps. They stuck two of the smaller ones on the 3 paper form and also handed me two larger ones loose. I then had to go upstairs to a machine, press some buttons, enter two 4 digit codes, get a paper with a barcode and PINs on it, fill out some information on the big paper, and hand it all in back at the first building.

I handed in the forms and again waited. They called me back a while later, this time I went into the office and did a quick eye exam, there is a large sheet with many circles on it. The circles have holes on one side, pointing either up, down, left or right, you have to answer where the hole is. Then they flash a set of lights on the left of the sheet and you have to tell them which colours were up and down. The whole thing takes about 30 seconds, very efficient this part.

Then they sent me with a form and my barcode back to the first building to a different part of the first floor. I had to hand in the form, scan my barcode, get my picture taken (again?) get another form and go back to them with it and hand it in.

After handing it in and waiting some more, they made me stick my big stamps on a blue cardboard, sign a waiver saying I got all my documents back, and ushered me out. I had a big red no 12 stamped on my card. I had to fill out some more information on the card and go wait at a few rows down at a new window.

Finally after some more waiting, they called my number, it turns out they're group numbers and you have to wait until the everyone in the group is finished whatever they're doing. So I waited in line with 50 other people in group 12, went up, gave my blue card with stamps and got my license!

But it's not really done yet. I then had to go to a machine near the front door, wait in line, put my license on the pad, take it off when it was done reading it, enter my security codes and validate my information.

And then I was done! Whoo! The only drawback was that I had just renewed my license in Canada in December 2008, So they thought I'd only been driving for 11 months. They don't have licenses which expire and need to be renewed in Japan, so unless I go back and provide them with a driver's abstract showing that I've had a license for longer than that, I'm considered a "new driver". But I don't care, I have my license, I can now drive the rental car! To Okinawa I go!