The first day of training was only a half day. We got up early, my roommate and I, and headed down to the dining area with our little free breakfast passes. I knew no one there, except my roommate, and felt completely out of my depth. I’d spent the last three months working three jobs and sleeping in naps stole at either my mother’s apartment or a friend’s, and eating fast food. There was no socializing. Never having ever actually been a social animal, there was no horse to hop back on. No bicycle to remember how to ride. I was about to get a crash course in making friends of strangers.
I put on my best customer service smile, because it was all I knew, and followed my roommate around the buffet like a lost puppy afraid of being kicked. I did venture away from the safety of the known for coffee, because really, coffee is worth braving any horror. Even being abandoned as my roommate went and sat down, and I lost her. It took me awhile to find her again. No one I walked past offered me a seat or a smile, so I wandered around the seating area smiling like I was brain damaged and loved it, and hoped no one knew I was seconds from dropping everything but the coffee and fleeing in terror.
It was about this time that I started reconsidering my decision to move halfway around the planet from the known. As always when it comes to me reconsidering a decision, I was too late. I sat down and made friendly small talk for all of three seconds before everyone realized that I was too socially awkward to speak to. Then we all shuffled out of the dining hall and into the training center. We practically mooed.
Training was…an experience. Five days of being told the ins and outs of the ALT job. Smile. Be genki. And for God’s sake smile. Genki is basically cheerful and energetic, healthy, happy, bouncy, pick your adjective, it’s versatile. We were assigned points on how happy and eager we were for demonstrations, instruction, games, and random talks about Japanese culture. We had to smile constantly. I’ve been in customer service since the seventh grade—I count babysitting as customer service—so I was already broken. It was interesting to see others flounder.
After training most people took the Narita Hotel bus into the city of Narita, because the bus was actually the only way to escape the hotel. The hotel was on a hill surrounded by nothing but highways. We called it the Narita Island and the Magical Fish Bus. To give you an idea of how broken we were at that point. The city of Narita, where we wandered anyway, had a couple of bars, the train station, a mall, a temple, and some other stuff that I wasn’t interested in. At this point I didn’t drink alcohol. I look back at my innocence and smile.
A Japanese mall is exactly like a US mall, only with more Japanese people and worse fashion. Like really bad fashion. Which wasn’t too much of a problem, since Japanese people are tiny stick figures and there was no way I could buy clothes there anyway. The temple was pretty interesting. I went with a small group and we took random pictures with GQ posing that I remember fondly. I’d been to Japan the previous year with my Japanese professor and two other students, so I’d seen temples before. And really one is much like the other, only some are prettier.
Some people would go to the bars or the mall, visit the shrine, get their culture in while they could. We were going to be there at least a year, unless we were deported or quit, so I figured I could get my culture in small doses, and didn’t worry about cramming it all in, in a week. My roommate however would not let me hide away in the hotel room very often, so I found myself participating regardless of my feelings on the subject. I did enjoy our trip to Chiba, however. We ate and drank at an izakaya, basically a Japanese family restaurant for food and alcohol. They have alcohol everywhere in Japan. Restaurants, quick shops, and vending machines. We also got lost in the red light district. There were many Japanese bouncers giving us the eye, ready to swoop down on our group with a mighty force should we dare enter their shops. There were thirteen of us, however, so I’m not sure what they would have done.
On our last day of training we had presentations. We had to give a five minute abbreviated lesson to a group of pretend children—basically the other people in our group pretending to be children. Since I knew I would be teaching elementary and Junior High, they told me I could choose which set I wanted to give a lesson to, but to pick the one I was most worried about. Elementary sounded easy, you basically act like a hyperactive child. I can do hyperactive child. I was more worried about Junior High. I remember Junior High. I wasn’t sure how I would survive it again without killing something. Probably a child. Oddly, it’s now my favorite school.
My lesson was simple, my flashcards handmade and not at all visible or legible, but I made up for it with so much freaking genki my trainer choked on it and died. Wait, no, that was in my head. He did give me top scores and told me I would be just fine. I believed him, and was relieved.
The next day we left for our assigned cities. I was headed up north, to Miyagi prefecture’s Sendai city. There was a small group of us, and we sat with each other on the shinkansen, or bullet train. They’re not as fast as they sound, but they’re still pretty fast. Since I was in a group of people I’d just spent a week with, I wasn’t completely uncomfortable. I didn’t know them well though, so I wasn’t completely social either. And we lost members as we went along, one or two disappearing off to another city or in another direction, until there were only two of us. Luckily, our ICs—Independent Contractors—were together as well, so were didn’t have to separate until they took us to our new apartments.
An Independent Contractor is basically a Japanese person that speaks some unspecified amount of English hired by Unnamed Company to set up the ALTs new life for them. We were taken first to get our apartments, and told to fill out paperwork, with the ICs explaining what was what and where to sign. Then we went to a cell phone agency to get cell phones, and again the ICs basically did all the work for us, we just had to pick a phone, a phone number, and sign our names or stamp our hankos. A hanko is a Japanese stamp, or seal, with their family name on it. Instead of signing, they hanko stuff. It’s quite convenient.
They took us to lunch, then we went shopping for home supplies, since my apartment only came with amenities and not anything I could live on like a bed or food. My new friend Tom went to Matsushima, one of the top three most visited places in Japan, and I went to Higashimatsushima—basically translated as east Matsushima, but about five towns away from the real Matsushima. That’s just the way it is here. And we had about two weeks to stew until school and classes officially started.
That’s about when I started panicking, as I realized that training had not in fact prepared me for anything, and I would be expected to teach real students, and I had no idea if I would be doing it alone, with another teacher, or dancing naked in a barrel while they pointed and laughed and threw pickled vegetables. Wait. That last one was a reoccurring dream. Never mind it.
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