North Sea Road: a Japan Tale

Just another JET

This is one of those JET memoirs.

Except it's not. Or, at least, I don't intend for it to be.

The JET Programme got me the first real job I ever had. It was a paid coop placement as an English tutor in the Writing Centre of Humber College. The interviewer who awarded me the position said that I'd made a real impression on her when I'd said my interest in teaching ESL came from aspirations to teach English in Japan some day.

It was an empty ambition that I'd confessed to on a whim, while under the pressure of one more co-op interview. I'd given teaching in Japan only the most cursory of considerations, and those considerations were founded on a love for sushi and anime (powerful Japanification drugs that the J-Government better be bankrolling), and perhaps on the vague memory of a story someone told me once of a cousin who'd gone to teach in Japan.

But it got me my first coop placement, which lead to further coop placements, which lead to being fortunate enough to start a full-time job on the Monday after I finished my last exams of my final year at University. It was a great job, with fun people...until some of the people changed, and the rest of them started quitting or getting let go. By the beginning of the third year of it, I was looking for a change, and it was then that the JET Programme swam back into view.

The girlfriend of a friend, slightly older than we were, had just returned from a stint on JET, and she was absolutely glowing about it. On a balcony in St Jamestown, over several beers, she replanted that initial seed in my mind: to go to Japan. To teach English.

The fall rolled around soon thereafter, and the prospects at The Job were looking more grim by the day as ambitious new management continued their steady process of reshaping the company in their image. I put in applications for teacher's college and for the JET Programme: large, complicated, origami ships of paper forms in triplicate that I folded just right and set floating on a sea of uncertainty, bobbing back towards their application committees. They were very much that: slow moving long-shots in the dark that, were they to set off any avalanche of activity, wouldn't do so for months yet. They were timebombs of potential that I could set and walk away from, heading back to the day-in, day-out of the job where I could forget about them until they produced some effect.

The application process for the JET Programme is a rambling thing. Applications in November, interviews in February, acceptance in April, placement details in June or July. By the time you head out for JET in August, you've waited nearly a year since you first applied. And, if you're unlucky enough to get declined for JET, you're stuck into another year cycle if you need to apply again.

Fortunately I didn't have to face that. I somehow pressed my 7-years-distant, introductory knowledged of Hiragana into service in my interview, explaining the similarities between Japan's native character set and our roman one, and I managed to to impress the interviewers enough to be given a "GO" spot.

I recall the process only in rough fragments of memory:

Clandestinely reading through a dense set of guidelines in a warm patch of late autumn sun on a long bus ride home form work.

Waiting in a dully lit, overheated hallway in the University of Toronto for my interview while snow rained down outside.

An old Japanese woman and a young white man, asking me what I knew about Japanese culture.

A packed initial information session with a strange woman who I now know well, in a weird, isolated building that I now know to be the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre.

Cliquing up with a band of genki JETs who were also leaving from Toronto in 2009, oblivious to the fact that once we reached Japan, we'd all be scattered to the winds and air dropped into distant corners of the country.

The JET Programme is the necessary backstory to the North Sea Road. It was the JET Programme that landed me on northmost island of Hokkaido. It was the JET Programme that embedded me in the lives of the residents of the tiny fishing village of Furubira. It was the JET Programme that gave me a new brother and sister; a new father and mother. And, when I finally commit it to ink, it will be the JET Programme that was responsible for me tattooing an indelible mark of those two years into my skin: a pictoral index serving as link to and concrete memory of one of the most inspiring things I've ever done.

So this is not just another JET memoir—not really. North Sea Road was inspired by my experiences on the JET Programme, just as my other story collection Modern Myths was, but I intend for it to be about far more than how I felt about eating nato for the first time.

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Necessary backstory:

The JET Programme (sic) is one of the largest exchange teaching programs in the world. It is certainly the largest operating out of Japan. It is a goverment sponsored initiative that air drops thousands of native-English-speaking foreigners into small towns all over the island archipelago to expose locals to foreign cultures in the hope of encouraging them to speak more English.

This is something I participated in from 2009 to 2011, and it had a great impact on what came after it.

This chapter is probably not that exciting, but I'm hoping to write this one more or less chronologically, so I feel like this chapter was necessary at this point. Hopefully I can get back to more "Houses of Spiders" whimsy with the next one.