Tokyo in Pictures

So, the main winter break vacation post will be from Seoul, but my partner in crime Adam and I swung through Tokyo on the way back home. We had the unique pleasure of spending a full two days with my former IR/PS classmate Kentaro, and reuniting with a collection of UT/JA peeps in Roppongi as well.

In this collection:
-Amazingly delicious sushi food porn
-Fall colors still visible in Ueno Park
-People!
-The shrines and Buddhas of Kamakura
-One Yokohama shot from an automotive tour

By the by, all shots were taken with an iPhone 4. For a phone camera, I’m pretty impressed.


JET Program, meet chopping block

The JET Program sent me to Japan. There are many ways to go to Japan these days to do entry-level work like teaching English, but this is the preferred way to go since it's the only one with Japanese government backing.

Japan got a new prime minister earlier this summer, and the buzzword of the day is "fiscal responsibility," which led to the extension of a government-wide review of a huge range of government programs. Naturally, JET came under review. There's a really good writeup of events on jetwit.com by a JET alum and Columbia SIPA graduate. I've taken a few bits and added some commentary and things that you should consider if you're a JET-watcher, alum, or prospective participant:

Snippet: During the course of the proceedings, the JET Program was criticized as being ineffective in raising the level of Japan’s English education. One of the more publicized comments called for the elimination of the Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) portion of JET. 
Translation: This assessment is pretty much correct - as far as educational programs go, it's about as close to worthless as you can get. If you took fancy new American educational metrics to JET-subscribing schools, I'd bet good money you'd see virtually no correlation with English skills among the students or graduates. The common observation among alums is that each class has one super-star child, who would have been awesome at English with or without an awkward white person standing at the front of the room every day. This is why the overwhelming majority of school districts have dropped JET in favor of less costly private dispatch providers such as Interac. Seen in this light, JET looks like a pretty poor investment for the Japanese government (who go to enormous cost to hire teachers through embassies, fly them to Japan, and pay them way above local cost of living).

Snippet: In its June meeting in Washington, D.C., the US-Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Exchange (CULCON), a joint US-Japan “wisemen’s commission” scathingly criticized the shortsightedness of any move to cut the JET Program, issuing a statement that [strongly endorsed the JET Program].
Translation: A handful of policy wonks who do work of questionable value, are likely all JET alums, and have their employment thanks to that status desperately want to see the program live. 

Snippet: For its part, the US State Department also seems to be taking the position that the JET Program makes valuable contributions to the long-term underpinnings of US-Japan relations and cutting it will be harmful. 
Translation: State Department employees focused on Japan likely include a significant population of alums from JET or similar programs in other countries. If they can't work on fun cultural exchange stuff like JET any more, they'll be sent back to the passport division, and that would suck.
 
 

Snippet: The general sense was that the JET Program was being evaluated as an educational program with the exchange component being given short shrift, since its impact is difficult to quantify and assess.  
Translation: Hai, there's the rub. JET stands for Japan Exchange and Teaching. In truth, the State Department is right to observe that the demise of JET would adversely affect US-Japan relations in the long run. But I believe that the effects of JET can be observed, and it wouldn't be very hard at all. Ignore the financial sector for a minute and look at the Westerners working in bilateral roles between Japan and Western countries. I'd wager that the JET alums in general (a) are in roles of greater import and (b) leave their Japanese bosses more satisfied than non-JET alums (both of which are statements you could measure with a simple employer survey).

I'd predict this has a lot to do with the Japanese government's treatment of JET members as opposed to those cheaper dispatch teachers. Dispatch teachers come over to do a job. JET members, on the other hand, have their existence acknowledged by the Japanese government and often arrive in their villages as de facto government employees, which confers much greater degrees of both respect and responsibility. They're paid well, which keeps them more comfortable.

And there's an even simpler metric: look up all the Japan specialists (current and former) from top-tier international relations grad schools. You'll get a wide pool of people: business people and entrepreneurs, journalists, nonprofit managers, international institution members (ranging from obscure UN organizations on Equal Rights for Toasters to the World Bank) and yes, policy wonks who sit on self-serving conferences like CULCON. How many are JET alums? How many are Interac alums?

I think you know my prediction. 

There are petitions circulating the English-language Web, but this is really a matter for the politicians. The JET Program is a child of the LDP (the party that lost power last year and held onto power forever using a massive aggregation of local pork), and make no mistake: JET money that went to rural governments was a clever form of pork. 

If I had to make a prediction about the program's fate, I bet it'll be left alone. Two reasons:
-The government is completely deadlocked, and even moreso after the Upper House election of a couple weeks ago.
-JET has been on a slow decline for about a decade as local governments unilaterally decide to go to private dispatch. If the problem will take care of itself in time, why step on a political mine?

Those of you who want to involve Japan in your professional lives, jump on the JET wagon while it's still a valued asset. We could be the last generation of professionals who get to benefit from it.

Happy is a relative thing

Life is pretty grand right now. I'm making a niche in San Diego, I've got a dream job for a research gig, I can handle the academic pressures of school, and I'm beginning to be exposed to the joys of southern California, such as lots and lots of promising concerts from artists I love.

Still:

I'd rather be in Japan. I can't spend a day without walking home from school thinking I'd rather be walking home from work somewhere in Japan, following my nose to good food and beer. And sumo on TV. And trying to understand the evening news immediately thereafter.

It's easy to be nostalgic when my life in Japan was so relatively easy, but I think what draws me most is the same thing that sent me there in the first place: the sheer unpredictability of each day. I didn't know where I'd eat, or who I'd meet doing so. I didn't know what I'd learn. For all my training, I still couldn't read a lot of the signs I'd see along the way, and they became miniature intellectual curiosities as I walked along.

And I could really go for some legit sushi right about now.

I still miss that general sensation of "I'm in a foreign land! I'm in Japan! Wowwwwww!" It's still a motivator, even after having lived there. For the last three years, I've been in Japan at least once every 8 months. I'm about to break that trend, and it's disappointing.

It's that time again...

I'm the kind of person who remembers things by seasons, so after something happens I'll let it go for a year and then reflect on it when that time of year comes around again.

Late July and early August is JET turnover season, and it's been fun to look at Facebook through that season. To put it simply, late July sees lots of "Goodbye!" posts (both from departing teachers-to-be and their friends in response) and for a couple weeks thereafter you see "Hello!" posts from people who just got back and want to share their new phone numbers.

Add then there's the photo albums. Whether it's the first days or the last days, it looks much the same: parties in Tokyo. Then people put together their "best of Japan" albums and it still looks the same: serene snowscapes, cherry blossoms, local temples, beaches, post-party food runs resulting in one guy passing out on the table. Their photos look like my photos, which look like any other JET alum's photos, but they're still our own for what those places and scenes meant.

My amigos' photos, even if they're not my own, take me back through all the time between "Goodbye" and "Hello." I understand the feelings, the highs and lows, the tastes. It's almost like being ex-military - there's a huge body of common experience, unique to your 'people,' to draw upon when establishing new relationships, both personal and professional

This season last year was my own turn for the "Hello!" posts, and now that it's been a full year and I'm re-established in American culture, this is the first time I can step back and look at the whole experience, from start to finish, holistically.

It was a pretty great chapter in life.

Feeling at home in Japan

I was last in Japan a couple of months ago, and I visited my old home of Kawamoto, in the remote mountains a couple hours away from Hiroshima.

The first time I ever experienced "returning home" was when I visited home after 6 weeks of college. My mind was blown. I very nearly forgot how to actively navigate my own home town, and I just let my hands do the steering automatically until I got to where I was going. I was like a Roomba: soon as I hit a dead end of something I knew was the wrong way, I picked a direction and turned, and repeated this process again.

That sensation dulled itself during my college career as I got used to being away from places for a long time. In Kawamoto's case, however, everything had just gone so unchanged that it was all still familiar.

There was a lot that had at least an air of newness to it, but that was from bringing my very good friend and old college roommate along for the ride. All the newness was going in his direction - I merely caught a whiff of it as I was left to knowingly smile at the discovery of the incredibly clean air, or the beauty of the natural scenery, or to laugh along with a sake-induced drunkenness.

The real shocker of the familiarity was returning to the school where I taught. Everything was working as normal, but I was removed from this process that used to involve me day in and day out. So removed, in fact, that I was welcomed with the same procedure used for guests ranging from random parents to local politicians.

It would prove impossible to do what I wanted to do: walk into the teachers' room, make rounds, offer American candy to everyone, chat it up with my old team-teacher and my replacement Jeff (who, on an aside, is a pretty cool guy).

What I got instead was a guided tour from a surprisingly hasty vice-principal, who managed my tour around the school with the same looking-over-my-shoulder closeness that visitors to North Korea get from their tour guides. From the door, we went straight past the teachers' room, into the principal's office. The principal, who once made it a point to stop by my desk and chat in an incomprehensible mix of rural Japanese and elementary Korean, spent no more than 60 seconds out of his own desk to quickly down some tea at a table across from me.

Mind you, this is a school so laid-back that teachers often start classes 5 or 10 minutes late. But now that I was no longer a cog in the works, we would not speak of such informality.

From there it was straight to the classrooms. My oldest class had just graduated, to my chagrin, so I was left with two classes of kids I knew. The younger ones had only been my students for about three months, and they were disastrous. So my visit was short-lived, but long enough to disturb the class with my mere entry. Rather than talk to the kids for a few minutes, I was relegated to the back of the room and asked not to interrupt the ongoing class.

I had completely become an outsider in this process. I was a mere observer, not an old friend who had only been gone for eight months.

My favorite kids, who were the youngest when I first started, were now the oldest. Walking into their class was a completely different story.

They screamed. They barely managed to finish the last few minutes of their class, and the instant they were given the closing bow (yes, Japanese schoolkids bow to begin and end each class) they rushed to the back of the room where Adam and I stood.

It was a short conversation, which eats me up inside. Leaving that school last August was one of the more difficult events I've ever put myself through, and to come back from halfway around the world to talk to them for 5 minutes was far too little time. They likely didn't care that I was moving to California, or that this here was my best friend Adam. There wasn't time to tell the girls whether or not I had a girlfriend, nor did the boys get to learn what the latest and greatest American video game was.

I could have conversed with those adorable little buggers for hours on end.

That's the first story. With this next one, I'll offset my emotional squishiness with some extreme geekiness:

Back in Tokyo, Adam and I were exhausted on a Saturday night and just wanted some neighborhood dinner and a couple quiet drinks. That's the kind of place where I feel most comfortable: a local hole in the wall with some very un-Tokyo quietness combined with some half-Japanese half-Western food and a nice selection of whiskey.

We walked into a place that I had liked the look of the day before, and were greeted by the sounds of Crazy Ken Band.

I know about two people anywhere in the world that appreciate CKB, so let me link you to a YouTube video to give you an idea of the sound. It's a Japanese take on funk music. It's 31 flavors of cheesy, and I love it for that. Song after song idolizes Japan's low-brow: cabarets, the Navy town of Yokosuka, muscle cars and the kind of Americana that produces motorcycles with ape-hanger handlebars and American flags. Long story short: the odds that a random 24-year-old American would walk into the bar, recognize the music, and like it are kinda slim. (Personally, I have an old Japanese TA to thank for this completely worthless knowledge.)

As Adam and I were doing the post-game report on the previous evening's festivities, I stopped him mid-sentence. The music had just changed over, and it was the third or fourth CKB song in a row. By the fifth song, it was obvious that this place was all CKB, all the time. I had to know: was this a CKB theme bar? There was a poster of the band on the wall, after all. I asked the waiter, who consulted with the bartender.

"Just for tonight," was the answer.

Huh? (In Japanese: "Ehhhhhhhhhhhh?" in a rising tone of confusion.)

"We pick a band every night and play just their stuff."

The bartender and the waiter were people I don't know and may never see again. But between the lovably cheesy soundtrack, the Japanese comfort food, the delicious whiskey and the pleasure of sharing it with one of my best amigos, I felt more at home there than at my old stomping grounds of Kawamoto Junior High.

A lot of guides introduce Japan as a nation full of such confusions. It's yin and yang at the same time. Nudity is a crime or an expectation, depending on where you are at the moment. Tokyo is the world's loudest, brightest, craziest place and yet you're never more than 40 minutes from the silence of Yoyogi Park, where the trees are thick enough to block out much of the sun.

"Home," in such a land, is a pretty relative thing.