Hi from rural Japan

I have arrived in Shimane! I'm borrowing Internet access since I won't have my own for a couple weeks. I can't open any accounts anywhere until I get my resident alien card, which just started today and will take a week.

Life here is pretty sweet. My rant-liable predecessor turned out to be mildly psycho, nobody liked her, and it's a relief that she's leaving. As such, my living conditions are pretty great - my house is nice, big and comfy, my car is small and AWD, the other teachers in my town are insanely helpful, and my working conditions are great - I don't even have to report to the Board of Education office for the entire summer holiday, so one of the other teachers took me shopping in a nearby town for futons, towels, groceries, etc. My supervisor is *not* a Nazi by any means - he's actually rather easygoing, and my predecessor just thinks the sky's falling. Turns out she's 40 years old and still can't take care of herself. Oh well. Adjusting is turning out to be relatively easy.

Also: typhoon today. No reason to panic, as they always hit the southern islands and just kind of dump some rain here once they've died down. It's now 5pm as I write this, and the rain predicted for 3:30 has yet to show itself.

Next stop: Kawamoto, Shimane, Japan (or, my JET placement)

I'm going to be in the middle of nowhere. More specifically, Shimane Prefecture, the second-least-populated prefecture in all of Japan.

prefecture (n.) - a province that's small in size, roughly the size of a larger Texan county.

Within that prefecture I'll live and teach in the city of Kawamoto, with a humble, cheerful population of 4,500. Amazingly, the prefecture and the city have Wikipedia pages, so if you're curious there's more to read about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimane_Prefecture

There's plenty of good news about living in a small place. First and foremost, it'll be great Japanese practice - they chose to send me out there because I speak Japanese well enough to survive. Also, being one of the very few foreigners that's ever been in this part of Japan, I'll likely be a curious thing to the townspeople. This equates to me being popular by default, which I'm OK with. This particular small place is also good because it's near the beach and the mountains, so I get beach weather in summer and skiing in winter.

I'm far from Tokyo (the single greatest city on Earth - all the excitement of NYC without the dirt, crime or rudeness) - probably over 6 hours by bullet train - but roughly 3 to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which are probably the biggest real cities nearby. It's remote enough that the highway infrastructure isn't exactly finished yet - and yet, many foreigners in my area buy cars. Expect to see pictures of me with a cute, tiny, box-shaped Japanese car and driving on the right in just a few months.

I just took a break from writing this to look up my city in my Lonely Planet guidebook. It's not there.

Fortunately, I've found over the last few days that my prefecture has an active Internet community for JET teachers. I signed up and was about to introduce myself in the 'new JETs' subforum when I saw this gem of a post:

'Michael Blake Errison / Emmison, are u out there?'
So through some sneaky investigations of a certain German ALT in Kawamoto we have found out that Michael Blake Errison or Emmison is coming to Kawamoto BOE or might be coming not totally sure. So Michael you out there?

After a couple days of digging around, I came into contact with Lena, an English teacher from Ireland who wrote that post. Apparently the 'certain German ALT' is the person I'm replacing, and while I'm trying to get in contact with her personally, Lena was able to fill me in on a lot about my town. I'm just over an hour from Hiroshima, there will be 3 JETs in my town including myself and Lena, there *is* broadband Internet access, and here's the real kicker:

Kawamoto BOE (Board of Education, the guys who actually employ me) are very good to their JETs. Assuming I inherit everything that the German is leaving behind, I'll be coming into a nice big house in the center of town and a car! Supposedly the BOE owns most all the possessions in the house, which means I can't abuse them (for instance, can't take the car on road trips), but it does mean I have very little initial expenses, which is very good news.

As for my teaching, it's not set in stone, but the German currently teaches junior high, so I'll probably do the same. Should be a whole lot of fun.