Interesting Foreign English Teachers, Expatriates, Riff-Raff and Fiends
A lot of interesting foreigners come to teach English in Japan. Mostly they are not professional educators, but only university educated young people - often fresh out of college - who come here for a lark, and because they heard that it was easy and that they could make a lot of money at it. None of that is true, but no one understands that until they actually experience it. These kinds of foreigners have been notoriously unreliable over the years, typically staying for short durations only, prone to break contracts and return to their own countries when it pleases them, or break contracts for more attractive jobs, etc. Because of this kind of risk, many Japanese schools that make use of foreign native-English speakers to teach Oral English Communication do so through a Japanese middleman company (like the one that I work for). In the old days, a person who stayed for two years was considered an old-timer. Then in the 1990s, despite the slowdown in the Japanese economy, the exchange value of the Yen against all other currencies began climbing quite high, drawing more people in more quickly, flooding the market with a gross surplus of mercenary ‘teachers’ looking to cash in on the exchange rate. At the same time, it became more common to find foreigners staying longer - five years or more - maybe because the money was so good. The 1990s glut of excess foreign English teachers effectively suppressed the remuneration, driving wages down sharply and making it more difficult for teachers to take advantage of the high yen. We had to work longer hours, and more jobs, for less money. In the end, though, almost everyone returns home to whence they came. In the case of long-term expatriates, they often return with Japanese spouses and, sometimes, children.
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There was the Jewish, Australian teacher, also an Israeli citizen, veteran of the Israeli invasion of Lebanonand Beirut in the early 1980’s. He used to tell stories of being court-martialed for being out of uniform because one day he wore the wrong socks. Married to, and divorced from an Israeli woman, he had a daughter in Israel that, so far as I know, he never saw, and he spent all his vacation time surfing in Thailand.
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Another Australian teacher was more interested in time off and vacation time than he was in work. He was never able to understand that taking time off when it suited him was not synonymous with paid holiday time as described in his contract. He thought that if he worked (unpaid) overtime then he could build up a cushion of hours that he could convert into increased paid holiday time, despite being directly cautioned against such a plan. His thinking was a textbook example of the different business paradigms at work in Western and Japanese minds.
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One of our teachers, an American woman, married another of our teachers, an Australian man. They returned to Australia, bought a farm near Brisbaneand began a farm stay business for Japanese. Through direct advertising as well as a recruiting agent they host visiting Japanese students on their farm to give them the experience of farm life - food, home, crops, animals, etc.
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There was the Canadian woman who always dated American military personnel here. She made no secret that she wanted to marry an American soldier so that she could get a Green Card to live and work in the U.S. - a felony under American law, I think. She seemed to think it was a joke and always talked about it with a smile and a laugh. She dreamed of settling in a big city like Los Angelesor New York, but in the end, I heard that she ended up in Wyoming.
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One of my best English teacher friends was an American man who worked part-time for my company only for one year. After that he landed a job working directly for a private girls’ high school as an English Conversation teacher and remained in Japan for seven more years. At the beginning, he was married and arrived in Japanwith his wife, also an English teacher. Then during his first year his wife left him, divorced him, and married a Japanese Jehovah’s Witness. During his seven years at the girls’ high school he began dating one of his students. After she graduated my friend took all of the money that he saved teaching English and together they bought a Land Rover and planned a continent-hopping global trip together. They took the car to Australia and drove around the whole country. Then it was off to Indiafor the same. (They met Mother Teresa, who was still alive at the time, and shook her hand. That promptly made them ill. It seems that Mother Teresa, because of her work, was so covered with germs that anyone meeting her was well advised to wash their hands immediately afterwards.) After that, they landed in the Kenyan port of Mombassaand drove around that country for a while. Finally, they did the same in Western Europe. The original plan was to return to Japan after one year, driving across Russiafrom Western Europe. That plan was abandoned, however, because of the expense and bureaucracy involved with the Russian leg of the expedition. Once back in Japan they finally got married and emigrated to my friend’s native Seattle. However, the Japanese wife left him and returned to Tokyo within two months. I never knew what happened. Today he is a computer programmer in Texas, happily married to and settled down with a Mexican woman he discovered on the Internet.
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There was the dual-citizenship British-Belgian woman who divorced her husband in Belgium, leaving behind a son in that country, in order to follow her Japanese lover back to Japanthirty years ago. She met the man in Brussels where he was a student, and then followed him to SaitamaPrefecture. Her Japanese husband is a truck driver, and for ten years she lived as a housewife - first in the man’s parent’s house, and later in a trucking company apartment. After a decade of that, and the birth of two Japanese sons, she found work as an English and French teacher. She did that for a decade, and I hear that today she works as a professional artist.
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Then there was the divorced American woman who came to Japan with her alcoholic teenage son. In her second year in Japan she was elevated to Manager of the company (in the days when a second year foreigner was still considered an old timer). Her son was granted permission to stay at the boss’s condominium in Honolulu for a time during the summer. He trashed the place in a drunken orgy and the boss took the clean-up and repair money out of the manager’s contract completion bonus. The Manager denied responsibility for her son’s behavior and left on a sour note, in an argument over money.
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Even now, I still feel a little ashamed about the Canadian man who thought it was too bothersome to teach an after school club at a certain boys high school once a week. So he deliberately made his English club as uninteresting as possible until students stopped coming. In the office he boasted, “I’ve got the attendance down to just four students now.” I believe that he thought it was a good thing: fewer students meant easier work for him. He didn’t care.
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Then there was the American who also served as Manager for a time, then returned to the States, married a Korean woman and went back to school to become a professor of Asian Studies. (Because so many English Conversation teachers in Japan are youngish, recent university graduates, and this work is their first foray into adult working life, the goal/dream of returning to school for some kind of graduate studies is common.)
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There was the American son of a Washington, D.C. area land developer. After several years teaching English in Japan, and marrying a Japanese woman, he returned to Baltimore, Maryland to take over his father’s business when he retired. Today he is a millionaire property owner and construction contractor.
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Then there was the Canadian teacher who, after six years of hard, reputable work (during the 1980s) for which he is still remembered, decided to launch his own language teaching company. So he stole one of our company’s salesmen, one of the office ladies, and secretly re-negotiated about a third of our contracts for himself in order to start his own business. That incident happened in 1989, just as I arrived and, truthfully, the company has never recovered from it and has been in a long, slow decline ever since.
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I remember the Australian man hired in mid-term on a Friday to replace a suddenly departed teacher. Then he was fired three days later on the Monday after failing to show up at school. The school telephoned the company asking,“Where is Mr. A?” The company sent a salesman around to his apartment looking for him. It turned out that the man lied about his work experience on his resume and when the time came to go to school and face classes of 25-to-40 Japanese teenagers he panicked, locked his door, drank himself silly and hid his head under a pillow.
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There was the British woman who practically just disappeared one day at the end of the summer. We discovered afterwards that while on vacation in Thailand in August she either found, or was offered a job there - a lower salary, but also a much lower cost of living and a more fabulous environment/climate to inhabit - and she returned to Tokyo to pack up and split. But instead of giving proper notice to the company she telephoned from the airport to report the fiction that her brother in Liverpool was badly injured and that she had to return home on that account. The timing was horrible, because the second term of the Japanese school year was about to start. When the woman returned from her Thailand trip she sat in the company office every day for a week doing “office work”knowing that she would leave again within days, but saying nothing and giving no hint. She only waited until payday on Friday (withdrawing all her money from an airport bank) and then was gone.
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There was the Canadian teacher married to a stripper from a Roppongi nightclub. One night he got drunk and fell out of the branches of a tree that he had climbed, badly breaking one leg in the process. He was hospitalized. Upon release, his mobility and ability to work were severely compromised, and he could not tell the truth of his injury to the schools where he worked lest they ask for a replacement on the grounds of bad character (a legitimate complaint, I think). So he and the company spun the tale that he fell down the concrete steps exiting a train station. (This is one of my great fears in Japan. Staircases here are much steeper than they are in Canada, and during rush hour they are very crowded with jostling people.) Because of him the company had to include a rule in its Rules and Regulations handbook forbidding drunkenness at work.
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There was the American woman with the limp. Her education and work experience were adequate, and her personality seemed okay. She had been in a near-fatal car accident at some point that left her with a permanent limp. The schools accepted her after seeing her resume and then meeting her in person, but after a couple of months they asked for a replacement. The Japanese teachers considered her “disabled” and felt uncomfortable around her.
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I will never forget the Australian man, a professional geologist by training, who came to Japan primarily, I think, to study a particular school of karatethat he was devoted to. Often when he came to the office in the summer time to do “administration work” his face sported bruises from his karatepractice. Of course, at first we asked him about his injuries. But after a time he abbreviated his explanations to just one or two words for convenience: “elbow,” “foot,” “punch,” or “fall.” When he left Japan he quickly found work with an Indonesian petroleum corporation surveying Pacific islands for possible oil and gas drilling sites. We corresponded for a short time after his departure. I sent my letters to him to a post office box in Noumea, New Caledonia. I thought it was exciting and exotic to get reply mail from such a place.
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There was the young American teacher - I mean really young, chronologically as well as mentally - who taught for only one year before starting his own business dealing in used clothing. Used clothing can be very profitable in trendy youth-oriented districts like Harajuku, Shibuya or Roppongi. This guy would fly to the States and go to thrift stores to buy up their entire stock of clothing, then ship it all back to Tokyo and peddle it to trendy used clothes shops, or sometimes directly on the streets at flea markets and bazaars. Frankly, it made him a rich man in a couple of years. His road to wealth was aided by fact that, like many short-term foreigners I have met, he did not pay resident tax or health insurance (paying income tax is unavoidable since our employer automatically deducts it from our salaries).
Some young people come here, they are shocked by the high cost of living, and in reaction to it they refuse to pay health insurance or resident taxes, saying, “Why should I pay these things? I am not benefiting from them.” So I ask them, “Does your apartment have gas, water, electricity and a working telephone? Is mail delivered to your home? Are there parks, pubic schools, hospitals, a fire station and police boxes (“koban”)in your neighborhood? Are the roads paved?” Of course, the answer is always yes, so I say that I cannot understand how they can say that they do not benefit from carrying their weight in this society by paying their share of the burden of maintaining it. But, you know, certain kinds of people are impervious to that logic, and this American man was one of them.
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Then there was the Canadian teacher, married to a Japanese woman and with two children, who wanted to return to live in Vancouver (his hometown). But his wife wanted to remain in Yokohama, near her aging parents. In the end, he taught English in Tokyo for several years, then the family moved to Canada for a few years, then returned to Japan for a year, then went back to Vancouver again, and so on a couple more times. He kept returning to the company each time he needed a job in Japan, and the boss re-hired him because he liked him. But there came a time when he refused to hire him once again. I don’t know what he does for work now, but I do know that he still lives in Yokohama with his wife, his sons, and his Japanese-in-laws, probably dreaming of returning to live in British Columbia once more. The boss still likes him.
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There is the American teacher specializing in Business English classes. A 30-year resident of Japan, he is a good teacher with a lot of talent, a universe of experience, and legion of anecdotes to tell. His hobby is photography, and a couple of times a year he holds his own photography exhibitions. He rents an exhibition space and usually manages to sell enough pictures at least to cover the rental cost of the project. He is an interesting man.
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One of my favorites is the British man, in Japan about the same length of time as myself and married to a Japanese woman just like me, who works as an English teacher part time, and performs on weekends as a fake Christian minister at Christian-style Japanese weddings. He also does a little bit of acting on the side through a talent agency, and he takes on a little translation work. In addition, he performs his own music at a British pub in Tokyo three or four times a year.
“When are you going to go back to the U.K.?” I ask. “Will you ever go back, or at least go to live in your condominium apartment in Paris?”
“I want to, some day. But there is still so much that I want to do before that.”
He is a very interesting character.
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One of the worst I have ever met was a New Zealander - a chemical engineer by training. In addition to being a compulsive talker for whom being quiet was a physical/bio-chemical impossibility, his primary concern in Japanwas money and how to get more of it. English teaching is not a high-paying job, and by itself is not conducive to affluence (unless one plans to launch one’s own English Conversation School, which is probably a lot of hard work with meager returns). During the summer months when we were required to be in the company office doing “administrative work” he spent his days scanning newspapers for financial information and then talking on the telephone with banks for hours at a time trying to find the best exchange rates of a range of international currencies. He dreamed of making his fortune through speculation. The hurdle he could not overcome on an English teacher’s salary, though, was that to play the money markets required a bankroll of at least hundreds of thousands of dollars, not the mere tens of thousands of yen at his disposal. I could have told him that right away - in fact, I tried. But it took the fool an entire season to understand his predicament. Since then, the company has never again hired a New Zealander. The boss believes they lack sufficient work ethic.
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Another of what I consider the “worst” teachers is an American woman who was actually very sweet and amiable face-to-face. A devout, fundamentalist Christian, she was the daughter of missionaries and had been born and raised in Japan. But due to her parents’ religious beliefs, she had been educated entirely within her church and literally knew nothing outside of, or beyond the boundaries of her church. So, although she lived most of her life in Japan, she understood and spoke no Japanese, and she knew nothing about this country: it’s history, it’s politics and culture, economics, current events, etc. It was impossible to have a conversation with her because she knew nothing. Although her resume claimed that she studied “science” at a university in Illinois, we discovered that this education centered around Creation Science. One day I tried calling her at home to discuss some matter about a school where we both worked. A brother answered the phone, but he refused to put a female family member on the line with a non-family male, even after I explained who I was and what I was calling for. It felt like a Muslim family sequestering its female members. I stopped trying to talk to her when one day she asked, “What is DNA?” with a straight face.
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One of the most memorable characters was a British teacher. In Britain he was a literary ward-winning, published poet while still at university. He worked a few years here as a part-time English Conversation teacher, and he trained part-time at aikido, the fighting art made famous in police action films by American actor Steven Seagal. He left Japan and no one heard any more from him until one day it was noticed that he had written a book and that it was for sale in the Japan section of the foreign language books floor of the large Kinokuniya bookstore. It was a recounting of his experience in Japan, with names changed to protect identities. The company and the boss, and the company manager at the time of his employment were all clearly identifiable. The boss never read it, but he knew about it and he became miffed that one of his (former) employees had produced/could produce publication-quality material in English that he was unable to lay some claim to, and thereby profit from.
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Lastly, there are all those foreign English teachers who loosely call themselves“professionals” and put on false airs. I am a professionally-trained and certified teacher in Ontario, Canadaand for me this is a great irritant - foreigners who come here to teach English but who have no professional qualifications or certifications - only university-graduated native English speakers, as I have described. They have the cheek to proudly call themselves “professional teachers,” and when confronted with their resumes’ lack of professional qualifications and certifications they launch the predictable defense that studying education at university and getting a Bachelor of Education degree does not make them better teachers of English in Japan; that experience and vocation supercede training, and that “professionalism” resides in their serious approach to the work more than in their formal educational history. I have argued with such people and I refuse to do it any more. Sometimes the debate even makes its way into the Letters-to-the-Editor pages of daily English-language newspapers in Tokyo. It irks me greatly to read some facetious foreigners writing about how they have lived and worked in Japan for six months, or for one year and they think blah-blah-blah. Frankly, I think that Japanese culture is so different from Western cultures that a couple of years is not enough time to properly learn/understand anything at all about this place. I simply will not listen to what foreigners think about Japan if they have lived here for less than a couple of years. The day that I hear professionally trained and certified foreign English teachers explaining how their training and certification, indeed, are not necessary for the good performance of their jobs is the day that I may start listening seriously to that position. I don’t think that day will come soon.
Admittedly, the Japanese schools where we work do not care if we are professional teachers in our own countries. Whatever education we have from Canadian or American, British or Australian universities counts for little or nothing in Japan. What the schools want is cheap but reliable service. They want a foreigner in their classrooms when they have contracted for a foreigner to be present. They want a youngish-looking energetic person with a good smile. That is almost all there is to it. We are fodder, and easily expendable. If we are breathing and we speak English, that is all they need.
I think that we expatriates are an odd bunch, which may be why we are here in Japanfor starters, not in Ontarioor Wyoming, or Maryland, or Liverpool, or London, or Brisbane doing other things. You can tell from the memories that I describe above that many foreigners leave a lot to be desired, which does little to endear us to our Japanese hosts. Certainly, I think that the long-term expatriates are a varied group of socially marginalized people who represent a great resource of unappreciated skill in language and cross-cultural understanding, possessing largely unpublicized talents, interests and experience that we use to eke out a living. We could be great. Our greatness is imminent, right here in our heads. But the longer we reside here the more out of the loop we become, and even our own families - siblings, cousins, etc. - begin to disregard us. Oh, well. We have only ourselves to blame.