It's funny how you can make a big life-changing decision seem smaller than it is by making it incrementally, day by day over a very long period of time. Does that make any sense? I'm not the sort of person who makes long-term plans and sticks with them. Short term planning I can do. Five- and ten-year planning? Not so much. But if I break up a long-term plan into incremental short-term plans... Success!
A few years ago I met a very interesting woman, a friend of a friend of a friend who is about five years younger than me, and got to know her a little as we rode in the same car from Oakland to the north side of Lake Tahoe for a weekend in the snow. She had recently come back from Japan, where she had been teaching English for a year in a semi-rural town, through something called the JET Program. She said it had been a really good experience, but not something she wanted to do beyond the one-year contract, and she was glad to be back in Oakland. "Huh," I thought. "That sounds kind of interesting."
I thought about that conversation a lot. I thought about what it would be like to live in a semi-rural town in Japan. I thought about what it would be like to leave my architecture job and try something else. I thought about what I would tell my parents, my friends, my bosses. I thought a lot about living in a postage-stamp apartment with a tatami floor and a two-burner hot plate and a deep soaking bathtub. I thought about my dreams of working abroad after college graduation, when for a short time I had an unofficial offer to go work for a Chinese firm in Guangzhou. I started combing the internet for information about the JET Program. I read blogs and watched countless YouTube videos and studied Japanese and talked about it with my family and slowly, incrementally, positioned myself to apply for the program, without ever officially saying "I am 100% certain I am going to do this."
I also made a mental bookmark for the month of November, which was the time for applying to the program. There is a three or four week window each year to apply for the following year's program, and the word on the web is that the application is difficult and the requirements are notoriously tricky (spoiler: I found them to be basic and readily achievable). When that window came around in 2013, neither I nor my bank account were ready to apply. I made a New Year's financial resolution to aggressively pay down my credit card debt and start a "what if" savings fund.
When November 2014 came around, I thought I'd check the JET Program website to see if the application was up yet. When I checked the website I saw that I had miscalculated- the application period had actually opened mid-October and the deadline was November 15th. I was two weeks late and had two weeks remaining to scramble the documentation and send my application to the Embassy of Japan in Washington D.C. I asked myself whether I wanted to wait another year and apply in November 2015, and I concluded immediately that I did not. If I have learned anything about myself, I have learned that I operate best under an imminent deadline- all the application items fell into place in short order and off it went to Washington, and the months of waiting began.
2016-02-10 Update: It's become a bit painfully obvious that I'm not going to write Part Two, at least not in the same level of detail as I began. It's almost a year on at this point, and I can't recall the little details and swings of emotion in the proper order, nor can I get very excited about rehashing the long, mendokusai application process. I'm quite glad it's over. I hate to leave it hanging, though, so what I can do is give the chronological order of the application and departure procedures, with a few notes here and there.
- November 11th: Online application submitted; printed application and supplementary materials (certificate of health, letters of recommendation, etc) mailed to the Japanese Embassy in Washington DC to be delivered by November 15th.
- Waiting
- January 13th: Email notice of results of first “screening”, invitation to interview, received.
- February 3rd: Interview at Hotel Nikko in SF at 9:30am
- Waiting waiting
- March 31st: Email notice of results of second “screening” (interview). This could be considered the point of “You’re in! Unless you screw something up between now and July 31st.”
- April 1st: Invitation to join the SF outbound JETs Google Group and FB page; begin the series of cascading paperwork deadlines
- Waiting waiting waiting
- May 9th: Pre-JET hangouts begin with a picnic in Golden Gate Park, where I met lots of nice former and future JETs and locked my keys, phone, and wallet in my car
- A little more waiting
- May 13th: Email notice of prefectural placement in Aomori-ken received on May 13th.
- May 24th: Welcome email from Kamayachi-san, the teachers’ consultant at Aomori Board of Eduction, request to sign and fax the “statement of agreement” basically executing the contract for employment.
- Cascading paperwork deadlines continue through June and July
- Waiting waiting waiting waiting for specific placement information
- June 20th: Alumni-led orientation at Hotel Nikko in SF. I wore my sunglasses the whole time indoors because my Kaiser doc had me keeping my right eye dilated at all times.
- Travel agency starts making travel plans for flights and Tokyo Orientation.
- June 23rd: I emailed Kamayachi-san with concerns about getting treatment for my eye problem. He answered me that day with my placement in Hirosaki, which allowed me to almost immediately (independently) locate my predecessor through facebook, before she had permission to contact me herself.
- July 31st: Mandatory pre-departure orientation at Hotel Nikko, followed by a reception at the fabulous Pac Heights residence of the Consul General in SF.
- August 1st: Group B departure from SFO to Tokyo NRT and Tokyo Orientation at the Keio Plaza Hotel.
- August 5th: Arrival in Aomori and Hirosaki.
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