Through the Eyes of a Vagrant

It’s been a while since I updated my blog, but now I will begin updating it regularly again. This entry is to bring everyone up to speed on what has happened in the past year, and to where exactly my travels have taken me until this point.

In August of 2008 I returned to Canada from Hokkaido since it was the end of my contract on the JET programme. I had decided not to re-contract when they had asked me to in November of 2007. Little did I know that at the time, when I chose not to re-contract, that the economy of the entire world would start to go down the tubes.

When I returned to Canada I tried for eight months to find a job in the programming field, or in academia (without a teaching licence), to no avail. Here is a list of the job offers I received (some of which I rejected) while looking for full-time employment to actually start out on my own with:

• Job at a copper factory working occasionally for two days a week making $10/hr
• Job at Cineplex in the box office making $8.50/hr for only four hours a day part-time with an unpaid break
• Position as a professor making $22/hr for only 13 hrs/wk with a four hour commute every day by car (best offer I received)
• Position as a Japanese teacher at a shady school for only three hrs/wk with an hour and a half commute by car

It was very depressing. Without any tangible experience with programming or without my teaching licence, finding a position, much like other recent graduates, was very difficult and competitive.

So I had a nagging voice in the back of my head telling me that I should try to go back to Japan. I knew things wouldn’t be as cushy as they were on the JET Programme. Many of the other offers had much lower salaries and I had heard many bad things about other English teaching companies in Japan. So, I would spend hours, time and time again, looking at job offers for English instructors only to close the websites in the end.

Until one day, I had had enough of all the terrible job opportunities in Canada, and for the hell of it applied to five job offers that I had found on the net. Within two days, I had received three out of five replies requesting an interview with me. They were from Teach Away, Interac, and ECC. It was like night and day.

The sad thing was, I had also applied to teacher’s college to the tune of around $300. And by the time I had interviewed with Teach Away and accepted my position with them, I had received acceptances from all three teacher’s colleges. Of course, I’m not sure why I had applied to teacher’s college in the first place. It’s definitely something I want to do in the future but there was no way I had the money to be able to support myself and go back to university for a year.

So I was off to Japan again. The funny thing is, Teach Away is actually a placement agency and introduced me to Interac (my current employer) and thus, only two companies had offered me a job – which still wasn’t too bad.

Now I live in Okayama City. It’s known for its peaches and the story of Momotarou. I had actually originally asked for a placement in Fukuoka or Kyoto but was given a placement in San-you Onoda as it was fairly close to Fukuoka. However, that teacher at the last minute decided to keep their position and I ended up being placed in Okayama. It’s fairly close to Osaka, but still, it costs about $60 to get there and back from Okayama so it’s not something I can do on a regular basis. I agreed to Okayama because it has a population of about 700,000 people, but upon arrival I realised quickly that it is still very much countryside. The city’s downtown reminds me of Sapporo and has many of the things that I came to like in Sapporo in it as well, such as the foreign food store “Jupiter,” a large shopping street, many large stores such as Bic Camera and a five-floor Daiso, internet cafes, and a few good dance clubs and bars. Some things that I like about Okayama over Sapporo are the warm weather and lack of snow, and the larger foreign population. Some things I dislike are the humidity (almost always over 80%), the massive spiders, and gaijin traps (a name we gave to deep concrete pits on the side of the road to prevent flooding due to the large number of rice fields. Many foreigners in Japan that I know have fallen into these by accident and have injured themselves, and driving next to them still scares the crap out of me). Overall, however, Okayama is a better city than Sapporo I think. I’ve been able to make many more friends here than I ever did in Hokkaido and I am enjoying my free time much more than the last time I was in Japan. Work is problematic, and my new way of life also leaves some things to be desired, and getting set up here again was hell on earth, but that’s an entry for another time.