～Interlude～

Today's blog is very personal... And long. Read through the end, it gets good, I promise you (-_^)
Through recent reflections, I have been thinking about my future and my feelings on other careers I had previously considered, especially my feelings on the JET programme and its' participants. I think I finally have been able to voice and describe the tangled spider web of myself and my relationship to Japanese studies. DISCLOSURE: THIS IS HIGHLY PERSONAL. I read this and feel that my heart is verbalized on the page. I welcome all comments, but know this subject is VERY close to my heart.

But before the main feature....
a bit of venting (for sanity's sake)
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Today has been a very loooong day (surprisingly since time seems to fly by so fast.) Waking up before my alarm at 6am, volunteering at my internship site (an Japanese bilingual program at an Elementary school) from 7:30 till noon, then hauling my ass all the way across town back to school for my one class of the day (thankfully easy classwork today), and then hanging around school till 5:30 to hold a meeting for a Japanese Major Grad Ceremony/Party which no one showed up to *(-_-)**~~ Oh, I got a ticket for my car "blocking the sidewalk", a section of unfrequented pavement. F*ckn' SAW the MeterMaidMan stop in front of my car and ticket me. To make a tale short, one that involved me sprinting downstreet after him and getting him to stop by yelling "F*ckn asshole!" and a lovely but frank conversation punctured with colorful insults, I think I can get out of it by snapping a photo of my car and sending it in. Hah.

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I've been doing a lot of thinking about what shape I want my future to take, at least for the next 5 years. I thought about this a lot this time last year, when I had thought I would already be graduating, since I was completing my fourth year of school. When I was in my Junior College and still living at home 3 years ago, my Dream had been to be an English teacher in Japan (hopefully JET), marry a Japanese man, and have bilingual kids.

No joke. This was Dream that I told myself I wanted.

My experience of living in Tokyo for a year and my lukewarm relationships to Japan through new Japanese friends who I met at my college after my year abroad killed a lot of that passion. I began to wonder, "What REALLY is Japan to me? Why is it feel so central to who I am? Why do I cling to it so much? Why do I wrap my self-identity so much with this county? Not that I care, but is this unhealthy or abnormal? Should I give up on my Japanese studies since Japan seems to have given up on me?"

(Aside thought: break-ups with my first very serious, almost-finance Japanese boyfriend and several really BAD messy rebound relationships could be partly responsible for this notion of betrayal...)

Until this point in the current Interlude Era of Limbo Era as I call the life of Now, (a time frame of the last year and a half) I have been very ambivalent about joining the JET program. I was of the opinion that participants in the program were purposeless drifters who had no life aspirations beyond creating a fantasy life in Japan. After in my one year abroad in Japan, I suffered a horrible disillusionment about the type of people who become ALTs and the kind of life the lead. I saw it as a life of debauchery, drinking, and depression, as many of the JETs feel they are not very useful in their jobs. I used to think JETs were a subclass teachers since they had NO education credentials. JET applicant’s often sub par Japanese language skills and cultural knowledge annoyed me.

Then I applied for JET out of desperation for a job and a direction in life. Over the months I waited, I became more excited. I can be in JET, but I can do things my way. Life is what you make of it, and I will do that with this job too!, I thought. I thought I would get it, that I was a shoe-in, though I never let myself get overconfident, half-expecting the opposite.

...and it came. Two week ago, a crisply polite rejection letter came in the mail.

grrrrr (>_<)~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~........ Actually, I'm ok. I'm ok with it.



But I had to stop and think; why am I so judgmental about the image I perceived about the majority of JETs, with no teaching credentials and hardly any knowledge of Japan?

I realize I must be an elitist and a purist for my knowledge of Japanese. I think I hated how my knowledge of Japan came from only video games, comics, and cartoons. I think I used to think I needed to be slightly embarrassed when I admitted such a fact to Japanese friends, since only nerds and other social rejects and socially-inept types were really into such hobbies. I think I did not want to be associated with those types. I desired prestige and professionalism. I desired financial success, social success, and even more, opportunity to travel and see the world. I want real life experiences, I do not want to spend all my free hours with my arms, hands, and fingers connected to the computer like umbilical cords, dependent for an experience from anime which, in it’s essence is FANTASY. I do not want to get caught up in the fantasy world generated by many media geeks, and forget about the beauty of a sunny day in Katmandu or the cool breeze blowing of the bay in Nagasaki. I am a passionate geek for anime, manga, and video games. I am passionate about discovering authentic Japanese and other world cultures. I want to break out of the shell that I used to live in when I was in junior high, when I would not leave the house for up to a week while I played Final Fantasy.


Thus, I chose to learn a language over becoming an animator, so I could live abroad in the country of my dreams, Japan. Thus, I could learn what the REAL Japan was like. Thus I could have an advantage over the average anime fan who never pauses his Dungeon and Dragons game or World of Warcraft to get off his ass and his parent’s couch to get a degree and move to a foreign country. Thus I could have perfect Japanese skills and feel I was higher class than other students of Japanese and fans of Japan.


…this is why Japan and Japanese is so important to me. It is completely tied up with my ego. And I am fairly arrogant, at times. You are your skills. I am good at Japanese. Therefore, in essence, I AM Japanese language. I have learned in the last few years that it is not the entirety of who I am. I realized after my disillusionment of life in Japan and realization of how horribly I sucked at Japanese even after 2 years that I couldn’t depend on it to give me a complete identity. I needed to expand who I am. I need to encompass and incorporate more into me, to flesh out the bits of me, those strong-willed, opinionated, obstinate, and pushy parts that refused to be suppressed by oppressive Japanese culture. I opened my heart to explore my heritage, the inheritance that my brothers seem to have chosen to ignore. I open my heart to my Dutch and British ancestry and their people’s history. I claim my heritage to flesh out the person I consider myself to be. I open my heart to love the world and its cultures, to see the beauty in our differences and similarity in experiences.


But I will first hone my skill and knowledge of Japanese. As my mom always says “Finish what you start before you begin any other new project. And make sure you clean up after yourself when you’re done!” (That last bit usually applied to messy art projects ;-)