I'm moving to Japan. (Yay!) I'm going to live there for at least twelve months on a three year visa, and I will be working as an assistant language teacher (ALT) in an English classroom. (More information on where I'll be living and working another day.) I'm participating in the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme, which, if you've never heard of it, is a government initiative that basically aims to promote international relations in Japan at a grassroots level. Postgraduates from all around the world are invited to Japan to live among the community and work in foreign language classrooms, building stronger relationships between their Japanese cities and their home countries. If you're interested to learn more, or to apply, here's the JET website: http://jetprogramme.org/en/
Now that it's all finally happening, let me recount the process of the past few months of my life, for anyone who might be interested.
Some context. JET is something I'd known about and been interested in for a while. I learned about it in probably my second year of uni, when a few friends from the campus clubs and societies I'd joined started to get accepted and move to Japan. I probably know five or six people who have participated in, or are still on, the programme. So it became pretty common in the conversations we were having at uni, especially because I was studying Japanese at the time. I think it's quite a common goal for people studying the language; if you take Japanese seriously, you either do a student exchange (like one friend, who went on exchange halfway through his degree, then put off the rest of his degree to just stay there for ages, living and working in Japan), you continue with your studies until you're good enough to go onto professional academia (you become a uni tutor or go into research, etc), or you do the JET Programme.
For a number of reasons, my bachelors degree took many more years to complete than intended or anticipated. By the time I finally graduated, I'd stopped studying Japanese years earlier and subsequently forgotten most of it, and I'd sort of given up on JET. I thought my chances of getting a position were disparagingly slim, so I decided to just work in Australia for a while and try to figure my early adult life out. Spoiler: that didn't happen (will we ever really have our lives truly "figured out", anyway? I doubt it).
Flash forward through the boring bits of young adult existentialism, and in 2016 I decided it was time to just go for it. If I didn't get in, I'd just do something else. Get another job, move into the CBD, go back to school. Whatever. At 25 I was restless and discontent, and sort of disappointed that I hadn't done anything I deemed worthwhile with my twenties. One random day mid-2016, I went up onto the rooftop car park at Westfield on my lunch break, ate my wholemeal vegemite sandwich, and called the JET desk at the Embassy of Japan in Canberra. A nice dude named Simon answered a bunch of questions I had and gave me all the important info.
For months, the JET website had no information on it. Life carried on. Finally, updates! The downloadable application paperwork was up on the site, along with a printable guideline. Thank whatever gods for that guideline, because the paper application process is long, difficult, complicated, and legitimately gruelling at times. (Bear with me here. You're about to experience an unfortunate shift in tense - sorry grammar nut friends. But I promise it all works out fine.)
The application itself is eight pages long. Firstly, you have to write an essay good enough to convince them you're the right person for the job over the hundreds of other applicants. You need to make numerous separate appointments to see your GP to get a general check up and have them fill out a certificate of health, and another form qualifying you as mentally sound enough for the position. You need to apply for a National Police Check with enough time for the results to be posted out to you. You need copies of your passport, ID/driver's license, etc. You need photocopies upon photocopies of every single page of your paperwork, and they need to be individually stamped and recognised by an official. You need to organise three separate copies of your application to post to the Embassy, and they need to be butterfly clipped, not stapled. All the pages have to be in a specific, correct order. It's intense. It's intimidating. Some days it's infuriating. You stress. You lose sleep. You get it done, post it in an express overnight satchel, and then you wait.
November 18 rocks around and you hope like hell that they even received your application. Someone emails you letting you know they did. And then you wait some more. You wait the rest of November, all of December and half of January, and then, if you're lucky, one unremarkable day you get an email that says two things. First, congratulations for getting through round one. Second, the date of your interview in February. You're giddily excited, but it wears off quickly, and the rest of January crawls by at an agonising pace. By the end of the month you're sick with nerves. You have mock-interviews with your best friend (who also applied, and also got an interview) about four times, until you can mock-interview no more. You read the JET reddit for tips. You read blogs, websites and forums, and watch people's testimonials on Youtube. You prepare until you feel over-prepared. Then you just feel terrified.
Then you go to your interview at the Consulate General of Japan. You dress smart. You buy a leather pocket that looks professional, and stuff it with a notepad and pen because one guy said you should take notes during the interview and ask questions at the end of it, and you don't want to take any risks. You arrive an hour early and they run late, so you sit for what feels like decades in the waiting room outside the office making awkward small talk with all your competitors (who don't seem even half as nervous as you, which just makes you even more nervous). One guy actually does look nervous, but then he tells you he's done the Programme before and you want to smack him in the jaw.
The interview lasts around twenty minutes but feels like two. A nice Japanese lady comes to get you and leads you down what feels like the Corridor of Doom, into a ludicrously enormous board room which is entirely inappropriate for what is meant to be a small, formal interview. The nice Japanese lady sits at her place in a row of professional-looking people who stare at you. One is a youngish former JET, one an intimidating Japanese man who looks like the CEO of an important corporation. The nice Japanese lady smiles at you. You've been told to shake their hands to give a good first impression, but there's a gaping expanse between their desks and yours and it's too awkward to get up and go around, so you don't and it makes you panic a bit. They jump right in. You can't believe it's actually happening. You want to take notes but your hands magically aren't working. You want to drink the complimentary glass of water but are afraid you'll accidentally choke on it. You choose to be safe and not drink the water, and spend the rest of the interview with a distractingly dry throat.
Somehow, despite all your preparation, each question catches you off guard. It's like you're back at uni and you've prepared all the wrong material for your exam, and it's on stuff you're not sure you ever even learned. Your stomach turns to ice. You give dumb, short answers. Probably not the kind of answers they were hoping for. You power through it and hope a better question comes next. It doesn't. Instead, they decide to impromptu test your language skills. You fail spectacularly and feel squeamishly humiliated. The Q&A you were warned about rocks around. Your questions sound dumb and vapid. One of them gives you a look like they know you have questions only because you've been told to prepare questions, and for no legitimately other good reason.
Then it's over, and you leave. At first you're a bit brain dead from it actually being done. Then you just feel awful. You're sure you could have done better. You're disappointed in yourself. You want to cry but you're sort of too exhausted. You go home and try to give nothing away to your best friend, whose interview is the next day. When hers is over she immediately contacts you to express her dismay and cry, and you feel simultaneously relieved that you're not the only one who feels as though the interview went atrociously, and disappointed for her that it didn't go well. Defeat feels like lead in your gut.
And then you wait some more. For the rest of February and all of March, you run back through the interview in your mind over and over and over and over, painstakingly nit-picking until you're convinced you've started remembering it wrong. Your emotions are a rollercoaster; gloriously high on the days you're feeling optimistic about your chances, and devastatingly low on the days you can't possibly imagine they'd give you a spot. The rest of the time you just feel stressed, anxious and tired as the killer wait frays your nerves. You try not to read anything anywhere about JET and just carry on with normal life, even as it occupies your every waking thought, day in, day out, for weeks and weeks. You don't want to talk about it because you're so bloody sick of it but it's also the only thing you're capable of talking about. There's no room in your brain for anything else.
The Americans start to get their results. The JET reddit becomes full of people celebrating. You only know because your best friend has been obsessively stalking the JET reddit since interviews for any tiny crumb of news. You continue to pretend your whole life isn't totally dominated by the outcome of your application. Finally, successful Australians start popping up on the reddit. It's time. And it's not a good sign - you haven't gotten an email yet. Surely that means they're contacting the successful applicants first, and you didn't get in. But you refuse to give up. You reason with your best friend, who is also trying to refuse to give up.
You get your emails minutes apart.
Alternate ALT. Wait listed.
Not rejected, but also not really accepted either. You don't know whether to feel disappointed or not. Your best friend cries out her exhaustion in the bathroom. You sit at your work computer with your brain reeling in its confusing emptiness. It was the most likely outcome, but you were still somehow unprepared for it. Your friends and family have mixed reactions to the news. Some think it's worse than being flat out rejected. Some thing you're still in with a shot. People don't know whether to be happy for you or not. You don't know whether to be happy or not.
More agonising, impossible waiting. March crawls into April, crawls into May. Your best friend messages you every day, sometimes excited out of her skin that both of you are still in with a good shot, having considered your chances of being upgraded realistically and come up optimistic. Sometimes she's as flat as you and it's your turn to keep you both afloat. Back and forth, up and down, over and over. You start to wonder at what point is the reasonable time to let go of hoping and start planning the rest of your year and what you'll do instead. But you really don't want to give up. You're also sick to death of waiting for something that may never be happening for you. The constant state of not knowing is, hands down, the worst part.
Anyway, it's basically like that until you're lucky enough to get upgraded, which my best friend was in May, and then I was in June. So we're both going (hooray!). The relief and elation were actually slow burners - I didn't feel properly excited about it for weeks after getting the good news. I think I was probably cynically expecting there to have been a mistake. It was hard, having been wait-listed, not to feel like you weren't really picked because they thought you were right for the job, but because someone dropped out and they needed a replacement quickly. Even now, having built up my confidence about being accepted, there's still a niggling voice in the back of my mind that remains in a consistent state of worry. I think that's all part-and-parcel of this job, though, because now my worried feelings are all pertaining to leaving a good first impression on my colleagues and students, and not being a colossal disappointment following in the footsteps of my predecessors. We all keep telling ourselves that we can only do our best, and that our best will be good enough. Beyond that, it's going to be completely touch-and-go.
So there you have it. The arduous and agonising application process for the JET Programme. I think I just needed to blurt all that exhaustion out in one big hit; now that I've got the job I can move on from that horrible no-mans-land of waiting and wondering. Drawing all of it out is like sucking out the poison, and now I can finally just put it behind me. I do think it's important for people interested in or considering applying to be aware of how much patience and serious strength is required to get through it. It's a tough time. Your mental health will take some blows. But it's absolutely worth it if you're lucky enough to get a position. Now that all the paperwork is done and I'm starting to pack and organise (exhausting and gruelling in an entirely different way), the reality of moving to Japan to live in a small community is starting to hit me, and the excitement is buzzing.
If you made all the way through all that, you deserve a medal. I don't blame you if you skipped it. From now on my posts should be shorter and filled with lots of photos. I'll be chronicling life in Japan here as much as possible (the good and the bad), and also on my Instagram (@breadbuffet), so if you're more interested looking at photos than reading anecdotes maybe head there. Thanks for reading -- stay tuned for the big move.
