Home » Education & Career » Living in Japan » An English School in Three Movements

An English School in Three Movements

© Timothy Joseph Young

Getting to Know All About You

One of the best things about teaching English in Japan is the variety of Japanese people you get to meet, especially if you teach one-on-one lessons. At the small, local English school I've taught at for over a decade, my students have been doctors, engineers, kids, university students, housewives, and even a retiree or two.

They've shared with me their experiences of playing pachinko, working at a fast-food chain, conducting a neighborhood campaign to stop construction of a housing development, and many other parts of life in Japan that I haven't experienced first-hand. A few have even shared with me their marital dissatisfactions ("No passion," one woman complained about her marriage) and infidelities!

I've felt sometimes that it's my non-Japaneseness that causes some of these people to open up to me. Japanese are well-known for hiding their true feelings, and of course plenty of them won't be any more open with a foreigner than with a Japanese acquaintance. Still, I sense that my being, in an important sense, outside of Japanese society causes some Japanese to feel they can suspend normal inhibitions and say what’s really on their minds.

Idiosyncrasy and Osteopathy

And then there are the nonconformists who, though Japanese, seem to exist outside of Japanese society anyway! Watanabe-san is one of those.

He is probably the most hands-off English school owner-manager in Japan. To work under Watanabe-san is to virtually be your own boss, only better--free use of facilities and textbooks, income tax handled for you, salary delivered promptly on the fifth of each month (or the following Monday).

Watanabe-san is notorious for focusing all his energy on one thing and ignoring everything else--including managing the school! Often his distraction has been a game or sport. There was a period when he always wanted to play people at Othello. Then he got a Gameboy and played Othello against that. There were a couple of winters when he went away for days at a time to go skiing, and let the school run itself (all the employees have keys).

Another time, before I came to Japan, he went ape over his video camera, to the point of setting it up to tape lessons as a way of assessing each teacher's performance. One of the teachers wouldn't stand for it and put the lens cap back on the camera. Watanabe-san soon dropped that idea. (By the time I arrived, the video equipment was gathering dust in a corner, and he had taken up tennis.)

The copyright of the article An English School in Three Movements in Living in Japan is owned by Timothy Joseph Young. Permission to republish An English School in Three Movements in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.