After having taught over two years in Korea, Japan seemed like the
best next step. The amount of money I can save is comparable, plus I'd
already briefly visited Japan in 2009. It was cool. Learning Japanese
will be fun, as well.
My original plan was to apply to JET, the
Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme, because it pays more than most
teachers would get directly from a school, plus it covers the flight and
subsidizes rent above 55,000 yen a month, which is rare when a school
is the employer (JET being a government-run program). However, before
applications for 2012 began, I started looking for other opportunities
on Dave's ESL Cafe, just in case. I found a position listed for an EFL
teacher at a women's Catholic junior college in Kagoshima City, Kyushu,
and applied. The benefits of this job were so amazing that I thought I'd
never get it, but I applied anyway, since my qualifications were
appropriate. After a Skype interview with a couple people from the
school's English department and a nerve-wracking couple of weeks, I
found out I'd gotten the job. Unbelievable.
My pay will be the
minimum wage for teachers (250,000 yen/month), but unlike most schools,
which defer part of the salary and call it a "bonus" at the end of the
year, this school will give me my full pay each month. The time is
really right to be transferring money from Japan to the US, too, because
at the current exchange rate, I'll end up with about 40-50% more
dollars than in years past. Another money saver is the fact that I'll be
a "dorm teacher" at the school, meaning I'll live for free in the dorm
with the students and I'm expected to eat lunch and supper each weekday
with the students in the dining hall, and as much as I can on weekends.
So the only regular expenses I'll have are breakfast and snack foods,
cell phone charges, transportation when I want to leave campus, and
entertainment. That saves me hundreds of bucks a month. Plus they're
going to reimburse me for the flight costs, so all in all, this job is a
way better deal than JET would have been, and applying to that and
getting a visa through the program would have been just about the
biggest hassle I'd ever have had to go through.
The other two
awesome things about this job are that because it's a college, I'll get
11 weeks of paid vacation a year (although the first year is an 11-month
contract, so really seven weeks are paid at first), plus paid holidays;
and the location is awesome. Kyushu is the southernmost major island in
Japan, and it has a subtropical climate, which is right up my alley.
The city I'm in is a port city with its own airport and bullet train
stop, so I have every kind of access to anywhere I want to go. Across
the bay is an active volcano, and while I've read it does result in ash
floating around in the air in the summer, it also provides a lot of hot
springs in the area, so there are a bunch of really nice bathhouses near
me.
Right now I'm nearly done with the visa process, which has
been easier than other visas I've had to secure in the past. I'll post
about that once I'm through the process.
