Getting A Teaching Job in Japan

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.