Visa Process

Getting a teaching visa for Japan was really easy, especially compared to the other countries I've had to get visas for. To teach in South Korea, I needed to get official copies of my college transcripts and send my employer my actual Bachelor's degree, in addition to getting passport photos done and completing long applications. I also had to get a local background check done the first year I got the visa, which got tightened up to a state-wide background check the second time. Finally, I had to pay a visa fee of around $45 and travel to Boston to be interviewed by the Korean consul. The visa to study in England was about a thousand times worse, so I won't even go into it, and it cost about $500 for me, because I had to pay $150 to get it expedited.

To teach in Japan, the process is a little different, and it apparently matters how/where you get hired. When I applied for my teaching position directly to the school, I sent scans of my degree and transcripts, and later a PDF of my TESOL certificate and a letter of recommendation. They didn't need hard copies of anything. Later, I filled in an application for a Certificate of Eligibility and a personal history form (for the school itself, though, not to get the visa), and sent a couple passport photos. The school did most of the work in getting my visa over in Japan, where they submitted my documents to the immigration department there, so I could be sent the Certificate of Eligibility, which basically means everything is a done deal. Once that was issued, all I had to so was submit that and a brief visa application with one more passport photo and my passport itself to the consulate in Boston--no interview required. Since the US and Japan have some sort of treaty regarding this kind of thing, there was no fee for the visa and because I was visiting my brother in Boston, I was able to drop off the application instead of FedExing it. Total cost to get the visa: about $16 for the FedEx delivery back to me in Maine. The visa was processed in about three days, and I got my passport back like ten days after I'd dropped it off. Very quick.

With the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme, you have to do a lot more, like write a statement of purpose, provide original/official copies of every post-secondary school experience you've had, get three letters of recommendation, complete a medical form (and a physician's form if you have medical issues), plus the application and authorization forms, etc., then if you get accepted to a position, you have to provide a federal background check from every country you've lived in for the past five years. It seems like a wicked hassle.

JET seems to be a better deal than getting hired either directly by a school or through a big corporate placement agency, because as I mentioned in my last post, they pay significantly more, pay for the flight, and subsidize rent beyond a certain figure, plus they provide Japanese lessons (self-study) to JET teachers. But sometimes, like in my case, you can get an even better deal from a school and then not have to deal with all the bullshit that an extremely competitive program like JET puts you through.