Tokyo Orientation

For some reason, the airport for Tokyo (Narita) is not in Tokyo. It’s in Narita. So, after this 14-hour plane ride (that I couldn’t sleep during because I kept being interrupted with additional food), we collected our bags and get on a bus for Tokyo. It takes at least two hours to get to the hotel (depending on the insane Tokyo traffic). I didn’t take any pictures of it, but (if you can imagine) the hotel was really nice. It was pretty cool – JETs from all over the world were coming in for this orientation. The number of English accents was staggering.

Before going to our rooms, they give us about a dozen tote bags full of stuff we should read. Just to give you an idea, one of the packets was from the US embassy, and it contained (among other things) a book on US geography, a book on US history, a book on the US economy, and a book on the US government. So, after unloading all our bags (including the ones we came with), one of my roommates, a guy I met in NY, and I decide to go explore the area around the hotel. The Keio (hotel) is in an area of Tokyo called Shinjuku, which I think translates to freakin’ crazy. I don’t know if I was delirious from lack of sleep or jet-lagged or what, but as soon as we got about a block from the Keio, it seemed like we had entered crazy-town. Every shop/restaurant/business establishment pays someone to stand outside of it and scream in a high-pitched voice, and every other shop is a pachinko parlor (which must be legally required to have neon flashing lights and big-eyed anime characters outside of them). There was a truck driving around with a giant Pikachyu-like character painted on its side blaring some shrill music. And another truck with The Masked Avenger on the side of it (The Masked Avenger’s mask makes him look like a gigantic red-eyed insect). Its really disconcerting when, after leaving an insane pachinko parlor, the street outside of it is just as (if not more) crazy. After wandering around for a while, we finally got up the courage to get some dinner (in a place that was disappointingly normal). If you’ve ever watched any anime, Shinjuku is pretty much exactly what you expect Japan to be like.

After getting some sleep, they put us through two days of non-stop orientations – and in each one, they gave us another tote bag full of stuff to read. Despite their length, and the emphasis placed on their being mandatory, the orientations were surprisingly useless. The Japanese, it turns out, like to make a big stink of things with formal speeches that end up saying very little. It seemed like, every hour or so, there would be a new Japanese official giving us a fifteen-minute welcome speech (at night, though, these speeches had food waiting for us at the end – but don’t even touch the food until the speech has come to a complete stop). While the whole experience was new and exciting to everyone coming in (about a thousand of us), the Tokyo orientation is apparently exactly the same from year to year, with the only change being in the sentence “the JET program is in its Xth year” (this year it was 20). At each orientation/seminar, they would present a wide range of possibilities of what your life would be like in Japan, and say that they couldn’t be more specific because every situation was different (depending on what prefecture, town, board of education, etc).

So, during the prefectural orientation, I expected my questions to actually be answered – no, no, no…. The whole thing was big catch twenty-two. They gave us a Yamanashi train schedule (a huge fold-out schedule) written entirely in Japanese. This, they said, would help us get around. I could read the times all right, but if you don’t know where the train is leaving from, where its going, what the stops are along the way, and what train station is closest to your house (or how to get there), how are you supposed to get around? To top it off, I had thought that we would be going from Tokyo to Kofu, the capital of Yamanashi, for a more specific orientation, but it turns out we don’t have local orientation for another two weeks. At the local orientation, they are going to tell us about how to travel around Yamanashi (and other places), how to maintain our apartments, and how to get internet. That’s all well and good, but if you can’t read the train schedule, how are you supposed to get to the orientation? And once (if) you figure that out, what’s the point of telling you had to travel around? And if you’ve been living in your apartment for two weeks, you’ve probably had to figure out how to use the appliances, right? Why tell you two weeks later? And of course you could figure all these things out if you had internet (train schedules for all of Japan are written in English on the internet), but they don’t tell you how to get that until local orientation.

On the first full day, they packed us into a large multipurpose room and sat us according to prefecture. Its weird, I had already made friends at Tokyo orientation (mostly people that came in with me from New York), so I hadn’t quite accepted that these new people I was sitting with would be the ones that I would almost exclusively be hanging out with (my other friends would be far, far away – scattered across the country). It’s a good thing that they’re a cool bunch. I met someone from UPenn (its nice to be able to commiserate with someone over not being able to get a cheesestake), and there was even someone from Northwestern (who I had never met, of course). She introduced me to a bunch of other Northwestern people who were at the Tokyo orientation (but not going to Yamanashi). Apparently there are NU people scattered all over Japan. Go fig.

On Tuesday night, all the Yamanashi people went out to a restaurant in Tokyo. There were even some second and third years who came to greet and hang out with us. After dinner, we went to karaoke. I figured I’d give it another try – “when in Rome” right? It still sucks.