Job Discussion Forums

[opala22]

Hi all,
This is my first time posting!
I'm a half Japanese, half Chinese native english speaker. I am moving to Tokyo in 3 weeks to teach, but am a bit paranoid about how I might be treated being that I appear to fit in, but don't! I do speak conversational Japanese, but for the most part I need to polish up my vocabulary. Has anyone on this board been in the same position? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Cheers,
emily

[Lowly Rollie]

Hi!

To start with, I should say that I'm not Asian, although I am Canadian. While I was in Japan, I worked at both Geos and Nova, and one of my friends (Korean-Canadian) also worked at Geos.

Her experience (and I heard a lot about it from her!) was that she was automatically assumed to be Japan-born Japanese. Which was pretty funny, since the Japanese students would often proudly tell all and sundry that they could tell the difference between Japanese/Korean, or Japanese/Chinese, or Japanese/any other oriental descent. So they'd look at her, and assume her to be native Japanese. Until she opened her mouth and started talking, and then they immediately knew that she wasn't.

Geos has Japanese teachers for the lower level students, so this would often cause a momentary problem the first time that students met her - they'd take one look, and assume that they'd been put in a low-level class with a Japanese teacher. She could see this written all over their faces, and so would immediately step up and introduce herself - and as I said, as soon as she started talking, they realized that she was a native English speaker, and everything was ok.

I also worked at Nova, and there were oriental native English speakers there, but the problem I mentioned above didn't occur, because Nova only hires native speakers.

As far as being outside the working environment goes, that's where my friend would start to get annoyed. We'd be out, a group of us, all teachers out drinking. When she first arrived, she, like most of us, spoke no Japanese at all. So we'd be out, and some more experienced teacher would speak to the wait-staff in Japanese, and the waiter/waitress would turn to her (my friend) for clarification/repetition of the request. Often asking for clarification or repetition in machine-gun-fire Japanese!

This happened a lot, and it always bugged her. She learned how to say that she wasn't Japanese pretty quickly. She also learned pretty quickly that just saying "wakarimasen" didn't always work, because it means both "I don't understand" as well as "I don't know." So when the wait-staff was asking for clarification, she thought her response was that she didn't ~understand~ the question from the server, but the server heard that she simply didn't ~know~ the answer to the question. Which, of course, would mean that the server would just start asking even more questions of her, none of which she understood......

You seem to have a definite advantage in that you speak Japanese! You'll at least be able to understand what's being said to you and be able to respond.

I think that once you tell anyone that you're an English teacher, they'll just put you into the same category with all other English teachers. Lacking first-hand experience, I don't know that I can give you any more infomation than that.

Hope it helps though!

[opala22]

Thanks for your response!
Good to hear that the reactions weren't unreasonable! Although I've visited Japan as a child, and heard plenty of wonderful things about the country and people, I was just a bit concerned that people might think that I was an idiot!
Thanks for your shared experience.
Emily