Job Discussion Forums

[abufletcher]

I'm wondering whether anyone has an experience with or knowledge of Gunma Prefectural Women's College. I'm just looking for general information like "it's fairly well known in the area" or "It has about X number of students." I'm also interesting in general info about what it's like to live in Gunma (at the moment I'm in Kagawa).

If you have heard negative things best to PM me.

[wangtesol]

This private college is very small, around 1000 students. It is for girls who weren't able to get into decent colleges since their grades were not up to snuff. So generally one can kind of imagine how little motivation there is to study English. A position is advertised here every year, so there is little job security in teaching there as well.

Tamamura is the name of the town the college is in. It is small and industrial and away from the mountains which are the draw for living in Gunma. So if you don't have a car you will miss the best part of Gunma. The winds (karakaze) come every evening at 5pm and in the winter they can blow all day and are bitter cold. There are few Westerners living here. Takasaki has a limited foreigner scence (mostly ALTs), but Tamamura is not on the train line to Takasaki. You would definately need a car.

On the other hand, there is a large population of migrant workers from Peru, Burma, Brazil and the Philipines in this area. Next to Nagoya, it has one of the highest non-Japanese populations in Japan. So, there is an interesting international feel. Some people in the area volunteer at the Maebashi International Association in support of foreign workers rights.

But the migrant worker presence is due to, in part, human traffickers and organized crime. There is a large Subaru factory nearby; it and associated factories illegally employ tens of thousands of foreign labourers through dispatch companies on work visas and trainee visas.

My friend's Japanese wife calls Gunma's capital city, Maebashi, "a dirty little yakuza town" due to it's disproportionately large red light district and foreign prostitutes. One local hotel in neighboring Isesaki is infamous for its sign "Japanese Only." You can find that at Debito's Rogue Gallery at www.debito.org. Yakuza are not an uncommon sight at local onsen and martial arts places. Perhaps they are in many places in Japan, but it did become a concern for my roommate when the Yakuza guy at his local judo budo wanted to make friends with him. Sorry, but it is true. This was in Maebashi.

In Tamamura conditions for non-Japanese school children is not great, so there is a separate school for Nikkei children. In nearby Ota, this school board was the first where the non-Japanese population broke away and created their own separate public school board and schools.

I talked to some instructors from this women's college about labor conditions in general. They were pretty clueless despite having lived in Japan for several years. There is no union there. The Gumna International Assocation people are not up on labor issues either. So if you do have a labor problem in Gunma, you are on your own.

Amongst officials in Gunma that I dealt with, there is a strong current of racism. And from long-term non-Japanese residents that I have talked to, there is a lot of frustration with racism. There are some great Japanese people in Gunma, but unfortunately they are not in positions of power.

If you just work and go to the bar and drink, sure a person can lead that unhealthy lifestyle. But if you want to lead a long-term healthy lifestyle, you cannot count on the Japanese institutions in Gunma to support you. It is a very isolated place. The Westerners at the Gunma Int'l Assoc. and the Takasaki City Hall are just young kids who are improving their Japanese language skills. They don't know labor law, and one cannot call them community advocates. I really despaired at the lack of resources and the feebleness of the resources there was for me in Gunma when I had a labor dispute.

There is a very serious lack of concern for migrant worker safety in Gunma whether one is from the USA or Burma. The dispatching company I worked for pulled the same car insurance trick with me, that dispatching companies pull with migrant factory workers: they told me in my contract that the car was fully insured (inin hoken), but actually there was only partial insurance (jibaiseki hoken). So, if I had been injured in a car accident, the insurance would not have covered my injuries. This is a common and deadly trick that dispatch companies play.

When I went to the Labor Standards Office in Gunma, the investigator was some what helpful. However, he mistook an expired car insurance certificate as my current one, and so when he called the insurance company and they told him they had no such record on file, he told me it was a forgery. Then when I told my Japanese colleagues about this, they were quite alarmed but not really surprised. It was shocked with the toleration of organized crime.

[abufletcher]

Well, that's a pretty uniformly discouraging portrait of Gunma. Sounds like it could be a whole different country than the one I live in here in Kagawa.

[Brooks]

Gumma is probably one of the most conservative prefectures in Japan.
Kagawa is not a bad place, and is only a boat ride away from Kobe.