I don’t do a very good job of hiding the fact that I hate my job. In fact, I have three jobs, but only one of them pays me and, consequently, enables me to live in Japan by sponsoring a visa.
I have been teaching at a private English school in Osaka for several months now, and since day one I have been profoundly ungrateful and treated it like a massive burden. It’s true that teaching conversational English takes a lot more out of me than it does most people – I don’t feel comfortable talking. It’s one of the many reasons I first ended up in a mime class two years ago. And once I began learning the powerful expressive potential of the body, it made the prospect of purely verbal conversation more and more dreadful.
Another reason I haven’t appreciated this job is that it is, frankly, a means to an end. I wanted to stay in Japan to work with two of the people I love most in the world, and I was prepared to do literally anything to make that happen. But doing something as a means to an end has always grated on me, and it’s hard to overcome the thought that anything not mime-related is a waste of time.
Then, for two months, Japan was on lockdown and I didn’t have to go the English school. In a truly stunning gesture of generosity, the CEO continued paying us, but we stayed home for the duration of Japan’s state of emergency. And those two months were the most liberated time of my recent life. I could still do mime-related work, and I had masses of time to read, to watch movies, to garden, to cultivate a slow and intentional life.
And so one would think that going back to work at the English school would be doubly painful after such an idyllic period. And yeah, the week before, I was seriously in a funk. But I started thinking more about what I’m getting in exchange for sacrificing 30 hours a week to a job I don’t like.
30 hours is a lot. In terms of energy, 30 hours of talking to people is really, really taxing for me. But that leaves massive chunks of time that I can be in the studio, either helping build the dang thing or studying mime. I work two long days a week, but the rest of the time I am doing what I love. And if it weren’t for this job, I couldn’t have that. I’m not even going to try to talk about what mime means to me, or why doing it with these particular people is so important, because that story is very, very long. But suffice it to say, to borrow a popular phrase in this strange country, “No mime, no life.”
It is a huge privilege to be allowed to do the thing you love most in the world. God knows the odds are against us all when it comes to pursuing a passion. To have a job that allows for flexible hours, that lets me teach whatever the hell I want, that pays enough for me to live in a beautiful house, that verifies to the government that I’m a gaijin worth keeping, is such a privilege.
Just being able to stay in Japan means so much. I doubt I’d really want to stay if it weren’t for the mimes, but there is a part of me that wonders how I’d live elsewhere at this point. I’ve spent my whole adult life in Asia, and it is, for better or for worse, what I’m used to. I don’t know how paying utilities works outside Japan. I don’t understand taxes, pension, how to go to the doctor, or how to look for a job elsewhere. I could learn, but I don’t want. I worked too hard to get here. And that, too, is a privilege – not everyone is allowed to move across borders so freely, and not everyone is allowed to stay in a country that is different from the one that issued their passport.
The pandemic has made me acutely aware of how much privilege I have, and how this teaching job has afforded me that privilege.
Even at work, however, I have learned to be more grateful. I am aware that I am not the ideal person to start conversations about racism in Japan. As a white American, there’s so much I can’t know, and I don’t want to take on a role where I try to teach people about something that has never negatively affected me.
However, I think silence is the far worse option, and so I’ve been teaching lessons almost exclusively on the worldwide protests. It’s extremely difficult to have any kind of nuanced conversation in a 50 minute period, and some people don’t come to English school to discuss deep issues, so it can be a bit of a risk depending on the student’s attitude.
But for the past two weeks, I have been so encouraged by the limited conversations I have been able to have. Mostly students don’t ask me questions because they want enough time to speak themselves, but with this topic many of them have asked me about my experience as an American, and how it is different from that of others because I’m white, about what we learn about racism in school, about foreign news coverage of the protests. And in return they have told me about discriminations they have experienced or witnessed in Japan – against women, against Korean and Chinese people. A lot of them, at the end of the lesson, have thanked me. I’m very sure it’s not because of any particular skill I have as a teacher, but rather because through these English lessons I’ve tried to create a space to talk about things they can’t or don’t talk about with their friends and family.
Not everyone has been that receptive, and there are times when a student says, “Japan is racially homogenous so we don’t have problems” and I’ve wanted to lash out, but I have been really surprised by the number of open and probing conversations I’ve been able to have.
I’m still thinking of ways I can teach this topic that acknowledges my own inherent complicity in a fucked up system and that also doesn’t sound super preachy and condescending. And when I’m feeling really fucked over about teaching English, I think about the whole industry as an essentially neo-colonizing enterprise that has no business existing.
But I have to admit that this job has made me feel like there is something I can do other than declaring myself an ally on social media and otherwise going about my life. Is it the best something? I don’t know. But it’s something I used to feel when I taught high school in Tokyo – sometimes, it takes one person to kind of kick open a door you didn’t even know existed to help change the way you think. And from that little step can proceed societal change.
And teaching these kinds of lessons has made me feel for the first time that teaching goes both ways – the more I talk about it, the better I can understand how much I don’t know, and from there I can try to learn more.
So it’s Friday night now, and I’ve had two days full of DIY, mime, plants, reading, and spending time with people I love. Tomorrow is an all-day shift, and yeah, I’m still dreading it a little. But I’m also looking at it as an opportunity – to plant little seeds of critical thinking, to make space for difficult discussions, and to grow my own understanding of the absolute shitstorm that we find ourselves in today. I’ll be relieved when it’s over and I’m back where I want to be, but I am feeling for the first time that the journey will not be such a bad one.
Presently Kate 