JET 2011 Farewell Dinner

The Japanese Embassy held its farewell dinner for this year’s JET participants. There are 25 ALTs and 1 CIR this year, and I was back there in the same room as three years ago in the Japanese Association – but as a member of the alumni.

It was surreal to be recognised by some of the new JETs as “the person with the blog” – but it was great to know that my blog on my time in Japan has been useful. Today was also definitely the closest I’ll ever come to feeling like an ‘internet celebrity’, and I have to admit that it never crossed my mind that I’ll one day meet some of the visitors to the blog in person. One said that she recalled me blogging that it’s difficult to find good and cheap shoes in Japan*, while another found my blog “objective”** as it didn’t present an all rosy and wonderful picture of Japan/JET. 

Like it was for my batch, there were quite a few JETs this year who will be going up to the same prefecture as another Singaporean – some are even in the same city. Once again, there are few fresh graduates among the participants (I’ll hazard that it’s again about 20% fresh grads) and quite a number of ex-teachers.

My memory is horrible, but I still recall bits of this bus ride out of Sagisu into Umeda. I love this picture because of all the movement in it.

It also only occurred to me today that I probably benefitted more from hanging out with the other (largely) Caucasian Osaka city JETs when in Japan than if I had interacted more with Japanese people.

Yes, I would probably have gone away having superb knowledge of Japan and command of the language, but our culture is a lot more similar to Japanese culture than it is to western culture - my initial culture shock came from the other JETs and not from Japan. My 2 Japanese studies modules and 5 Japanese language modules had also prepared me with adequate knowledge of Japanese culture, and we occupy this strange position between Japan and the west – what the other JETs found extremely bizarre I considered only mildly puzzling (if not at all!) and a result of simply being a different country. My English also improved***, and I think I gained more from learning about the practices, trends and customs from the 7 other countries the JETs hailed from than I would have from being with Japanese alone. Perhaps I’m actually trying to reassure myself that I didn’t miss out on too much, but I’m grateful for the breadth of experience that I’ve gained.

This was taken with the Osaka-city JETs (and some girlfriends of the year 2 JETs) less than a week after I arrived. For some reason – and I only just realised this - all the Asians/people of Asian descent are in the front row.

It was very interesting to be there. Somehow it felt like nothing had changed, although it’s been a whole three years since I last stood there and a world of experience in between. It’s not the first time I’ve felt that being back in Singapore – in the place where I’ve always been besides those two years in Japan (and four months in London) – has that effect on people: the effect of making everything else besides the here and now and all things Singaporean seem far away like a dream.

Bon voyage, 2011 JET participants! May you have a fulfilling and fruitful JET experience :)

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*: I’d forgotten all about shoes. The reason being that the season for shoes – rather than boots – isn’t long, and since I was wearing indoor shoes most of the time I eventually didn’t get too concerned about outdoor footwear.

**: “Objective” being a diplomatic turn of phrase, she admitted. Not surprising, given that parts of my time on JET were difficult to get through and blogging was a form of expression and release!

***: I also discovered little things like the fact that ‘pail’ is considered an old-fashioned word in the UK and people say ‘bucket’ instead. By the way, the reaction I evoked by saying ‘pail’ was fairly large – for starters, the person had no idea what the hell I was referring to. The elaboration of “a thing you use to collect and store water” helped a little.