The disadvantages of teaching in Japan
“My first two years in Japan were spent teaching English… The students… studied English- or should I say, English was taught in their presence. Nothing ever seemed to sink in. Years of classes and endless tests and still they couldn’t master the intricacies of a simple ‘How are you?’ When I tried to have the most elemental of English conversations with them they looked at me with blank expressions, shrugged their shoulders, and said ‘Wakaranai’ (‘Huh?’) They did this, I believe, just to annoy me. Don’t get me wrong, these teenagers were polite and studious and well-mannered, but they were still teenagers, and teenagers are pretty well insufferable anywhere you go on this planet.” From “Hokkaido Highway Blues”, possibly the funniest book about Japan that actually teaches you something (the funniest in a guilty pleasure kind of way being Dave Barry Does Japan) pg 7. More quotes from this book on my much neglected blog QuoteJapan here.
Other disadvantages:
- The belief that there is nothing (mixed levels, lack of a teacher’s book, lack of experience etc etc) that you can’t overcome with a gambarimasu can-do spirit
- Incredibly tired business students who really should be having a nap instead of coming to class
- The chances that the economy will slowly fade away leaving your yen worth nothing if you stay here too long
- The difficulty of investing that yen in a way to make them worth the effort even if the economy doesn’t shrivel up like the aging population’s skin
- Prejudice against mixed race kids
- Too many interesting books about Japan meaning your ETP magazines and linguistics books get dusty in a corner
- Split shifts and Saturdays (although that’s certainly not just Japan)
- Loads of potential cultural banana skins in the classroom and out (although you’ll probably be forgiven all of them)
- Being asked very personal questions
- Being asked the same bizarre questions like “Can you eat Japanese food?” and “Do they have four seasons in your country?” over and over
- The occasional student who takes two minutes of silence before each two word reply
- Some very dirty schools and kindergartens (because the staff are supposed to clean up but are overworked and there is no full-time cleaner). Very unexpected that one!
- Students who just want to chat but have nothing to talk about
- Replies to “How was your weekend?” usually being “I slept”, “I cleaned my room”, “Nothing special” or just a cringe
- Being far behind the rest of the world in terms of getting hold of the latest materials
- Some terrible locally produced materials, especially the self-study stuff in Japanese your students might be using, including stuff from NHK (“the BBC of Japan” my arse!)
- Some long and crowded travel (although your shift times might cut down on that)
- Some tiny classrooms
- Getting very sweaty in the summer before you even reach your front door
- Having to teach the phonemic script, how to do pairwork, classroom language, grammar terminology in English etc etc from scratch with each new student
- Some awful teaching your students have gone through from both native speaker and Japanese teachers, although that can make you feel like the total professional with very little effort…
- A lack of clear career paths (although again that is not exclusive to TEFL in Japan)
- A lack of CELTA and DELTA or equivalent teacher training jobs
- A lack of FCE, IELTS etc spoken examiner work
- The number of TOEIC classes, but I guess if you can make that exam interesting you will never have any fears teaching BEC…
- JALT being a bit elitist (but then there is ETJ for the rest of us)
- Japanese being tricky (but interesting)
- Never being able to admit that you are an Eikaiwa teacher at parties
- The substantial chances of another school chain or two collapsing like Nova
- University jobs being hard to get and with continuously reduced working conditions
- 30 classroom hours being a standard Eikaiwa week
- A lot of the workshops being aimed at Japanese primary school teachers with no knowledge of English teaching at all
- The British Council shrinking, closing down branches and closing down the library (also not just Japan)
- A particularly unpleasant Dave’s ESL Cafe forum
- Lots of low level students
- Some very restrictive school policies of things such as sensible use of L1 (although in other ways you are left on your own if you never get student complaints)
- Managers and the people who write the school rules getting used to 23 year old idiots and so treating everyone that way
As is usual when you get to let out your frustrations on the keyboard, this list of disadvantages is substantially longer than the list of benefits I wrote a week or so ago, but that should not be taken to mean that I wouldn’t recommend teaching in Japan. For me, it’s worked out well and I think I manage at least a year or two more before I need a substantial change.
June 9th, 2008 at 12:53 am
Are there any pleasant Dave’s ESL cafe forums?
May 24th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
No there’s no pleasant forums here because unfortunately there’s nothing pleasant and positive to say about the sad, declining and humiliating eikaiwa (monkey entertaining) industry in Japan.
May 25th, 2009 at 5:02 am
Huh?
PS
For someone who has apparently moved onto better things, you do seem awfully bitter
July 8th, 2009 at 5:15 am
I identify 100% with what he says and can add more.
Definitely time to move on…or do you actually like living in a shoebox and paying 30 % in tax and insurance?
July 8th, 2009 at 9:52 am
Ahem, check the tagline in the top right corner of the page…
July 16th, 2009 at 3:53 am
i mean anyone still in Japan-reality check time. How’s Korea? I heard they are ultra nationalists and sometimes even physically assault teachers/foreigners. There are a lot of blacklisted Hagwon on the net. Doing a random web search yields things like “Dont teach in Korea” “Korea is number one” (their answer to everything? Sounds like Kim Jong Il would approve…)
July 16th, 2009 at 4:45 am
Do you have anything positive, amusing and/ or interesting to say?
August 9th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Other disadvantages include: teaching kids who crap their pants in your lessons and spills it over the carpet, then you gotta clean it up.
- teaching kids who vomit from crying so much.
- getting no regulare employee fringe benefits like annual pay raises.
- Always listening to co-workers complain about how crappy, stingy and cheap their eikaiwa company is.
- Being laughed at when you say you work for a company like “Brad’s Poopy KIds Pit club”.
- Being laughed at when you say you are an English Teacher when in fact everyone knows you are actually a gaijin clown in disguise providing fun entertainment for gullible paying customers.
- Embarrassed that all your co-teachers have the worst English spelling and grammar and you can’t believe that customers are paying for this low quality teacher.
- You spend/waste 5-10 years of your life in a job with the same annual salary and with no transferable skills. You wake up one day and ask “what the hell have I done in the last 5 years to professionally develop myself?” – Nothing.
- Being poor
– Getting no respect in Japan.
August 9th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
“Brad’s Poopy KIds Pit club”.
Laughed out loud at that.
Could be worse. Wages in Thailand are if anything lower than when I was there in 96, and they haven’t had deflation to blame it on.
If you haven’t done anything to professionally develop yourself, you only have yourself to blame. I worked as a teacher for an apparently notorious Eikaiwa for 5 years and it certainly didn’t stop me from writing and publishing materialsl, using and reviewing new materials etc.
August 10th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Alex, great for you. Yes I agree with you have to do something, anything in your own time to energize your brain and stop yourself from losing brain cells. Even if it’s a simple thing like studying Japanese or writing materials…. instead of wasting your money and life away on J-girls, izakayas, drinking and whining/boasting to everyone about working at Brad’s Poopy Kids Pit Club…. I’ve seen this too often as well as the superstar foreigner (complete ugly losers back home) who treats their time in Japan as one big vacation and get eventually get trapped in it.
August 27th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
From my experience some disadvantages include:
* talking to students with the foulest and most unbearable dragon breath in the world
* getting frequent colds and flus from the students
* being micromananged by unprofessional and uncaring managers
* being in an industry that has no real career or long term future
* being treated like a number
* feeling like a complete loser everytime you turn up to teacher meetings and wishing you could be doing something else as a career
* working in an industry that has no real care and passion for people’s education, only worried about profits and sales numbers
*
January 6th, 2010 at 11:56 pm
LOL!!! You make me laugh kiddo. These are not disadvantages. It’s what one would expect going to a foreign country and into teaching.
Do you have any actual disadvantages?
June 9th, 2011 at 5:12 pm
I traveled to Japan 4 years ago and I think it’s a nice place. This time, I got a contract offered to me to teach in Japan. I signed it and I sent it there. I am expecting to hear from them to keep me updated.
I am being hired by a staffing company in Japan, but the school where they will send me to work will be a public school in Sano City, Togichi Prefecture, Japan. (2 hours train ride north of Tokyo).
The bad things I am reading about teaching English in Japan only relates to teaching in the ESL companies, not public schools. I don’t know what it will be like to teach in a Japanese public school like Korea and Taiwan where I worked. All I know is that most students in Japan are at low level English so the language learning must be broken down for them to grasp the language as easy as possible.
June 10th, 2011 at 11:25 pm
All, I’ll say is that while this is true in many instances, I’d still take Japan over Korea as a place to teach. The nightmare that place is! So many charlatans!
September 15th, 2011 at 8:01 am
Jon said above “talking to students with the foulest and most unbearable dragon breath in the world”. Yes, it happened from time to time. It matters because we teach oral education and maximize student talking time. Listerine, Clorets and similar companies are just starting to tap into this huge potential market for oral hygiene.
Can anyone offer a comparison with other places in the world they worked? China seemed to have comparative levels of dragon breath (no pun intended). One Chinese student said to me in 2007 “Here in China no one cares about that” to which I most certainly agreed.
September 18th, 2011 at 12:12 am
Total loser job
September 28th, 2011 at 12:05 pm
I just have to jump in here. I have taught ESL on three different continents since retiring as a certified music teacher, and certified pilot/flight instructor. I have enjoyed 90% of my students, but I have seen the absolute worst management possible (women). The anti-American sentiment from other teachers is another factor that currently keeps me out of the ESL game. I would love to get a CELTA, but the experience from my TEFL made me loose interest in teaching for a while. I had never seen such terrible teacher trainers in my life, and I have had lots of instructors. So, good luck to you who continue to wade through the muck of ESL teaching. It is a nasty business, full of incompetents. I love teaching and have outstanding references from my schools, but I always feel like I am surrounded by idiots. What will you be doing in five years? My advice: Get out while you are young enough to do something else.