A Resigning Couple

June 2002
written by Kumanoki

I'm not a JET. But my wife is.

I can thank her for our being here in Japan in the first place. Unfortunately, though, she isn't going to be a JET much longer, a fact fascilitated mostly by her supervisor. Here's the deal:

We came to Japan with stars in our eyes, just like everyone else. When they told us at the Tokyo seminar that every situation is different, my wife and I took it in stride. Hey, we thought, we're here! We're doing the Japan thing! How bad could it be? We found out as soon as we arrived in our prefecture.

We had requested a specific city because it was the sister-city to our own hometown. We were told not to expect anything, and when we didn't get placed there, it wasn't such a shock. We were actually only a few towns away, and could get there in about thirty minutes. No sweat.

The real shock came when my wife and I were coming back from the capital city in her supervisor's van. She asked, "When can I see the shogakos I'll be working at?" He replied, "Oh, you don't work in the schools. You'll work in the prefectural education center. You will only go to shogako once a week." Every situation is different, but this was a shock. My wife had been told from the very beginning that she would be teaching. Up until that very moment we both assumed that is what she'd be doing for the next year.

Nope. In fact, her job consisted of activities that a first year JET should never have to do. She was to prepare presentations for the other JETS in the prefecture on how to teach in their schools. Let me repeat that: She was supposed to prepare presentations.....on how to teach.....in school. The paradox of her duties left her feeling confused and a little frustrated. How do you tell your peers how to do a job that you've never done before?

The workload was almost nil, as well. My wife had to learn how to organize her time in order to 'look busy'. Otherwise, she would zip through her reports or presentation materials and be left with nothing to do except chat on the internet.

One small relief from the office was a weekly visit to a shogako. Once or twice a week, she would go there instead of the office. This afforded her a little more opportunity to know what teaching was really all about, and it turned into the highlight of her week. After all, this is what she really came to do, in the first place, not be a OL.

One of the most shocking things about her new work environment was the fact that it was ridiculously strict. Her supervisor informed her that she was only to talk to him, except when saying hello or goodbye, and that they were to eat lunch together. Apparently it would 'look bad' if she ate lunch with anyone else in the department. Including me. We weren't even allowed to hold hands of kiss each other goodbye in the mornings, because "someone in the department felt uncomfortable."

As a young recently-married couple living in a foreign country, my wife and I needed quite a bit of help getting our lives together those first few months. Her supervisor was quite helpful to begin with, taking us to the department store, the bank, and the post office whenever we needed to go. However, he tired quickly of our needs. Our second month there he said that he wouldn't help us anymore; we should do things for ourselves. Well, for people without a car in a suburban area, we were shit outta luck. Thus began our problems with her supervisor.

Aside from shirking his contracted duties, he was quite genki...especially when I was also invited along for a lunch or two. I think he took a liking to me, but he displayed it in crude jokes and off-hand comments that not even the rudest of gaijin would make. Especially not in front of someone's wife. Especially not to the husband of your employee.

About six months into our experience, (having purchased a car with my salary, funrnished a bare apartment, and made ourselves relatively comfortable) her supervisor went ballistic one day. He took my wife aside in the office and berated her about her performance, saying things like, "No one in the office likes you. They all think you are rude and anti-social. And all of the teachers at your shogako told me you are a bad teacher and that's why you are being moved to a different school." I've never seen my wife cry that much in our eight years together. She was literally taken apart by her supervisor.

Well, after talking about it with our close network of friends, teachers, and co-workers, we determined that her supervisor was lying to her, and said those vitriolic things to exert some type of control over her. It bacame obvious when examining his behavior that everything he'd ever said or done was to exert control over her. He would say things to her like, "You are lucky that I take the time to eat lunch with you every day." My wife was his own personal gaijin, and it didn't seem like there was anything to do about it. My wife was beginning to hate her job.

We both plotted out courses of action. She would talk to the area coordinator to see if maybe she could get a transfer or something. I would do my best to try not to murder her supervisor over our sporadic lunch dates. She found out that the transfer deadline was way back in November, and there was nowhere to transfer to, anyway, her office being the prefectural education center, and not just a local office. So we were stuck. JET doesn't allow for transfers based on conflict of personality. (Is asshole a personality trait?) The area coordinator said the best he could possibly do was try to get her out of the office more, and into schools during the week. That never came to fruition.

So my wife tendered her resignation, telling her supervisor the reason she was leaving was because of my work. She told the real reason for her departure to the department head. Maybe something will come of it. Perhaps the fact that the prefectural education center lost an ALT will go unnoticed....but when the next one leaves because of the same supervisor, hopefully someone will take notice.

So my wife will soon be an ex-JET. We love Japan, and we plan to stay and work here for at least another year or two. It's just a shame that one asshole supervisor could so drastically affect my wife's job, our happiness, our life together in Japan. I hope that the JET Programme will take measures to prevent the type of mental abuse and misuse of ALT's in the future.

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