Being an ALT #18: What to Keep in Your Desk

Over time teaching I've accumulated a lot of stuff in my desk. Most of it is papers, textbook samples, student grades, past exams, articles and publications about English, and Japanese learning resources. But there are a few odds and ends around me that I probably didn't expect I'd use with such regularity before I got into the job.

Here are a few of the things that maybe not everyone associates with teaching or lesson planning, but which I now find essential or which have helped me out in tight situations:

Mug -- If you're a coffee or tea drinker it probably seems natural to have a mug handy, but I used to wonder why people always keep mugs around in office environments. Even though I still prefer water over coffee or tea, I can agree it's nice to have a cup of something at your desk after a day's worth of lectures and speaking activities. A nice hot cup soup in winter is a real brightener.

Sweat Rags -- Kind of gross, but you'll soon realise why most Japanese people carry litle flannels in their pockets. The combat the summer humidity and inevitable flood of sweat, purpose-made mini-towels with cute characters on will be very handy.

Hand Lotion -- In a normal week, I go through six or seven sticks of chalk. I try to stick to coated chalk to keep as much off my fingers as I can, but if you've done much blackboard writing you know that little smudges of it always somehow end up all over your hands anyway (and on your papers, your books, and your clothes). I keep a tube of hand lotion around to ward off that obnoxious dry finger feeling that accompanies continued chalk usage. This also combats the cracked skin of cold, dry winters.

Snacks -- An old coworker of mine used to use an entire drawer of her 3-drawer desk for the purpose of storing snacks, from cookies to potato chips. That's a bit extreme, if you ask me, but there's definite merit in having a pick-me-up ready after a hard class. When you're staying after to do lesson prep, a great choice to hold yourself over is a packet of powdered soup.

Uchiwa -- These, along with folding fans, are the traditional Japanese answer to summer's ovenlike classrooms, usually without air conditioning and occasionally without even electric fans. Along with cooling you down, they're useful for bopping (with utmost aggression and spite) your more rambunctious students over the head.

Wet Tissues -- This is another important summer item for me. The "facial paper" or "body paper" put out by brands like Gatsby and Adidas is really useful on summer mornings and after club or sports events. I actually keep these in my bag as well as my desk: They double as an antibacterial oshibori when you can't find a sink to wash your hands.

Headphones -- These depend on your workplace. In some schools, it's not a big deal for a teacher to listen to music while correcting quizzes or drudging through the monotony that is final exam multiple-choice-section corrections, as long as they don't do it overtly in front of students. These also come in handy when you're checking the content of bundled CDs or anything with audio output on your otherwise probably-always-muted PC.

Painkillers -- Not an everyday item for anyone's teaching, I hope, I keep these around for days on which classes or club are particularly brutal, or for when I start coming down with a cold, etc., during working hours.

Big Pile of Red Pens -- You'll end up taking your pen home in your pocket, removing it there, and forgetting it next day. You have been warned.

And of course various things to improvise games with - dice, chopsticks, stones, cards etc. We'll look at emergency resources some other time.

Have anything special you keep in your desk? Let us know in the comments below!

Being an ALT series: 

Part #1: Teaching English in Japan 

Part #2: Your Role

Part #3: A Typical Day

Part #4: Planning Classes 

Part #5: Getting Drunk on Duty (the Enkai) 

Part #6: 4 Japanese Teachers You May Have to Work With

Part #7: Physical Resources

Part #8: Making Activities

Part #9: Hopping Between Schools

Part #10: More School Hopping

Part #11: Getting Molested At School

Part #12: It Is Really This Easy?
Part #13: Brushing Your Teeth At School
Part #14: Demo Lessons

Maggie Sensei's Job Hunting Vocab

It's been a while since we wrote about job hunting here, although it always seems a continuing point of consternation for some number of our readers. If you're like me, anyway, when you're out of a job or nearing the end of a contract, finding a new job is always on the mind.

Recently I happened across another resource that you may find useful. Maggie Sensei's short, but helpful guide to Job Hunting in Japan comes from a blog whose humor is just a little bit over the top for me, but nonetheless its info is solid, and I'd sincerely like to see it more widely circulated. Maggie has put together an excellent guide to common terminology you'll encounter in the Japanese job-searching world, as well as resume examples and a compendium of questions you're likely to hear from traditional Japanese interviewers. Don't miss this page. In fact, don't miss the entire blog. It's a new site (about the same age as AccessJ, in fact) filled with quality, detailed lessons on a wide variety of Japanese language subjects.

Furthermore, remember to check out the resources we've put together here at AccessJ. On the most basic level, we've prepared Japanese resume (履歴書) forms that you can download, and some of our own lists of job hunting vocabulary, including detailed explanations on meaning and usage of the terms. Take a look also at our Job Spotlight series; many of the jobs in the posts are relisted annually, so if one appears to be in season, we think it's certainly worth checking out.

Any good resources of your own to share? Let us know about them in the comments!

English Language Newspapers

There are several Japanese papers available in English, although they are often supplemented with articles from other English-speaking countries' newspapers. Some are also aimed more at Japanese people practicing English than English readers. This blog will give an overview of the most popular print and eNewspapers available.

Maternity Leave in Japan

Worried about not being able to have kids with your "part-time" English teaching job? Well, I've got some news for you which I hope will make you as happy as it made me.


As long as your employer allows time off as maternity leave (paid or not), and you have the shakai hoken health insurance deal (many companies make you pay this by default, and JETs, BoE ALTs and some dispatch ALT employees will find themselves paying (a lot) for this every month) the government will pay you around 2/3rds of your daily salary for a period of up to 98 days. The schedule seems fixed to starting 42 days before the birth, and ending 56 days after. Not overly generous, but better than nothing.

If your company does pay for your maternity leave (though why would they when the government will do it for them?), then the government will only grant you payment if your company pays less than 2/3 of your regular wage (in other words, they will make sure you get 2/3rds of your wage as a minimum).

You can read more about the small-print on the (now defunct, but still accurate) Social Insurance Agency website:

How to Claim Your Benefit
To claim your benefit, you need to file the “Application for Maternity Allowance” (SHUSSAN TEATEKIN SHIKYU SHINSEISHO) to the Social Insurance Office (including one in a Social Insurance Bureau). We need certification by your employer and comment by your doctor on the Application form. For your first application, you need to submit photocopy of evidence such as your “payroll book” (CHINGIN DAICHO) and “attendance book” (SHUKKINBO). The deadline to file the claim is determined for each benefit payable day. You need to file a claim within 2 years from the next day of the day for which your benefit is payable.

Being an ALT #10: More School Hopping

In the last installment of our Being an ALT series, we discussed how some ALT jobs cover more than one school and how hopping between schools can affect your experience as a teacher in Japan. This time we'll continue that discussion and look particularly at how an ALT's time is split between multiple schools and the ways that can increase or decrease your workload.

School Politics

If you are a shared resource between schools, you can bet that every one of your schools is out to get its fair share of your time. When you ask for time off from work at one school, you may be asked why you can't take a day off from the other school instead. On the other hand, if you manage things well, it will seem to any given school that you haven't asked for many days off at all.

At the beginning of each school year, determining annual calendars of what days you'll visit each school and trading or rescheduling days to make sure each school's total count stays equal are also part of the multi-school ALT adventure.

Finally, if you work at rivaling schools, you may find yourself having to choose between school festivals or enkai parties to attend, and you will be occasionally asked awkward questions by faculty about which school you think is better. (Perhaps an English teacher might even ask you this last question during a lesson, which you'll then get to handle, impromptu, in front of the students... ahem...)

Scheduling Loopholes

On the other side of schools fighting to make sure they each get you for their one-hundred-and-sixteen days per year (or whatever your number of days happens to be), being a multi-school ALT means you'll occasionally find yourself at the mercy of an unintended scheduling conflict. Your schools may have slightly different summer or winter holiday dates, or test days, or demo lesson days, or PTA conference days. This can work out in your favor with an extra few days of summer vacation, or it could work in the other direction, such as two English demo lessons in the same week or paying for two enkais instead of one.

Planning Classes

If your JTEs are well-organized, they'll be able to tell you a week in advance what classes you're going to be teaching and at what point the students will be in their studies. But, not all JTEs are on the ball with this. You may not know in advance what you will be doing next time you come to a certain school. This can manifest as a rushed Monday morning in which you are told last minute what you'll be doing in the day's first class. When you don't have all your materials with you (see next point), it can be a real mental strain.

Doubled Materials

Another tough part of the multi-school environment is maintaining your teaching materials. In short, if you want to have the materials you create available for you to teach with, you'll have to truck them around in your bag each day you change schools. Your desk may not feel like "your" desk, because it'll be inconvenient to store things in it, and if you commute by car your car may become a portable desk instead. If you commute by bicycle or public transportation, you may just have to lug around an obnoxiously heavy bag on your commute.

Along similar lines, if one school issues you a laptop, you probably won't be able to take that computer with you to use at other schools. Schools may quip about you bringing your own laptop into work. And very security-paranoid schools may even frown on your popping USB drives in and out of their computers. (But, honestly, that's a little extreme. If you explain openly that it's the only reasonable way to keep your materials together across workplaces, it should work out all right.)

On the plus side, you'll be able to get twice as much mileage out of any material you create: Multiple schools means more chances to do lessons with students of the same grade level. This means you can reuse materials you've already prepared and develop your ideas and lesson delivery through repetition. Repeating the same lesson twice (or more!) is one of the best ways to hone your in-class explanations and become a better teacher. A lot of the bullet points here have been negative, but to be honest, this point alone makes teaching at multiple schools worth the hassle!

So in summary, don't let the negative aspects of a multi-school job put you off. As an ALT you'll have all the same opportunity to get involved (just show your teachers that you want to be!), and the broader experience you gain from working with different sets of students and coworkers more than makes up for the smaller annoyances. Take our points here as warnings you can use to prepare yourself for the job, rather than letting them stress you out when you find them out alone. Enjoy your new job!

Being an ALT series: 

Part #1: Teaching English in Japan 

Part #2: Your Role

Part #3: A Typical Day

Part #4: Planning Classes 

Part #5: Getting Drunk on Duty (the Enkai) 

Part #6: 4 Japanese Teachers You May Have to Work With

Part #7: Physical Resources

Part #8: Making Activities

Part #9: Hopping Between Schools

Part #10: More School Hopping

Part #11: Getting Molested At School

Part #12: It Is Really This Easy?

Part #13: Brushing Your Teeth At School

Being an ALT #9: Hopping Between Schools

In some ALT positions, you will teach at not just one school, but instead rotate through a set of assigned schools. This is especially common among junior high school and elementary school ALTs, but even high school ALTs may find themselves covering a few small, rural high schools or trucking out to a special needs school once every couple weeks.

This game of musical workplaces can be good or bad, depending on your preferences. Over our next two Being an ALT posts, we'll discuss some of the pros and cons of this arrangement. First, we'll look at some of the interpersonal impacts of having more schools to visit, and next time we'll consider scheduling issues it might provoke. If you're considering a move to a multi-school job, we hope these posts will provide you some food for thought.



A More Diverse Experience
First off, with multiple schools, you'll encounter a much wider variety of students and teachers. Every class of students has its own personality, and every school has a personality, too. Some schools are the pride and joy of their community. Other schools are out in the slums (or as close as you can get in Japan), and student behavior will reflect this fact. Lunch and cleaning time routines vary from school to school, as do teacher meetings and the way ALTs are employed. You may be a human tape recorder at one school but be given free reign over most lessons at another.

More Coworkers
More faces means more Japanese names to remember, and moving around between schools also means it will take a little longer for coworkers at any given school to warm up to you. However, as a team-teaching ALT, more coworkers means more people for you to try working with and a greater chance to meet teachers with whom you really jive in the classroom.


Perpetual Visitor
A common complaint about the ALT job is that you never really fit in as part of the team. It's easy to feel like an outsider or a special exception in this world. The intensity of that feeling depends on you and your specific situation, but if you're sensitive to that kind of thing, be aware that a multi-school ALT job can exacerbate or prolong the feeling. It will take longer to build relationships with your students and coworkers if you only see them for part of each week, and jumping between schools makes it easier to be "forgotten."

Being Forgotten
This is standard new-ALT rigamarole, especially if you don't speak Japanese (but even if you do!). A lot of information that circulates the school will fail to come across your desk. Maybe it slipped the English teacher's mind to let you know, maybe they didn't make enough copies of an announcement to put one on your desk, maybe they didn't think you'd be interested, or maybe it's something they've decided you don't need to know.

Serious things, like a student stealing a teacher's wallet, school property being vandalized over the weekend, a teacher's loss of a relative, or a student running away from home, tend to get swept out of the ALT's field of vision, intentionally or otherwise. These probably won't be explained in English to you.

But, other daily information that you really do need might not reach your ears, either. The daily schedule might have been shifted by ten minutes in one direction, or maybe lunch comes an hour earlier than usual. This kind of information is usually circulated in the daily schedule or on the chalkboard in the staff room, but it's going to be in Japanese.

This and other things, like not hearing about the annual staff photo until the morning of, can leave ALTs feeling pretty cynical or impotent in the workplace.

Of course, one of the biggest issues with multi-school ALT jobs is how the schools divide your time. Next week we'll look at how schools deal with sharing an ALT and how it'll increase (or sometimes decrease!) your workload. Stay tuned, and as always, if you have any experiences to share, please comment below!

Being an ALT series: 

Part #1: Teaching English in Japan 

Part #2: Your Role

Part #3: A Typical Day

Part #4: Planning Classes 

Part #5: Getting Drunk on Duty (the Enkai) 

Part #6: 4 Japanese Teachers You May Have to Work With

Part #7: Physical Resources

Part #8: Making Activities

Part #9: Hopping Between Schools

Part #10: More School Hopping

Part #11: Getting Molested At School

Part #12: It Is Really This Easy?

Part #13: Brushing Your Teeth At School

Japanese Ability to be Linked to Visa Extensions?

This article is a bit dated, but I only stumbled across it fairly recently: In May of 2008, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs hinted in a press conference that it would like to start taking Japanese language ability into consideration when issuing visas to or renewing landing permissions for foreign residents.

(A Youtube video of the press conference is also available; there's no particular variation between it and the written record, but of additional interest on Youtube are the scathing comments in Japanese about former Minister of Foreign Affairs Masahiko Komura and his "antinational" proposals.) 

Of course, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs tends to say a lot of things, and some number of its proposals don't actually make it through Japan's legislative bureaucracy and into effect. However, last year you may have noticed on TV or elsewhere news reports of the first 5-year landing permissions being granted to foreign residents in Japan. (Until that time, landing permissions were typically limited to 1- or 3-year durations.) This is all part of a major rollout of immigration policy change decided upon in the 2009 Partial Amendment to the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act.

As a recap: The old 1-year and 3-year periods continue to exist, but individuals deemed by the Immigration Bureau to have desirable qualities (such as stable work history or skills in need) may be eligible to receive a 5-year landing permission upon entering the country or to upgrade to a 5-year status on their next extension.

Anyway, NHK gave some coverage of this last year as the first 5-year extensions began to be issued. What I hadn't garnered from the news reports, but which was apparently hinted at in the 2008 press conference above, is that period of stay decisions could also be influenced by Japanese ability of the applicant.

In the press conference, the Ministry was careful to point out that any change would be a loosening of restrictions: Individuals who were previously eligible for 3-year stays will not lose their ability to get another 3-year extension because they can't speak any Japanese. However, individuals who were approved for a 1-year landing permission last time might get a boost to 3- or 5-years on extension if they have high-level Japanese skills.

At the time of the press conference, it was unclear how the Ministry intended to evaluate individuals' abilities when making their extension decisions. And since the statement 3 years ago, there has hardly been a word on the matter, or at least nothing ready to be found on Google. But, I'm dying to know more about how this went down and whether the Ministry is really still planning to base (or actually making) extension decisions on applicants' Japanese ability.

So, is this still simmering away on the Ministry's back burner? Will future applications include some kind of Japanese test or option to submit some kind of certification to be considered along with the application? If you know any more about this, please share in the comments below!

Job Spotlight: High School ALT Spots Across Nagano Ken

For the last two years, the Nagano Board of Education has listed direct hire ALT positions at high schools across the prefecture. These are cream-of-the-crop jobs, on par with the JET Program in terms of salary and support.

The jobs were first created as Nagano began to pull away from the JET Program, and they are often occupied by 5-year JETs who weren't quite ready to go home. But, the positions are open for anyone to apply.

However, because the package is nice and there is no shortage of applicants each year, the qualifications are steep. For starters, you need to be in Japan and have a valid landing permission for work.


Job Title: 外国語指導助手 (Assistant Language Teacher)
Type: 12-month contract employee, renewable
Qualifications: Living in or near Nagano prefecture, English teaching experience, valid work "visa" (landing permission)
Working Hours: Same as JET (Approximately 8 to 9 hours per day, Monday to Friday)
Remuneration: Monthly, 300,000 yen
Insurance: Yes, Japanese national insurance deducted from salary

To apply, you'll need a Japanese and English resume, a 1-page essay, and results of a health check.

The contract period is also unusual and deserves mention: The job runs from August to July, on the same timeline as JETs. Nagano appears to be keen on retaining experienced ALTs in their high schools, so contract renewal seems likely here.

The site to watch is the ALT Hiring Page of the Nagano Board of Education website. In previous years, the notice has been posted late in April, and the deadline for applications is in mid-May.

Job Spotlight: www.top-us.com

TOP is a recruitment consultant that specializes in Japanese-English bilingual job positions with (usually large) Japanese firms. They advertise positions both within Japan and across the U.S., and they have branches in Tokyo as well as 5 major U.S. cities. Their listings also include some English- or Japanese-language-only jobs.



If you are looking for a job where you can use your Japanese skills, and particularly a job outside of the English teaching industry, TOP is a good place to start. (In regards to Japanese skill, expect to need at least JLPT-2/N-2 to be considered for bilingual spots. An equivalent or higher BJT score is better.) You can search and inquire about job listings through their website, but if possible, I would recommend contacting them by phone or arranging a visit to their office. Recruiting agencies need to get a full picture of who you are and your available skillset in order to pair you with jobs where you are likely to pass the initial screening and proceed to interviews.

I am a big fan of recruiting agencies and the services they provide to job-seekers. Agencies take a cut whenever they match an applicant to a job opening; that cut is paid by the hiring company, not the applicant. So, use of an agency is free for the job-seeker. (If you encounter a recruiting agency that doesn't offer you its services for free, something's up. It might be better to look elsewhere.) You need only invest time to speak with the agency and demonstrate your eagerness to find a new job. Have a good handle on your strengths and weaknesses and fields of interest.

A good agent will not only introduce jobs to you but guide you through the application process, offering you opinions on how to strengthen your resume and coaching you on how to handle interview questions. I found this kind of help indispensable in my own search.

And, the caliber of jobs you can apply for through an agency is, in my opinion, usually greater than that of jobs you can find on your own. Big name companies often entrust their initial applicant search to recruiting agencies; this makes it the agency's job to weed out inappropriate applicants, saving the company time. Because of this, some of the highest quality openings may only be advertised through the safe annals of an agency, meaning people only looking in newspapers and online miss out on them.
By the way, the listings on an agency's website often don't cover all the positions the agency has to fill. This is, again, why I recommend calling an office or asking them if you can visit in person. By just having a conversation with an agent, he or she may remember some other open position that could work for you.

Finally, TOP specifically is an interesting find because of their offices outside of Japan. Even if you're in the U.S., their numbers and offices are available to introduce job-seekers to positions within Japan. TOP's listings are maintained in English, and the company appears just as interested in finding native-English speakers with fluent Japanese as they are in finding native-Japanese speakers with study abroad experience. If you are interested, be sure to check them out.

Job Spotlight: ALT Spot in Houfu City, Yamaguchi Prefecture

Last year around this time, Houfu City in Yamaguchi Prefecture advertised two direct-hire ALT positions with a competitive remuneration package.


If you're looking for specific figures about ALT working conditions, or if you're looking for a direct-hire gig around Yamaguchi to apply for, here's the lowdown and the link to watch over the next couple weeks:

These are the details from last year's posting.


Job Title: 外国語（英語）指導助手 (Assistant Language Teacher--English)
Type: 12-month contract employee
Qualifications: Native of an English-speaking country, etc. [sic], and meets one of the following requirements: 1) English teaching certificate, 2) Early childhood teaching certificate, 3) Experience teaching English
Working Hours: At longest, 9:00 - 15:35, Monday through Friday; open for discussion
Remuneration: Hourly, 4,000 yen
Insurance: No


The site you'll want to check on is the Houfu City Homepage. The site's news feed is in the top center of this page, and all past ALT hiring notifications (usually titled 外国語（英語）指導助手の募集について) have appeared in this feed. The link to old posts (以前の新着情報（履歴）一覧) is at the bottom-right of the feed box.

Being an ALT #5: Getting Drunk on Duty (The Enkai)

All the drunken work party antics you've seen in Japanese TV shows and movies are true. The enkai in Japan is a sacred event where work colleagues get completely hammered as a semi-compulsory part of the job.

On special days, like big sports-events or opening/closing-ceremonies at school, you'll be invited to join the majority of your co-workers for an enormous meal and massive piss-up. Also, when a colleague gets married, or occasionally when they have a child, win the lottery, etc., be prepared to give your liver a bashing.

It won't be cheap, but if you treat it right it will be the gift that keeps on giving. It can also be a quite surreal experience.

First, beware the price. At my school, we have enkais at the start and close of each term, on sports-day, on faculty sports-day, and on PTA day. Then there are other exclusive enkais, like Maths department enkais or second grade teacher enkais, which are sprinkled randomly throughout the year. The average cost of each of those is 5,000 to 6,000 yen. Smaller-scale ones might cost a bit less, and PTA enkais can be catered affairs on school grounds, bringing the cost down to around 2,000 yen.

The enkai itself includes lots of rambling speeches, each teacher trying to outshine the last with golf-clap-caliber humor. One speech, usually given by the vice principal (教頭先生) will kick off the party, and once people are drunk enough, a proper speech session for everyone will begin. Different people talk depending on the event, like retiring or transferring teachers at the end of the year and new teachers at the beginning of the year. Or, for example, school festival enkais incorporate as special guests the old teachers who transfered away last year. These speeches can go on for bloody ages. At the start of this school year, my school had 9 or 10 new teachers and the speeches in total went on for more than an hour. It wasn't too bad, because more food kept coming to the table during this time, but it was a bit awkward when the new and very drunk office boy could barely stay standing through his 10+ minute introduction (which he had decided to do standing on his chair).

The food will vary from workplace to workplace. At my school, organisers like to put things together the old-fashioned way, meaning a traditional Japanese, sit-on-the-floor banquet. These entail about six small dishes of various Japanesey things, like raw mushrooms in cold water, leaf tempura, koi sashimi, eighty-four types of tofu, and sixty-eight views of Mt. Fuji. Some of it is delicious, some edible, and some a gift for the guy next to you.

The drink is an unending stream of happiness, poured not by yourself, but by the person sitting next to you, or by the person crawling around the table with a bottle in hand pouring beer shots while bowing profusely. Beer is usually the only option (unless the high-roller principal has called for a bottle of the establishment's finest sake), and said beer is usually a lower-end brand name like the bowel-loosening Asahi Super-Dry or Kirin's best-effort rival brew. If a sake bottle shows up, Mr. Principal is probably going to call you over, being the token foreigner, and you'll end up drinking it even after promising yourself you wouldn't this time. Of course, getting wasted isn't obligatory. You can be an いい子 and drink oolong tea instead. This is where the tradition of filling other people's glass gets a bit silly: Having your beer topped up by excited co-workers is great, but being forced to glug down 2 litres of oolong tea an hour for three hours waterlogs anyone's stomach.

The aftermath of the enkai is you stumbling out of the building after mumbling your way through the school song (or company dance or whatever convey's your workplace's spirit) and the big banzai, only to discover it's still light outside and children are playing in the park.

And then... beware of the afterparty. This is where things and people can get messy. Usually teachers will divide into grade-groups and go to different izakayas around town where they will somehow find space for more food and a lot more alcohol. Treat these invitations with caution. After the afterparty, most of your male coworkers will go find a flowerbed to sleep in (the female coworkers will either be remarkably sober or have been asleep at the table for hours). You will go home to your totally sober girlfriend feeling like you've been hit by a train, but trying to retain your swauve debonaire persona.

And the worst part is that all more often than not happens on a weekday!

But anyway, it's all in good fun, and not going to an enkai you've been invited to is a faux pas. Miss a few, and feel the camaraderie you used to feel at work slip through your fingers.

For me, the most bizarre thing about school enkais is that I suddenly find myself sitting among dozens of new alcoholic friends who develop a passable ability to speak English. They'll talk happily all night about being my younger- or older-brother (whichever is least appropriate), how tall I am, and how massive my penis must be. Then after the party's over they'll never speak to me again until the next enkai. Are they ashamed? Can they not remember our solemn friendship pact unless they get drunk again? The whole thing is a mystery.


That's it!

Any reader-stories in the comments please.

See you again!

Being an ALT series: 

Part #1: Teaching English in Japan 

Part #2: Your Role

Part #3: A Typical Day

Part #4: Planning Classes 

Part #5: Getting Drunk on Duty (the Enkai) 

Part #6: 4 Japanese Teachers You May Have to Work With

Part #7: Physical Resources

Part #8: Making Activities

Part #9: Hopping Between Schools

Part #10: More School Hopping

Part #11: Getting Molested At School

Part #12: It Is Really This Easy?

Part #13: Brushing Your Teeth At School

Job Spotlight: How to Get a Gaijinpot Job

Although I think there are other, better resources available for job searching, the well-trodden sites of the Internet are still worth a look; they are often well designed and because of their popularity, new jobs appear on them almost every day.

Today we're going to take a look at Gaijinpot Jobs.

(But, this advice is just as effective at other big job-listing sites, too.)

Most readers have already heard of Gaijinpot Jobs, so I'll keep the site description short: You create a profile on the site, write and save resumes, browse jobs, and send resumes with cover letters. Most of the jobs listed on the site are ESL teaching gigs, from small local schools to corporate giants like Interac. And Gaijinpot's ability to store your resumes means you can apply for a load of jobs with very little effort.

And that right there is what I want to focus on.

Think about it: If you can save one resume and one cover letter and send those off to a dozen companies in five minutes, so can everyone else. So, if you want to get in for an interview, the name of the game at Gaijinpot is quality and speed. Read on...

There are a lot of jobs with similar requirements here (visa, native speaker, TEFL certificate, driver's license, pulse). And there's a glut of people on the site who all fit those same credentials. Within 24 hours of a new job listing at Gaijinpot, it's not uncommon for dozens or even hundreds of people to one-click submit their resume to that company.

Unfortunately, many of the employers aren't so picky. They need to get onto the interviewing phase ASAP and there isn't a lot of time to dredge through two hundred resumes. Instead of waiting around for every resume that comes in before the ad expires, usually they just look at the first resumes to arrive. Once five, or ten, or twenty people who meet the initial requirements are identified, the company proceeds to interviews with this group and ignores all further resume submissions.

(Unless, of course, all five or ten or twenty people interviewed turn out to be duds.)

The point is, there's a very short window of time for you to get your application in. It's much shorter than the actual run time of the ad. You are more likely to get a callback from a company if you can get your resume in fast.

In order to do this, it's best to skim the site itself every day, as you'll see new jobs the instant they've been listed. Next best is to sign up for the daily job e-mail that Gaijinpot offers. I say next best because actually everything in the daily e-mail is going to be about 24 hours old; it's a compilation of yesterday's newest listings. Anyway, check it in your inbox every morning, and immediately apply for any jobs that look interesting. If you wait until the weekend, consider your chance already gone.

But, speed isn't everything. Recruiters know that on sites like these, any doofus with an "Enter" key can instantly submit a resume and a generic cover letter he wrote six months ago.

This means you need to keep your resume up to date, and you need to target it. Gaijinpot's even built a system for you to save multiple versions of your resume, for Pete's sake. Use it! Don't send the same thing to every company. Pick and choose the skills you'll highlight according to the type of job you're applying for! If it's a teaching job, your introductory lines should be about your degree in education and your past experience. If it's for an IT job, talk about your programming language proficiencies and certifications.

Most importantly, for non-teaching jobs, get rid of the teaching related talk! Unless you've worded it to show how your teaching experience has prepared you for the job you're applying for, your statements about "great lesson plans" and "getting along with students" will leave recruiters rolling their eyes as they reach for the delete key.

And finally, in the same vein, you need to write a cover letter for every job you apply for. Generic cover letters are really obvious: "I'm a 27 year old graduate from America. I'm really interested in everything about Japan and I've lived here for three years. In school, I studied..."

This is a bad cover letter because it talks about you. But the company doesn't want to hear about you! You're already attaching a resume full of that information! Your cover letter should talk about the company and position you're applying for. Mention what you know about the field and the company. Use the company's name in the letter. Talk about an experience you've had in the past and why you think it prepared you for this job.

Armed with this mentality, your likelihood of a callback will skyrocket. So get out there, and start customizing your next application. :)

Job Spotlight: Shigaku.or.jp

For those of you who are interested in teaching English, but just want to escape the yearly-contract, no-bonus, no-pay-raise ALT quagmire, here's a site to keep an eye on.



Shigaku.or.jp maintains a daily updated page of private school positions up for grabs around the nation. The job advertisements are for teachers of all subjects, but many English teaching positions are advertised in each update,  and among them are listings (usually one every few weeks) for which only a native speaker is wanted.

Because the schools are private, some rules about teaching certification can be bent: A well-written resume and application coming from a foreigner will draw interest, and if you impress a school during an interview, you can bet they will find a way to hire you.

I highly recommend this site, as the positions are at prestigious, competitive schools, but they often go unadvertised among most of the foreign community. This is a chance to directly appeal to schools and get hired as a full member of staff, rather than as a dispatch or contract worker.

However, the leads on Shigaku's page are written in Japanese only, and many of the jobs themselves (even those intended for native English speakers) are often written in Japanese on the schools' websites. Conversational Japanese is a must here, and applicants with JLPT-2 or greater equivalency, coupled with teaching experience, are the ones who will have their pick of jobs.

Job Spotlight: Careerforum.net

One of the best places for foreign nationals to look for jobs in Japan are career forums. Career forums strip out a lot of the traditional Japanese hiring practices of attending compulsory seminars, filling out entry sheets, and attending up to eight rounds of interviews before a job offer finally arrives. They concentrate employers in one convenient location, so you can gather information and talk with recruiters at a dozen companies all in one afternoon.



The company that organizes the largest Japanese-English bilingual career forums in the world is Disco International. They run a fully bilingual website promoting all of their events at Careerforum.net (CFN).

The largest of these events is the Boston Career Forum, held annually around the end of October. Some 150 companies attend this event, all big names like Panasonic, Goldman Sachs, Mitsubishi, and NTT, and they are looking for candidates with Japanese and English language skills to employ their English skills in Japan or Japanese skills abroad.

Lists of attending companies tend to come out as early as six months before the actual event is held, and if you create an account at the CFN website, you can gather information on and send resumes to companies months before the event takes place--which I'd recommend, since companies schedule most of their interview sessions beforehand, leaving very little space for walk-in candidates.

Some readers are probably wondering if it is worth it to fly all the way out to Boston for the event. If you have prepared well beforehand and scheduled perhaps six to ten interviews online beforehand, I say yes. 

There is potential here for foreign nationals if your Japanese is up to snuff. JLPT-1 or a high BJT score is a must if you are not a native speaker. But with that qualification, and a well-written English and Japanese resume, it is possible to line up interviews for jobs in Tokyo with major companies who are looking for native English-speakers.

(I promise. Two companies flew me to Tokyo and back for 1-day interviews thanks to the Boston Career Forum.)

On the other hand, if you've never interviewed in Japanese before in your life, or if you've spent no time researching companies and practicing how you'll sell yourself to their recruiters, these events probably aren't worth the cost of a plane ticket for you. More than a few Western college students walk away from these forums with sour grapes because they thought walking unprepared into a Konami booth would land them a programming job. You need printed resumes, rehearsed interview answers, and, for any technical field, examples of your work to get anywhere.

If you're just interested in seeing what a Japanese career forum is like, CFN hosts other events around the world, including London, Tokyo, and Los Angeles. If one of these locations happens to be nearby for you, it's completely free to register for and attend CFN events.

But, for the big jobs, Boston is where it's at.

By the way, all of CFN's career forums (and, really, almost all 就職活動 events in Japan) are formal-attire affairs. Dress up with a nice suit, including a white, long-sleeve button-down shirt, jacket, and tie. For ladies, a pantsuit is acceptable, but most Japanese women wear a jacket, blouse, skirt, and heels.

The CFN website itself is a great source of further information on how to prepare for and participate in a career forum, and an awesome point of the site is that they translate everything across the site, word-for-word into both Japanese and English. Members (it's free to be one) can opt in to a newsletter about job-seeking tips and also access every back issue of that same newsletter (there's hundreds, if not thousands of them) on the CFN website.

11 Useful Vocabulary in Your Job Search (Part 2 of 2)

Knowing just a few particular terms can double your readiness to tackle a professional job search in Japan.

Continuing from our last post about job-search vocabulary, here are six more words that you ought to know as you embark to find work outside of ESL:

履歴書（りれきしょ）

The Japanese equivalent for "resume." Japanese resumes have a standard format, including your contact information, full educational history, a photo, and sometimes things Westerners find surprising, like a list of relatives, their birth dates, and their current occupations. Traditionally, a 履歴書 is supposed to be handwritten.

自己PR（じこPR）

This is your "self promotion," or a 60-second blurb about what you want to do in the workplace and why your background makes you qualified for this job. You'll write it on your resumes, and you should know it by heart so you can say it (naturally) as your self-introduction at the beginning of interviews. This should be re-written and tailored for every job you apply to.

志望動機（しぼうどうき）

Closely tied to the above, your "motivation for working" should establish that you understand what this job/company is all about and you're excited by the idea of working there. There is a lot of crossover between the 自己PR and 志望動機 of job-seekers, but in principle, your "self promotion" should be telling about your skills and how they match the job, and your "motivation for working" should show that you know about the company and that your goals are in line with its. This should also be re-written and tailored for every job you apply to.

適性試験（てきせいしけん）

"Aptitude tests" are common among Japanese recruiters to weed out some of the hundreds or thousands of applications they may receive each year. The idea is that if you didn't bother studying for an aptitude test about kanji and math encountered in the business world, they're not going to bother considering you for a job. As a foreign applicant, you may be exempted from some of these; companies considering you for employment usually have a special project in mind for you, which they'll find out if you're capable of through resumes and interviews. However, you may still be asked to take a truncated version of an aptitude test or a personality test. Bookstores in Japan carry shelves of books about what kind of vocab you should know for these tests, what kind of story problems are commonly encountered on the math sections, and what kind of trip-up questions companies throw into the personality test to make sure you're not lying. (It's not always as simple as "T/F: I have never told a lie before.")

面接（めんせつ）

The Japanese word for "interview." If you made it past the resume screening and aptitude testing, you'll go in for one of these. They can take any of several forms, including group interviews (three or four applicants against a panel of interviewers), one-on-one, or you alone against a handful or a roomful of your future superiors. Japanese interviews tend to come in multiples, with each interview being numbered in succession: 1次面接, 2次面接, etc. Each level of interview will be with someone higher up in the organization, the final often being with the president. Two to four interviews for a job were my most common numbers, but I've heard stories of companies having up to 8次面接 for Japanese applicants.

内定（ないてい）

Roughly equivalent to "job offer," this is the payoff for all your hard work. After the final interview, a letter is issued to you stating that the company is extending 内定 to you. You'll need to reply with a letter of thanks, and accept the 内定 by completing some final procedures, such as taking a health exam (健康診断) and signing commitment (誓約書) and guarantor (身元保証書) forms. It is not uncommon for a Japanese company to conclude their hiring process and notify successful applicants six months or even a year before the starting date of the job. Which means: start your job search early, way before you intend to move into a new job.

We hope this series of articles has been useful for job seekers. If you have any other job hunting terms you'd like to add or ask about, please leave a comment below.