The Job Search Continues

I'm still job-hunting. It's weird to request a salary in the millions, as in 2 or 3 million yen per year.

I have two interviews coming up! One is with Bertliz, and the other with the G. Education, company that bought out Nova when it declared bankruptcy a few years ago. I'm more excited about Berlitz than the other one because it has a better reputation among teachers, offers health insurance, and has fewer problems than have been reported by current and former teachers. But they both sponsor a work visa. I hope that I'll have more interviews before those two (esp. before the G. Ed one).

But in general, I'd rather work in a regular school (elementary or junior high) as an Assistant Language Teacher (ALT), because I'll be exposed to more of Japanese daily life and culture. Most ALTs at most schools are required or encouraged to participate in the school's cultural activities, which offers opportunities to talk more with the kids, hang out with them, meet their parents, etc. I'm not sure if those hours are usually paid, though. I know a few schools that explicitly say that they pay for additional activities; others are silent on the issue, at least, on the web.

Working at a conversation school means interaction with the students in a vacuum, basically.

The more interesting jobs, including one that teaches English through children's literature (eg. Harry Potter, etc), require at least a basic proficiency in Japanese, which I don't have. I had a call from a school's recruiter the other day and he asked me to speak in Japanese with him to test my proficiency. I did ok with saying my name and asking his, but then got stuck when he asked "Nan sai desu ka?" which I now knows means "How old are you?" (And no, it's not illegal for employers to ask job applicants for their age, nationality, or picture, as it is in the States.)

Experiencing this and seeing all the "basic/conversation Japanese required" has motivated me to ramp up my learning. I'm terrible at teaching myself things (besides cooking), so I'd prefer instead to take some intensive classes, like the ones that meet Mon-Fri for 3 hours each day, but I can't really afford to. Most 4 week classes are about $2000, but I've seen one that cost more than the monthly salary that most schools offer to English teachers. Sheesh.

But I do have tons of Japanese textbooks, like the much beloved "Genki" books, audio files, podcasts and youtube lessons like Japanese Pod 101, so it might work. So far, all the conversation exchange partners hat Koko and I have found are all advanced English speakers, so we end up speaking in English the entire time. I need to find someone who is at a basic level so I'm forced to use the language more.

By the way, it kills me that conversation schools pay around 200-250k yen/month, ALTs and university positions 275k-300k (the latter of which requires a masters, by the way, and at least 2 years experience), and a gym instructor gets 330-410k with only a bachelors and teaching certificate and two years' experience?? Wakarimasen. I don't understand.

How to Help / Donate to Japan

Some tips from Yomiuri Daily (and me) on donating relief supplies, summarized below:

* Don't send used, worn-out clothes. They may be hip in Williamsburg, but Japanese people are superclean and germophobic. (Have you seen the face masks??) But seriously, if you were a refugee, wouldn't you want ONE thing that's new and clean? Also, there's no water there, so no laundry and no showers (only wet naps, and those are needed too.)

* Pack each box full of ONE thing; don't throw a bunch of stuff together

* Write clearly on the outside of the box what the contents are  (type, quantity, and if applicable, for which gender or age)

* Some prefectural offices are only accepting packages made in person, because otherwise, it will take a long time to sort

* Other prefectural office will accept packaged delivered by courier service

* Still others will regard sent by mail or courier service will be returned cash-on-delivery

Please check the prefectural office's website to see what they need before you donate, or they will get flooded with stuff that evacuees don't need right now, while the real crucial items are somewhere, still in the stores.

So if you're already in Japan and decide to send relief supplies, pack one box full of that one thing, be it sanitary napkins toilet paper, underwear, whatever. Label the outside with the contents (type, quantity, and if applicable, for which gender or age). Then pack another box full of one thing--can be the same as the box before, or not.

But if you're overseas, you can make a bigger impact, and faster, if you donate money. I always wondered about this, thinking that some organizations will pocket a lot of the donations for personal use, but now it makes sense.

First, no matter what you buy--$80 worth of sanitary napkins, for example (Amazon has 36 24-packs for $80.61 with free super saver shipping to the US)--you have to pay to ship it to Japan, which will cost at least another $80. But you could have used that $80 to buy more sanitary napkins, which would benefit more people than just those in the shipping industries.

Second, if you donate money (to a reputable charity, of course, like Japanese Red Cross, Oxfam, Red Cross, Salvation Army Japan, Oxfam Japan, JEN, Jhelp and Second Harvest Japan, etc), that money can be used right away to buy the materials and get it to the people who need them. It's a lot faster than your going to the store, going to the post office, packing it up, the package taking another 1-2 weeks to reach Japan and clear customs, then another week or however long it takes from where you sent it in Japan to the evacuees. That's 3 weeks vs. the 1 day it will take for people here on the ground to get it to the evac centers.

Third, if you donate money, that money can be spent here in Japan, which will help the local economy, and we all know that it could sure use the help. The country has been in a deflationary period and economic depression for the past 20 years, and these recent events will cost $300 billion to repair, rebuild and recover.

Fourth, if you donate food from overseas and the volunteers are unable to translate the label to check for allergy information, they cannot send the food onto evacuation centers. No one wants to be responsible for an allergic reaction that results in severe illness or death.

Fifth, if you donate food in large quantities from overseas, it will get stuck at customs, which has to spend more time inspecting it.

So...bottomline, if you're not in Japan, the best, most efficient way to help, with maximal impact, is to donate money. I'd love to say, Send your money to me, and I could buy these items and get them to the collection  centers. But I don't have a car, so it'd be hard to get huge amounts of stuff from one place to another by subway. I'm going to just buy stuff near the collection centers and then make a drop-off right after I get out the store. But since I'm kind of broke and can't afford to buy much, I'm going to be volunteering my time instead--probably sorting the supplies.

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Here is a useful article from the Japan Times on how to help.

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A Big Box of Everything for One = A Big Box of Garbage

Vlad talked about how, when people send relief supplies as one box of a variety of items for one person (eg. one toothbrush, one toothpaste, etc), that this box cannot be distributed at an evacuation center because...how would you decide which person out of the hundreds at the center gets this box? And even if you split it up, it would be a nightmare to say, Ok, you get the toothbrush, but you get the toothpaste. Or, Fine, you get these two things because they go together, but everyone else only gets one item.

It may sound petty, but imagine that you have lost your home, your office was washed out to sea, maybe you even lost your family, and you're living at this evacuation center, on the floor, with hundreds of other people; there is constant talking, crying, sniffling, babies making noise, no privacy, no place to put what little stuff you own on the blanket next to your shoes, you get one canned soup and three crackers a day, the government is telling you that you can't go outside because of the radiation and you have already been indoors for three weeks straight now, and then some guy is telling you that you can get the toothbrush but no toothpaste? You just might have to kill him for it.

Ok- maybe I exaggerated a little, but only the last part, because everything else is true. The evacuation centers really are short on food, and people really aren't getting enough to eat. See the list from the website of Watari town in Miyagi prefecture, one of the hardest hit regions. Second Harvest Japan and JHelp also have lists of needed supplies on their websites.

Vlad said there are volunteers completely devoted to sorting out the relief supplies received. If there are boxes with a bunch of mixed goods in them (eg. a big box of everything for one person), they are sometimes thrown out because no one has the time to go through it, figure out which of the 50 different items go where, etc.

It's kind of disheartening to know that usable or possibly necessary items are being thrown out because they were not packed properly. And yeah, maybe if the volunteers and collection centers had the space to store tons of these kinds of boxes and all the time in the world to go through them, maybe they wouldn't get tossed in the garbage. But the reality is both time and space are limited, and you have to work so that the most people get the most benefit. You can't spend a lot of time sorting one box.

So if you're going to donate, make sure that whatever you donate--whether it's money or materials--will be used, and fully.

So Encouraged

Tonight Koko and I met for dinner a Bulgarian who has been in Japan for over a decade, his wife and baby. This guy is part ambassador, part community organizer, and part hacker. I'm gonna call him Vlad because that's what I thought he said his name was. Vlad and his wife were both trained rescuers for nuclear situations so they know the risks and how to protect themselves from radiation, and they are staying put in Tokyo.

A few days after the nuclear reactors started having serious problems, he and his wife prepared a bathtub worth of drinking water, in case radiation reached groundwater or tap water (as it later did). He urged other people in the community to do so just in case, because the people mistook emergency preparedness as a sign of an actual emergency, and fled Japan.

Vlad said that there were mainly two types of people who left Japan:

1) People who came here temporarily, such as teachers on one-year contracts
2) People whose multinational employers shut their offices down and paid for them and their families to leave the country for two weeks and paid for their stay abroad (and who wouldn't take a paid vacation when the typical vacation time at a company in Japan is 10 days a year?)

When asked why he didn't flee in the days after the earthquake, he said that if there were another earthquake while he was on the way to the airport, he would have been stuck on the train. Also, lots of people were getting into fights at the airport over tickets or stuck there, waiting for the next available flight, and he didn't want to put his wife and baby through that.

When asked why he didn't flee in the week after the nuclear reactor situation was getting serious, he said that even if there was a meltdown, it would take days for it to reach Tokyo, and that rather than going outside into the open air, or getting on a train where everyone else is getting on or trying to get on, and basically making it extremely difficult to get out, he would actually be safer at home, which is built partially into a hill (like so many buildings at Binghamton University), and where he has enough food and water for three weeks.

I'm so encouraged by the fact that he knows the facts, knows what's going on, and is prepared rather than panicked.

As he serves as the de facto organizer and liaison for the Bulgarian community here, he is often contacted by schools back home that send students to Japan on exchange programs to serve as their guide and to lay down the ground rules of what is permissible or not in Japan.

Vlad is also contacted by Bulgarian media seeking to get a Bulgarian perspective on happenings in the land of the rising sun. He and another compatriot were recently interviewed by a Bulgarian news station, and both said that outside of the areas hit by the tsunami and Fukushima, everything else was fine, radiation in Tokyo wasn't at a dangerous level, etc. Neither of their interviews were aired.

Instead, the station aired an interview with a frantic exchange student who panicked because she tried to call her school to cancel something, and no one picked up, so she had to go outside (in the radiation, she said) to the school itself to cancel the class, and so on.

More and more, I am doubtful that much of what is reported in the media is actually true.

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I am also very encouraged that he and some friends are:

* Building solar lanterns (maybe something like these) to send to the evacuees. They meet on Sundays, but one guy went to the States to get more solar panels.

* Building phone chargers (now that cell phone towers are working again up north) to be hooked up to car batteries, which can easily be found in car battery disposals, abandoned cars, or cars destroyed by the tsunami. Such a battery can charge up to 100 phones.

* Turning a school or other building in Chiba as a temporary shelter for 100 refugees until they get back on their feet again. Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs because there are no more offices or factories to return to, or employees to run your company, or bosses to report to...

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When I heard about what he's been up to, I felt, this is the kind of thing I should be doing! Anyone who hasn't left Japan, who can help in any way, should be doing these kinds of things. And I feel like, rather than run away like so many have, those who have stayed should help with the relief efforts, help rebuild in some way. I don't speak Japanese, don't know my way around, don't have carpentry skills, but still, I want to help!

Maybe one of the people on the solar lantern project can teach me how to solder so I can build those things too.