It’s funny, I get the impression that it’s actually feeding the problem, I don’t know how it is in Japan, but the people I know who are really into it have some crazy ideas about how human relationships should work and they are not healthy.
The ruling party is a xenophobic, war-crimes-denying autocracy, and the country continues to refuse any solution to its vast labor shortage that involves immigration from the nearby, poorer Pacific Rim countries with their huge skilled labor pools
Japan is very open to skilled immigrants, more so than the US and the UK. We have nearly 900,000 Chinese residents and a substantial number of residents from countries such as Vietnam and Nepal.
Nearby Asian countries do not have “huge skilled labor pools” that are relevant to Japan. To perform most skilled work in Japan you need to be able to speak, read, and write Japanese. The pool of such people in other Asian countries is quite small (pockets in Taiwan, North East China, perhaps Korea).
The current labor shortage is far from vast and for the most part it does not involved skilled workers but rather menial jobs with poor pay and sometimes dangerous work conditions.
And just for the record, I’m a naturalised immigrant to Japan, albeit from the UK. If you are “skilled” (college degree and up), it is far easier to gain permanent residency and citizenship in Japan than it is in the US or the UK to say nothing of really tight countries like Switzerland.
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From Howl’s Moving Castle, from Studio Ghibli. Extremely good, watch now.
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Saw it once, years ago, thanks!
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Oddly, it appears from this article that commentary about Japan is rather like Sci-Fi. It serves not so much as a subject, but as a backdrop to project all our own fears and issues onto.
And in a way, the Japans and Americas and Denmarks of this world can and are being treated in the same way as any Sci-Fi setting. We use them to imagine and project potential futures, to asses their ups and downs, pitfalls and opportunities of one way of doing things over another. It segues neatly into the idea of the UN as the laboratory of governments, allowing us to see what succeeds in the real world (20th century Scandinavia, generally). Our inability to copy the best examples and avoid repeating the mistakes of these experiments is our political tragedy and farce.
Of course, another strand to Japan-tinged narratives is that their criticism has a tendency to rebound embarrassingly. The nation that was written off as incapable of innovation- just cheap imitators grew to be a technological colossus. The country that was derided for its controlling Zaibatsu and overworked salarymen now appears to be the quaint home of the job for life when compared to the Gigafactory burnout, or the zero-hours precariat. The nation that was lectured endlessly about its lost decade and its lack of reform to its banking sector doesn’t look so bad now, given the complete failure of most of the rest of the world to respond to a similar crisis (and certainly not doing so while maintaining a 3.5% unemployment rate).
So all the mistakes that we project onto Japan now- we’ll see.
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I mean, it still sounds like the first part of that is also true. Just, as the OP suggests, we’ve caught up. And, like every late adopter of innovations, we’ve improved the technique.
I don’t know how I feel about this so I’m posting a Totoro.
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“This traditional style originated in the fifth century in Japan, when the life expectancy was about 40 years,”
How does he know this as written history did not exist until the eighth century? Much of what is now considered ‘traditional style’ did not start until around the 16th century.
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Oh my god I havent seen the Yatta video in 10 years. I have a degree in Japanese and I STILL regularly forget how strange Japan is.
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anime is haram
Or alternatively, they’re catering to their “base” the same way Trump does.
I’ve written this a few times, but as someone who grew up on the net, I’ve seen a direct path leading from Gamefaqs “Life, The Universe, and Everything” to Something Awful, to 4chan, to 8chan and finally to niche hate sites/subreddits.
I strongly suspect that a lot of people with rough childhoods/lives indulged in shock humor, but the people who stuck around had some deeper issues. With each iteration, the culture gets both more toxic and more concentrated.
(Ex: Something Awful would make a bunch of grey guys walk around in a swastika shape because it was funny to watch people freak out, folks on /pol/ on 8chan are literal nazis)
Along similar lines, I suspect people who are hardcore obsessed with anime nowadays are that same type who are hardcore obsessed with imageboards, casual racism, and other stuff that stopped being funny in the mid 2000s to most well adjusted folks
This traditional style originated in the fifth century in Japan, when the life expectancy was about 40 years, which meant people usually died before losing their physical strength.
That’s… not how life expectancy works.
When you read about historical periods having life expectancies of 40-50 years old, that doesn’t mean “most adults died at around 40-50 years old”, it means that the mean average was brought down by high infant mortality rates, so there were a lot of deaths at like, 0-1 years old.
In general, throughout most of history, any person who made it to adulthood had a reasonably solid chance of surviving to at least 60 years old.
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Speaking truth to Boing doesnt do much good. There is a decided narrative no matter what the facts are.
In truth it has become amazingly easy for a skilled person from anywhere to get a working visa and they are now giving out permanent residency after only a few years and honestly I know people with grade school level Japanese who are now getting PR.
Worth pointing out that it is the supposed “xenophobic” ruling party that keeps lowering the bar to immigration.
As far as the nonsense about robots, the govt seems to have learned from its previous errors and is now including language training in programs to get overseas nurses certified here.
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Be seeing you!
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A coworker is leaving for Japan for a month in a week or so. It will be interesting to hear what he has to say when he returns.
I don’t know if this is recently but last I lived in Japan 2008 to 2009 (I lived there 2 separate times, first 2005-2006 in Itami near Kobe) I lived in Sapporo for the second year, and came back to it from America right as the recession hit.
I spent 9 months through the winter of 2008 looking for work in the Japanese Countryside because they teaching Market was wiped out nearly overnight.
I have and had a degree in Japanese from a major university and had just finished working for the city of Sapporo for a year as a jet so I was massively qualified to teach privately but there was just nothing.
I had that working Visa but technically it became invalid when I did not work for the city of Sapporo and I had to report to immigration to notify them of my status. It was expected that within a certain amount of time I would have another employer that would keep my working Visa legal but otherwise there was the chance of immigration employees knocking on my door to deport me.
I don’t remember it being a fun or easy time.
Even though even then there were many people known to overstay their visa and get away with it I seem to remember my situation being a little more serious but it has been 10 years now and I changed careers to become a high-end Machinist after that experience even though I still use my Japanese.
Maybe it has changed since I was there
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Well… more than a bit has changed in almost 10 years. Also lots of folks lost their jobs back then. Me included. And thats gonna lead to the next point
I dont want to sound rude but JET people are supposed to go away and a degree in Japanese basically means you can speak Japanese. Teaching English isnt a particular “skill” at that level. Those things have not changed.
OTOH it sounds like in the meantime you got into something really cool and considering how rare it is to encounter Japanese outside Japan you are lucky to get a chance to use it.
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I dont want to sound rude but JET people are supposed to go away and a degree in Japanese basically means you can speak Japanese. Teaching English isnt a particular “skill” at that level. Those things have not changed.
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My actual degree title is B.A. in Japanese language and literature. The degree was not simply about speaking Japanese it was about understanding and translating the language as well, including 1000 year old Heian Japanese, from when the Japanese Court was in Kyoto.
When I graduated I was able to speak and write at a high level though admittedly not native fluency.
I am well aware of what the common view of jet is in Japan and outside of it. What you may not know is that there are multiple kinds of JET for that matter and some of them are administrative positions and cultural relations. My degree did not mean that I was simply able to speak Japanese. It meant I was able to live and work in Japan and adapt to the culture as well because I understood it better than someone who had no degree in it.
Of course you do not need a degree in Japanese to become a JET, and in some ways it is not preferred because it makes the possibility of entering Japanese speech to get through an explanation possible which would negate native English teaching.
The real point is that when you teach in Japanese public schools you do not use Japanese language and that is preferable in that situation. In private teaching however, my background would have been immensely valuable to a private English school who required someone more than simply able to speak English, and when needed good deal with confusion among students and explain in their own language what they needed to correct and what the differences were because there is not a second Japanese teacher that speaks your language there to translate for you in class constantly.
Granted many private 英会話 (english language schools, Aeon, ect, many chain schools, private ones) obviously take on standard JET people and do the same kind of thing where they don’t speak any Japanese, but not all schools teach in simple shallow ways with parroting technique of just hearing the native language. Not to knock anything against the language system that exists there because hearing native English counts for a lot, but I could not have learned Japanese effectively at the level I did if I simply heard a Japanese person speaking and they weren’t able to explain their grammar and words selection usage and other things. People with higher-level skills exist for teaching people at a higher level for that very reason.
I am sorry if it makes it sound like I am some sort of college professor because my Japanese was never native so I don’t pretend to be 1 kyu fluency. But when you have a room full of high school age students or middle-aged Japanese that need to know concretely what the difference is between grammar usage in certain situations and generally more than just repeating you to learn you need to have more ability to talk with them in their own language to get things across.
As to your thinking that teaching English at “that level”, whatever that means, not being supposedly a “skill”-
All teaching is a skill. Standing in front of a room of people and actively engaging them in purpose of getting them to understand something at a deeper level is not something anyone can just walk in and do. Maybe you’ve done it. Maybe you’re a better teacher than I was. I’m not out to win some sort of teaching competition with someone I’ve never met, or anyone for that matter, but my mother was a teacher and she was one of my inspirations to try teaching because it was a natural extension of the only path I had known up to that point in my career.
Actively trying to teach especially teach a language is more than simply handing out papers with English on them and getting people to repeat after you. It’s creating lesson plans, natural conversations with variances and different natural responses so that the people learning can see how natural response works and how the language is used in conversation.
I know there are people who simply give handouts and expect their students to write sentences. From what I saw that’s extremely common in Japan and how many students learn but in reality they don’t learn a damn thing.
I taught in 2 middle schools, a special education High School, and to some Elementary School students all in one year. I was assigned different intervals to places the city of Sapporo wanted me to work. It sucked because I never got to really develop a relationship with any of my teachers and make something approaching a real difference, but it did show me at least over all the places I saw and then afterwards privately in a small English school with preschoolers and retirees what English teaching in Japan is probably like through most of the country.
English education in Japan is pathetic. The students are no different than here in math class when they cannot understand the importance or the use of what they are learning and they have no enthusiasm for it. Common teaching methods are handouts work books and paperwork. Depending on the teacher or the school of course this can be very different because I did have many other jets in Sapporo to talk with about how their schools ran. Some have teachers that really try to get students to enjoy speaking English and don’t give everything in handouts.
In the end, I didn’t write this really long response to somehow shit on your parade or your views. I don’t know what you’ve done and I’m not here to judge people I don’t know. I get that you have your own opinions but I’d like to at least think that someone can think a little deeper about what must have been a very complex situation and Life to get to where I was and that there might have been more to it even if you taught in Japan yourself. Remember that there are some Jets who are in a very small percentage that actually work for the Japanese government in cultural studies roles so even saying all Jets are some sort of token parrot English teacher is not even accurate. Most people don’t know about those Jets though because they are very few and usually people like me that have degrees in Japanese or a very high level of fluency, though I was not one of them.
I hope things have changed in the last 10 years for teaching English in Japan and I hope that all of the work books and the repeat after me tired bullshit routine in public schools has gone away. But knowing Japan as I feel I do to some degree at this point it’s probably not much changed at all.
And in case you were wondering, I don’t regret for a second getting my degree holding the debt that I still do from it for doing that for a large part of my life. The decision to change career paths was complex and also included time in Oklahoma for a couple years learning professional watchmaking. I’m not a genius by any means but I’m not someone you can easily judge like that.
And yes I know, there might be a few run-on sentences grammatical mistakes and what not here. I am no longer a teacher a grammar Nazi or actively involved in correcting people’s speech. Cut me some slack.
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