Cellphones and things

Hello hello! This is Ian writing this post.


Forgive me if I forget to add a verb or a particle or anything else that use typically used in English. My written English has begun to deteriorate due to the amount of Japanese I use in a typical day. I know I will have some sort of typo in here. Anyway...

I haven't written anything for a while and I feel bad about that because I know that people want to know what life in Japan is like! So, I will give a quick update on things that have happened lately, and then I'll talk a little about having/getting a cell phone in Japan.

Here's a very very quick overview of things I've been doing: I have joined the tennis team as a 'first year student', which is appropriate because I am very bad at tennis. Tomorrow is the first day I'll be practicing with the junior high's Indoor Volleyball team. And I'm actually extremely intimidated because they are the 3rd best team in the prefecture, and 3 of the students are members of the prefectural team. So yeah, relatively speaking I think I'll be just as good at volleyball as I am at tennis. I have almost completely finished planning and readying my first lessons for each grade level. I have moved from one apartment (my predecessor's apt) to a different apartment in the same building (because they are renovating the building, room by room, so I had to move a bunch of stuff that I had only come to own for roughly 4 days, including a washing machine and a refrigerator). Our new kitchen has an 'IH' stove, which requires special pans in order for the burner to get hot (it's a safety precaution). I have been to 3-4 dinner parties at people's houses, so needless to say I have met too many people to keep track of. I went to Tottori-shi (Tottori City) for prefectural orientation, where I met ALL of the ALTs/CIRs in Tottori. Almost all of us when out to Karaoke after the meetings. Oh, another ALT with my exact same birthday, and a different ALT who is from Walla Walla, Washington. So that was kind of amazing. And I went to a 'concert', held by the ALT on the other side of town, for my birthday, and got an official Kotoura Town polo as my present. And chocolate cake.

Okay then, cellphones.

In my personal opinion, America has various pitfalls when compared to Japan. But cellphones are an area of life in which America reigns supreme, especially in comparison to Japan. To show you why, I'll explain my current cellphone situation.

I got a cellphone yesterday because my 'gaijin' (foreigner) residence card came yesterday. You need the gaijin card to get a cellphone and a car, both of which are very needed in my placement. Anyway, there are 3 major providers in Japan/this area. AU, Softbank, and NTT Docomo. For the most part, they are all the same... but to make things easy to understand, I went with AU and I'm only going to talk about AU. But don't think that my troubles are just with AU, cause they are universal troubles. Anyway, in Japan, cellphone plans are not structured around mins/month + texts/month + data/month, like America. Three hundred anytime minutes with unlimited texting and unlimited data is something that does not exist in Japan. In Japan, you have a service fee. Mine is 980 yen (about 10 dollars). That fee allows you to call anyone with the same provider, between 1am and 9pm for free. So that's nice. That fee also determines the price of what your calls to other provider users will be (and this is the crappy part). You don't get anytime minutes. If you call someone from an AU phone to an NTT Docomo phone/Softbank phone, you are charged 21yen/30seconds. That's 42yen/minute, or roughly 50cents/minute. That's for normal, non-roaming calls. Now, if you pay more per month, you get an allowance of up to a certain $ amount that they won't charge you for. For example, my 980 gets me 25 'free' minutes a month to call non-au phones. I believe it's like 6390yen/month for 600 minutes (or $70 for 600 minutes).

In addition to the service fee, you are charged a data usage fee. This is for smartphones, yes, but it also applies to all phones. You see, no one in Japan uses SMS to text each other. Everyone uses email. Everyone. In fact, at this point, it's often more expensive to have a plan that gives you more SMS than data usage. So, in order to text, you have to use the internet. The cost of data is not awful (but keep in mind I didn't get a smart phone), and the medium usage option is 1000yen ($12ish). So my bill is roughly $20 a month for 25 minutes and an undetermined amount of text messages.

But that's not the end of it. I got the cheapest phone they had available... which was 36,000yen (roughly $400). Japanese companies do no subsidize their phones when you sign their 2 year contracts, like they do in America. People usually get a free phone, or a $40 phone, when they renew their contract in America, but that's simply not an option here in Japan. They give you the option to pay in full right away, or to pay off the phone over the course of the contract. I chose to pay it off gradually, so that brings my bill up to 3800yen/month. So, I pay roughly $45 a month for 25 minutes and probably something like 500 texts a month.

Don't take your cellphones for granted.

Ian

Ian's first few days!

Hello everyone!

This is Ian writing this entry. Where to begin... well, I'll keep it short-ish since I need to go to bed soon. I arrived in Tottori a few days ago and was met by my Board of Education supervisor and my neighboring ALT (assistant language teacher). We, and an English teacher at my school, got lunch and then very rapidly jumped from official building to official building, signing documents and meeting people. I have forgotten who exactly I've met so far, but I know I have met the Mayor of Kotoura, and the Superintendent of Kotoura, and I have dinner plans tomorrow night with someone (I can't remember his title or name) that is the 'second most powerful man in Kotoura'. So basically, if you want to be an important person in rural Japan, you would do best to be a foreigner.

But I should back up a bit: I am the Assistant Language teacher for Akasaki Junior Highschool (and a routine special guest at 4 Akasaki elementary schools and a few preschools). Kotoura is the official name of the town that Kari and I will be living in, however, Kotoura is actually a conglomerate of three towns (I think): Akasaki, Yabase, and Urayasu (the last two towns are collectively known as Touhaku). Since Touhaku is two towns large, Kari and I live on the more rural side of town, Akasaki. We will actually have to go to Touhaku to get groceries and whatnot. But that's okay, because the Japanese Railway West (JRwest) has a line that goes through all three towns. Catching the train can be a little difficult, since there is usually only 1 train per hour on the weekdays. I actually just went over to Urayasu to get adequate footwear for my first tennis practice with the students tomorrow (I'm excited!), and I made it back just fine. But soon we will have a car and then we can roam about where ever we please (provide it's on coastal road 9... they have been doing construction on it for the last 3 years and they will be continuing for another 3 or 4, and as such they have removed all tollbooths on it. Jackpot!)

Anyway, so far I have not done a lot at my shigoto (career/job). I have been brainstorming ideas for lessons and have been reading some of the Ministry of Education books that my predecessor left behind. Aside from that, I made a poster that introduces myself and I have placed that on the English board, which is across the hallway from the school library (I'm actually pretty pumped that I get my own board to dec out however I please). And I have been making my rounds, observing the club activities and talking with students. Well, I talk to the students who don't giggle and run away from me. It's very hard to maintain a conversation with the students who do, since they are so shy and embarrassed.

In America, we take for granted that we often see people who are significantly different from us, whether in appearance or actions. For rural Japan, most people never see a foreigner in person, or for that matter anyone who doesn't look and act like them. In my case, the townsfolk and the students have only met my predecessor, so I am the first new face in 3 years. From my experiences, Japanese people tend to think of Americans as people who have the ability to do anything they want (they have other opinions of Americans too, good and bad... just don't think this is they only thing they think of Americans), so with that added in it can be a little overwhelming, especially for children. How accurately placed this notion is... can be questioned (for example, last time I was here another American counselor told me that Japanese people think that all Americans are good at dancing... this was confirmed later by my Japanese student teaching assistant at UW-L). At very least, the youth of Japanese ubiquitously views American culture/fashion/music/entertainment and more as extremely cool, and that is enough to be extremely influential for Junior High School students.

Anyway, I'll wrap things up here short-like by telling you the best pieces of information I got today: the vice-principal and a social studies teacher (as well was the gym teacher's son) all played TE (tightend) in American Football at Okayama University; the table tennis coach was trained by Hirano Sayaka (whom is about to play for the Gold Medal in the women's double table tennis match); I met the Kendo-sensei (Kendo literally means 'way of the sword', but you probably know it best as samurai sword training) and I think I will be able to practice with the team; tomorrow is a half day and I will be spending the morning practicing with the soft-tennis team (soft tennis is a little different than 'hard-tennis'... soft tennis uses somewhat squishy tennis balls -- they don't use the neon green Dunlop/Wilson balls, and they don't play on nice green courts... we play on dirt); and I finally got my hands on dress shoes (for real cheap too!) that I don't have to untie and re-tie everytime I enter/exit the building (maybe you know this, but in Japan you must take off the shoes you wore outside before coming into the building... it's a cleanliness thing / somewhat purity-ness thing... in any case, slip-on and sandals are king in Japan). So yea! Oyasuminasai!

Update!

Ian has wrapped up his Tokyo orientation and headed to Akasaki where we will be living and working for the next year!

Word on the street is that he'll be meeting the Mayor and other prominent figures in the area.  We also got our picture and short blurb in the local newspaper!

Hopefully he will have consistent internet access soon and can share some more details of his first couple days in Japan!

Just over 1 month to go until I pack up and meet him there!

-Kari