Search for a Method

Well, it only seems appropriate to finally talk about our home in Japan:

Numazu is a small city of approximately 200,000 people which is surrounded by several cities of about 100,000 - Fuji, Mishima, Gotemba and Susono. In other words, despite the fact that the Japanese think of this area as “countryside,” it has a significant population, comparable to several American cities that make it into the Biggest 100 American Metro Areas. We are located at the northeast corner of the Izu Peninsula, at the southeastern foot of Mt. Fuji, and approximately two hours by car, one hour by shinkansen east of Tokyo. Numazu station is located on the Tokaido Line and the Gotemba line, connecting the city quickly to most of the surrounding area.
View Larger Map

Perhaps part of the reason the people of Numazu think of their city as rural, is because it maintains relative obscurity to many Japanese. While both Mishima and Fuji, although smaller than Numazu, have shinkansen stations, Numazu does not. Additionally, there seem to be very few attractions for tourists and, as my student who happens to be a city planner explained, it is still recovering aesthetically from the poorly organized post-WWII building boom that left the city a messy cluster of concrete boxes and radio towers. There are moments of beauty, however, including Numazu’s Imperial Villa, a longtime summer home of the Imperial family, and Mt. Kanuki and it’s beautiful five-storied pagoda (shown below):

There is also a relatively famous tsunami gate, designed for reducing the damage caused by a tsunami by lowering a very large concrete block into the entrance of the port. The view from the observatory at the top of the gate gives an impressive look at Suruga bay and the area surrounding Numazu, hence it’s name “View-O”:

The port area around View-O is well-known for its exceptional seafood.

Of course, for all my talk of Numazu not being so small of a city, it still has a relatively small town feel. Most of the central city is relatively compact, with a few shopping areas on the south side of the station, including one covered pedestrian shopping street known as Nakamise. We have access to a meager selection of foreign food, and a great selection of Japanese food. There are two movie theaters close to the station that sometimes show English films, although they’re usually several months behind the United States. We buy most of our food at a grocery/everything store that is just a two or three minute walk from our house.

Overall, we are happy with our home for the next year. While we are not in the fast-moving world that is Tokyo, we’re also not in the middle of nowhere despite what our students would have us believe. This small town-city mix allows us to experience both rural and urban aspects of Japanese culture at the same time.

Now that I’ve finished writing about our recent travels, I’m going to start writing quick posts whenever I can about our classes, our apartment, and other aspects of our life here in Numazu. Whenever I get a little bit more time, I’ll also be writing about anything else that’s going on here that may be interesting to everyone at home.

I’m going to begin with our job: we are full time English teachers at American Language Services in Numazu. For the most part, we really like the situation that we ended up in. Although the pay is slightly lower than that of many other English teachers, we have diverse schedules and a variety of students and classes. I have basically every kind of class you can think of - from nursery students (3 years old) to high schoolers to adult business classes. You may, like we initially did, think that this sounds difficult. However, because we teach eikaiwa, or English conversation, most of the classes take relatively little preparation and tend to be quite interesting. The majority of classes are adults and most of them speak enough English to hold an interesting conversation about their weekends, which is always the first thing we ask them about. After all, people everywhere talk most easily about themselves. Additionally, many of our classes are held on-site at businesses or other locations. While this means commuting time, it’s a huge benefit to us, as we get to see the inside of Japanese factories, businesses, homes and schools on a weekly basis. While our students learn English we are getting a valuable cultural lesson.

Of course, while the job is interesting, it does have its downsides. We work approximately 22 teaching hours a week - sounds good right? Actually, including two hours we’re required to work in the office a week and hours and hours of commuting time we easily make it to a traditional 40 hours a week. The timetable, however, is far from traditional - we are supposed to be available anytime between 8 am and 9 pm every day, which we found out means that we have classes from 8 am and until 9 pm almost every day. Since doing this everyday (as we did when we first arrived) was incredibly grueling we asked for several nights off a week and now we’re not required to work Monday or Wednesday after 5:00 pm. This has been a big relief and now we’re pretty happy with our working situation.

I’ll probably go into more detail about specific classes later, but for now I’ll leave it with this short introduction. Let me know if there’s anything specific you want to read about in the comments.