The JET Opportunity: Part I

This post looks like it's going to be a long one, so the summary is that this article is a personal account of why JET is an opportunity I chose to pursue. (To hear about the JET programme itself, please consult their website.)

Gap Year

I've set 2012/2013 aside as a kind of gap year. For those that don't know, gap year is a term understood (in South African, and probably other western cultures) to mean a year dedicated to the exploration of some pursuit without the intention of using it to build one's career. 

It's relatively common for some middle class South Africans to take a year off school immediately after high school. I decided to go to university instead. After that arduous and circuitous task, I had a not insignificant study loan to pay back to First National Bank (thanks by the way). I wasn't earning a lot of money at that stage, so saving was difficult. And then I fell in love with a leggy 21 year old. As it turned out, she ended up being the one, and while she completed her studies, my dream of travelling gathered cobwebs in a lonely corner of my mind...

Until now. Now with my wife about to finish her degree and with myself entering the prime of my mid-life "reassessment", we are (Did someone say finally?) in a position to travel, and JET presented a perfect opportunity for us.

Work History

Work has over the last couple of years become tedious, with exciting opportunities to learn new things on the corporate horizon, I stuck around for longer than I should have at my software development job. As it turns out, the exciting opportunities I was heading towards had a habit of being squashed by upper management (ptooey). This grand corporate dance culminated in the execution of my employment one month before my wedding, and this after a flawless review! The nerve. (On the other hand they treated us with respect and were generous is making amends, but that truth is far less dramatic than the tale I'm weaving and hence too boring to include in this account.) 

Ok, in all fairness, I was also not the most faithful of employees. You see I was already in the process of being seduced by JET. Alas, the excitement and novelty of her was far too exhilarating! I couldn't resist, and it provided me with immense satisfaction after my retrenchment was announced to say, "Ha ha! I already have an interview for next week, so who's the winner now huh?!?" The said interview being a date with the JET selection committee at the Japanese embassy.

JET

You see, JET is a very alluring mistress. With a free return ticket to Japan, a reasonable monthly salary and a 35 hour work-week, it's hard to justify that staying at your old, hum-drum job is really the sensible thing to do, when such an adventure is only an application form, professional interview, medical check up, urine sample and chest x-ray away. Plus, when you're done and dusted with your contract (which, by the way, is renewable for a number of years), you're permitted to spend an extra month in Japan, which is great in case you've been too busy sampling the local sakes to have ventured beyond your local prefecture.

And that's just the cold hard facts.

In Conclusion (Psyche!)

Ok... this post is already getting long, and it's 12:18 in the morning... so how about continue this conversation tomorrow? Is that ok with you? I hope so. 

Good night sunshine. Would you mind turning off the light?

Introducing a Blue Crane

Hi

Allow me to introduce myself; my name is Eric. I am 32 years old and have been working as a software developer in Cape Town, one of the 2 capital cities in South Africa, for many years. I have recently married Taryn; a beautiful, talented and inspiring woman that is in the final phase of completing her doctorate degree in Molecular and Cell Biology. (As someone who stopped studying biology in grade nine, I'm very impressed with this, and I'm grateful that we don't follow the Xhosa tradition of lobola that would require me to pay the price of many cows for the privilege to marry such a well educated woman.)

I have been running the rat race for the last 8 years. Recently I have started feeling some dissatisfaction with my job. Although I enjoy software development, I find that coding what other people want me to code is so much less rewarding than coding what I want to code. Still, for some time now I've stuck it out, working for a software company that provided services to banks and large investment companies. The money was... ok, but nothing I did really seemed to significantly affect anyone's life. It has come as a real surprise to me that this is actually really important to me. That's right, as it turns out, I want to feel like what I'm doing is making a personal difference to someone's life.

So at the end of last year, on a whim, Taryn and I decided to attempt to change the pace of our lives, so we applied to participate in the JET programme. Now my wife and I are getting ready to leave our comfortable flat on the 16th floor of a block of flats in the CBD of Cape Town, to go teach English in what will hopefully be a rural town in Japan.

In terms of my world view, I'm very interested in philosophy, and in other people's world views; but I'm completely disinterested in dogma. I see myself as a very rational person and value the scientific method. Generally I don't attribute much weight to things that cannot be proven; which will make what follows particularly paradoxical.

For me living in Japan is the realization of a big dream; perhaps even the dream. I have never been to Japan before; in fact, I know only one Japanese person. What I do seem to know in a mystically profound way, is that I need to go there, and I need to live there, not just stay for a couple of weeks. It's almost as if I've been born with a destiny that requires me to go to Japan to discover something that I've never seen. It's completely irrational, and contrary to my usual painfully analytical grain.

Perhaps there is something to past lives... how else can I explain my expectation that when I go to Japan I will find something misplaced, that I've never seen, and when I find it, I'll remember it.