English Camp

I apologize for the delay, I have been rather busy recently with work, travel, and just getting my living situation squared away.

To start, shortly after my last blog I helped run an English Camp over the weekend of the 8th.  It is for students all over the prefecture. They sign up and attend a 3 day camp where during the day they work with us on English speaking activities. It was a surprising amount of fun. Since it's completely voluntary, many students were quite eager to use English, and the activities were quite fun. We had a day where the students organized presentations of Japanese culture in English. These included watching and playing a koto, which is similar to a giant lap guitar, learning calligraphy, writing haikus, watching kendo, and playing kendama. I regret not learning how to use a kendama over the many months at APEX when people were playing with them now...  The camp kids presented these cultural activities to a group of British Scouts which came to camp on the 3rd day. Apparently boy and girl scouts from across the world had a big camping trip which happened in Japan this year. Also, sorry for the lack of photographs, much like my school, there are rather strict rules on photographs of students here

in Japan.

Settling into Tottori - Week 2

It has been a rather interesting second week. I have begun working, settled into my apartment, made my first tourist trip, and I have eaten some good food.

To start, over the weekend I went to Higashihama beach, which is right near Iwami. Free! fans will know where that is, although somewhat ironically there is no swim team in Iwami. The beach is in a cove and has some of the clearest water in Japan. There were some very cool rock formations you could swim and climb on, so some fun bouldering challenges revealed themselves to me.
While there we ate at a little local cafe called Aloha. I had hamburger curry, and it was delicious. I don't think it's possible to have a poor meal out here in Japan. Even the convenience stores carry microwave meals that are quite good and dirt cheap.

This same weekend there were also a bunch of local bands playing in an open area near the main train station. Since it was only a short walk from the hotel I had been staying in I ventured over. Many of the bands looked like high school or college age people, but they were quite good. A wide variety of music was played in 15 minutes sets, and then the bands would change. What I got to experience was some J-Rock, some upbeat jam band stuff (my personal favorite, I just don't know how to describe it), and a DJ with a brass section. Who knew you could combine "club" music with (jazz) club music and have it sound really good?  I tried to record some of it, but the audio quality does not do the performances justice. I wish I would have been able to understand the band names so I would have been able to find them later.

I have spent a fair amount of my evenings socializing with the other JETs, since we all live in the same apartment complex, and second group just arrived this week. We have gone out for good food, and they are good company to be around. It's nice to not be isolated from other English speakers and people my own age, since most 20 somethings move away from Tottori to live in the big cities.

The school week has been very slow, it is still summer vacation so students are only at school for club activities and optional study hall. I have been helping a couple students with English speeches they are working on. There is a regional competition coming up in September.  Apart from that I have just been trying to prepare for my first few lessons.  I have eaten at some interesting restaurants over the past few days. A few of the teachers invited me to a traditional Japanese lunch place earlier in the week, which had a wide variety of food on a tray. It was good and the company was fun, even though I could not understand the conversation at all.

A highlight of my gastronomic adventures was a small ramen restaurant, who's name translates to "Carpe Diem" one of the teachers recommended. And seize the day I did, because she challenged me to eat the biggest meal they offered. Up to this point I have been very happy about Japanese food costs, but let down by portion sizes. So I accepted the challenge. I ordered the biggest bowl of pork ramen they offered. However, at this restaurant, once you order they then ask, free of charge, what serving size of toppings your would like. The topping is bean spouts, cabbage, minced garlic, and a pork fat broth/drizzle which comes in 4 sizes: garnish, a little pile, cover the bowl, and a small mountain. Accepting my co-workers challenge, I went for the mound. Check it out:



This was one of the best meals I have eaten out here. Not only was I uncomfortably full (clocked a solid 40 minutes of eating), but that drizzle was one of the best things I have ever tasted. Will definitely be going back, but probably ordering a more reasonable size.

Speaking of food, I also believe I have found my staple fallback restaurant. It is a 24 hour beef bowl chain very close to my apartment. This was a godsend since the food is inexpensive, portion sizes are sizable, and I can go whenever I want!

O ya, I got to move into my apartment in the middle of this week. I spent some time settling in. Thankfully my predecessor, Ivan, has gone above and beyond in helping me settle in to life and work in Tottori. I have really lucked out to have someone I can rely on, which is very unusual for JETs. He left a fair amount of useful stuff in the apartment, so I have not had to shop for much. I have been shopping at Aeon, which is a large department store/mall company which has many locations throughout Japan. Think Super Targets.

My new apartment- Copo Hestia

However, I recently discovered that second hand stores, which are big in Japan, have waaaaay more stuff than US secondhand stores. I regret not shopping there first. I have found surfboards to washing machines to new tea sets to bicycles to cheezy home workout machines all in the same store! It's like a community garage sale inside these places. Very cool and pretty convenient for inexpensive lifestyles.

Now that the week is over I will spend the weekend helping run an English camp.

The First Week

This is quite the post, so the TL;DR version:

• Flight and Orientation were good, met new people and had good accomodations
• Tottori is rather rural, think FoCo blended with Commerce City.
• Food is good everywhere, and relatively inexpensive
• My new phone is EPIC, btw you can still message me through FB, Line (cstjohn), or google hangouts, and my US phone still gets texts.
• The school I work at is a trade school/high school. These are common in Japan.
• It is Summer Vacation out here, so I have a month to prepare for lesson plans and schedule myself.

While I did not come out to Japan with any expectations, this week has been a surprisingly varied experience overall.

The long flight was pretty good. The plane had a widescreen touch screen with a lot of video content, which supplemented my already large entertainment library I brought with me on the plane.

We arrived at Narita Airport, which much like DIA is large but far out from any city. We took a bus into Tokyo. The road systems are fascinating, with much of their roadways either elevated above ground level snaking their way around, or buried underneath the city.

We stayed in Shinjuku for orientation, with is a ward within Tokyo that has government buildings and many international companies. It is incredibly commercial, with malls and restaurants everywhere. The Keio Plaza hotel where we all stayed for orientation was quite posh. What I was particularly humored by was the little touches that are absent elsewhere, like an auto-defogging mirror.

That evening we were on our own for dinner, so another ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) named John and I went to breakfast for dinner at Slappy Cakes, a Portland based chain that has most of their locations in Asia. It exceeded expectations and was absolutely delicious.

The hotel breakfast was western style, and the eggs were delicious. They used malt to fluff them, I plan on trying this on my own time later to see if I can get the same result.

Orientation itself was rather simplistic, and having spoken to my predecessor, it does not sound like it really prepared me for teaching. However there was some useful demonstrations and I was able to grab contact information from a variety of people I will hopefully be able to visit over the coming year.

The next nights were spent exploring Tokyo a bit more. I went to a game center, aka an arcade, which was rather impressive. Arcades are very common in Tokyo, with a variety of things to play. They tier their floors by gameplay style, for example there was an entire floor of music and dance games above the gambling casino style floor.

I also went on top of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, which features a famous view of the city, much like the Empire State building for New York. It was quite amazing to see a city that continues out of my line of sight.  (Sorry for the potato quality)

 Tokyo was very impressive and interesting, I wish I was not so far away from it.

After orientation finished I departed from Tokyo to Tottori, which is even more rural than I expected. The best correlation I can make for the city is Fort Collins and Commerce City blended together. It has the amenities which make it a city, but only just. The plus side is the city is rather easy to navigate, and my apartment is very centrally located. However, due to its remote nature many people in their 20s move away to Osaka, which has created a dearth of youth culture. So it does not sound like there will be much for me to do within the city, however it seems that I will be kept quite busy at work during the weekdays anyway, so I do not foresee it being much of an issue.

I was picked up from the airport and taken to lunch by Mori-sensei, one of the 3 English teachers I will be working with, a physics teacher, and Ivan my predecessor. We went for conveyor belt sushi, which was delicious. Fish is particularly abundant in Tottori since it is rural and resides on the coast.
My first evening in Tottori ended with meeting the other ALTs for dinner at a good restaurant called Source Cafe and a small local bar run by our landlord's son.
I spent the rest of this week running around getting other logistics squared away like getting my bank account, rail pass, and phone.  Speaking of which, I am glad I splurged on a nice phone. This thing is ridiculous. Apart from having great specs and a good aesthetic, it has some really neat features like being waterproof and glove mode, which apparently enables me to use my phone underwater while wearing mittens. Seriously though, this thing is beautiful.


I have been spending the week in a hotel until my apartment is ready. It is very convenient, and it serves breakfast which is nice right now. It is Japanese style, which I have noticed with all of the meals out here, is mostly rice. So finding filling food has been difficult. However, food is relatively inexpensive and there is no tax at restaurants! So I have been adjusting by getting higher quantities of food instead.

To end the week I went to school for my official first day. I work at Koryo High School, which is a non-academic school. The best way I can describe this is the school is a trade school/high school, whereas the academic high schools are college-prep schools. This is interesting because the homerooms are divided among career orientations. For example homeroom 3-F is the 3rd years studying food prep. These students take their common core classes like math and English, and also take classes in cooking, food distribution, etc.  I find this system very interesting, because it gives students valuable life skills by the time they graduate, yet I do not think I would have trusted my 14 year old self to decide my career path (especially considering I don't think my 24 year old self has figured it out yet).

Since it is still summer vacation, the only students at the school are there for club activities, which are taken much more seriously than in the US. Best way to think of it is club activities are like 5A varsity sports, they are students' jobs outside of school. I spent most of my day beginning to conceptualize my self presentation, which my first round of classes will be. I spent the afternoon proofing one of the English club student's speech, which she will use in a competition next month. Throughout the day I met various students, all of whom were rather shy. I have heard this is a common theme across Japan with foreign teachers. Yet a few of them became more social the more I spoke to them.

So it has been quite a trip so far. I will be easing into the school routine this month before school starts up on the 27th, which will hopefully give me time to prepare for classes and build my schedule. Next on the list is finding places to exercise and ways to travel!

PS. While I haven't heard too much from people in the US since I moved out here, that could be due to the time difference. However, now that I have my phone again I am online through Facebook, Google, Line (username: cstjohn), and my US phone still receives texts.