A view of Tokyo
I arrived at Narita Airport, Chiba (near Tokyo), at the end of July 1999. Although I had experience teaching freshman composition as a T.A. in graduate school in the U.S., I had never taught Japanese students (one of my freshmen students in the U.S. had been a native of the Philippines). Nevertheless, I was anxious to jump-start my teaching career.
I was based at a senior high school for the first year. “I’ll give it a year, maybe two,” I promised myself. (This is how all ex-pats start…)
Ten years later, I’m still in Japan, and I’m still teaching English. In the interim, I have moved four times within three separate prefectures, taught English from elementary school age to senior citizen, and earned a second master’s degree in education.
Oh, and I also got married. This past year, my wife and I had a baby girl, who is the pride and joy of our small family. My wife works full time, but she was granted child care leave; she was even paid 30% of her salary for the year (much of which had to be paid back immediately for pension and health insurance, of course).
“I’ll give it a year, maybe two,” I promised myself.
However, when she returns to work, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to find a day care center in our area…let alone a day care center that is willing to take care of an under 1-year-old infant that can’t walk or talk yet.
So, what to do? We talked it over, checked out our options. I found out from my school that, technically, I could take child care leave until the child is 3, provided that my spouse was working full-time and no close relatives were living in the local area. Great, I thought. Why not?
And so the adventure began…