At the end of July I’m finishing my Day Job teaching English in Japan with the JET Program, and the transition has given me a lot to think about. This is the third in a multi-part series about working on JET, what it’s brought me, how I feel about it, and where I’m headed in the future. If you missed the beginning you can get caught up with Part 1 and Part 2.
The cover photo shows the local government office in Namerikawa City, Toyama (役場, yakuba) sometime in the early- to mid-twentieth century.
Last week I talked about how hard it’s been to leave a job I really, really like and gain tremendous fulfillment from because I want to move on to a new stage of my life, especially with writing and creative work. It’s been getting harder and harder to both teach as an elementary school ALT, work on my new novel, and keep up with all the other activities and commitments I have, including this blog.
This balancing act has actually gotten a lot harder since I first got to Toyama in 2018. Back then, I had a lot more free time, partly because I didn’t co-edit an indie zine or belong to as many groups or know as many people in my area, but it’s also because my teaching job was less busy back then.
Here’s why the busy Day Job part matters: At other Day Jobs I’ve had, being busy impacted my outside of work time because I’d come home stressed, exhausted, or still thinking about my Day Job in ways I found distracting. Teaching on, JET, though, is different.
On JET, when my Day Job are slow, I can pull out my laptop and work on creative work, exactly like I would at home. That’s something I’ve kept on the down-low for a long time, but that really deserves an entire blog post, because it’s that awesome.
Down Time at Work Can Equal Productive Time
Back in college I had an awesome job checking boats for invasive plants before their owners launched them on to the lake. When the weather was nice I kept pretty busy because there were a lot of boats to check. But when it was slow (and this was something I was specifically told by my boss), I was free to pull out a book and read.
At the time, this felt like I’d stumbled upon some unbelievable jackpot—the job was actually paying me to sit under a shady tree on a beautiful summer day and read, exactly like I did at home for free. And I never forgot how good that felt.
(By the way, getting paid to read books while your job is slow is totally legitimate—the US Department of Labor refers to it as being engaged to wait, and it’s the same reason warehouse workers have to be paid while they’re waiting for the next delivery with nothing to do.)
Anyway, flash forward to 2010 when I first lived in Japan and worked in for a private English conversation school (which, by the way, I later wrote a little book about). My job was really busy, like, all the time with no summer vacation, but I also met a lot of teachers who worked for the JET Program who didn’t seem that busy at all. When we got together, the JET teachers would talk about spending long periods of time at their desks with nothing to do, surfing the internet, or reading books.
Even though the JET teachers complained about the down time (!!!!), I was incredibly jealous because they had a job where they got paid to do other things at work. It also paid more than working at the lake, came with health insurance, and wasn’t just for the summer.
So when I applied to JET in 2018, this was a big incentive.
My ALT Job Left Me With a LOT of Free Time
During my job as an ALT, most semesters I taught just under twenty classes a week—four classes a day or less. Japanese elementary school classes are forty-five minutes long, with five minutes in between. Add in meetings, morning prep time, and miscellaneous events and tasks, and that still left me with at least two hours a day that were basically mine.
Some days I had even more free time, often in large chunks. One semester I only had two classes on Mondays—like, for the whole semester. Other days classes would be cancelled because of special events, meetings, or because the semester was winding down and the kids had other things to do.
Japanese elementary schools also have a five-week summer vacation in August, and two weeks break between semesters around New Years and the end of March. During those days I was contractually required to be at the ALT office (or I could freely use the twenty paid days off I got per year), but there was almost never work for us to do at the ALT office, so this was free time as well.
(Here I should mention that JET jobs come with all sorts of workloads depending on your placement—I know JETs who are waaaaaaay busier than I was at my peak, and others who teach two classes a week and have oodles of free time. As JETs love to say, every situation is different ;-)
I’m sure a lot of you are probably saying, “But you’re a teacher, so shouldn’t you get vacations off like back in the States?” Sorry, Japan doesn’t work that way—teachers here have to come to school, clock in, and be at their desks the same as normal employees during vacations—and they usually have a bunch of work to do too. ALTs, however, don’t have the same workload, though we do have to follow the same rules about being clocked in.
Hence the being engaged to wait.
How Did You Use Your Free Time?
In the beginning it was really hard for me to use my free Day Job time effectively because I wasn’t used to it. None of my American coworkers were interested in using their free time effectively—one would watch Netflix, and another would chat with friends online and complain openly about how bored he was, which I found distracting. So I was kind of on my own.
I could always bring my laptop to work, but depending on which school or office I was working at, sometimes I had access to the internet and sometimes I didn’t. I also had to leave my laptop sound off unless I used headphones—which I kind of didn’t like doing because I wanted to create a good impression. These restrictions made things more complicated.
I started by studying Japanese, which worked pretty well because it didn’t require internet (I’m old school, so I use mostly textbooks ;-) and my Japanese coworkers were interested in seeing what I was learning. On days I had internet, I’d send emails, and then I figured out that on days I didn’t have internet I could write emails in Word and then send them when I had internet access again. I’d also download client manuscripts to edit and would work on them during my desk time.
Eventually I started blogging at work—like, a lot. I’d draft out a post, check it, then post it when I had internet access. About 90% of my blog posts between 2018 and 2020 were written, at least in part, at my Day Job.
I also worked on the TRAM, fine-tuned the manuscript for MFA Thesis Novel before sending it out to small presses, wrote long emails to friends, worked on short stories and essays, and even read books on my Kindle. (The one day I tried reading a paperback a lot of people suddenly wanted to talk to me, so I took this as a sign I was doing something wrong…)
The one thing I never did at work was write fiction. For me, writing a first draft requires a special frame of mind, focus, and solitude, and I HATE to be interrupted while I’m writing something complicated like a novel.
Alas, All Things Must Pass…
As you may have noticed, I said earlier that I wrote most of my blog posts at work between 2018 and 2020. That’s because in 2020 my Day Job started getting a lot busier.
Around that time, the Japanese government raised the number of required English classes for elementary school students, so there was more teaching to be done as a whole. Our city also lost an ALT due to a job change, and then another when we couldn’t get a regular replacement due to COVID. Also, things like field trips and special events that usually cancelled English classes were almost all put on hold due to COVID.
This moved me from less than twenty classes per week to twenty-five classes per week, plus prep time (which, because of my coworker I had trouble with, was now taking a LONG time). When I felt like I was on the verge of a breakdown my boss was able to lighten my schedule, but I still didn’t have as much free time as before.
This meant that for the last year, my free time at work has been minimal. I still have some, but now, depending on the day, it’s usually only an hour or two.
And with me being busier than before, this hasn’t been a good combination….
At This Point in My Life, Having Free Time at My Day Job is Essential
Not having Day Job time to do my creative work also played a factor in my decision to leave JET. If I could have the same job but with more free time, I’d definitely take it.
I have a friend who’s an engineer, and while he really likes his job, he hates that he has to do it for forty hours a week plus overtime. He always says that in an ideal world he’d like to be an engineer part-time and have a free day or two to relax, play video games, and enjoy his hobbies, and he wishes jobs like his allowed more flexibility.
For me, though, being on JET has showed me the value of having a Day Job that pays a full-time wage while not taking up forty hours a week. Among other perks, it’s allowed me to do more creative work than I ever could have working another kind of job, all while making livable wages and getting health insurance. This has made me consider other ways I can do this in the future—and I kind of already have some on the horizon.
And that, of course, is what I’m going to talk about next time ;-)