Jason’s Random Thoughts

The skies are clear, and the attractions are darn-near empty. What better time is there to see some of the many great sites all around Japan? Reiko and I have been itching to travel around Japan together and, now that her birthday is just around the corner, this week seemed to be the perfect time to get out and about. That said, it wasn’t one of those “spur of the moment” things … Reiko’s been planning this for weeks.

Our first destination: Osaka (大阪). This is a city that I’ve wanted to visit for a while, as everybody who goes absolutely loves the place. We decided to take the Shinkansen from Nagoya in the early morning so that we could get the most out of our visit to Osaka, and it was well worth the effort.

First stop: 大阪城 (Osaka Castle)!

Osaka Castle has a long history, and is said to have been impervious to attack. While history shows us that this was not exactly the case, the opportunity to examine for myself just how easily one could have taken the castle was a nice challenge. This was my second visit to a famous castle in Japan and, I must say, it was almost disappointing to see that the inside of the landmark had been completely updated. Luxurious elevators, spacious museum displays, hidden power and water lines, and automatic sliding doors on the top level for guests. It’s almost as though the outer shell is all that remains of this testament to time. That said, it’s still a great opportunity to learn more about Japan’s past.

Completed in 1598, Osaka castle has a long history of being used in conflicts and later being restored.  The most interesting period, however, was in the first 22 years of the castle’s existence.

Hideyori died shortly before the completion of the castle, but it was passed to his son, Toyotomi Hideyori.  Less than two years later, Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated Hideyori’s armies at the Battle of Sekigahara, but let Hideyori remain in Osaka.  Fourteen years later (now 1614), Tokugawa attacked Hideyori during the winter.  Although Toyotomi’s forces were outnumbered 2 to 1, they managed to fight off Hideyori’s 200,000-strong army and protect the castle’s outer walls.  Realizing Osaka Castle’s strength lied in its moats, Tokugawa began filling up the outer moat, which left the castle essentially defenseless.

This didn’t stop Hideyori, though.  In the summer of 1615, he issued that the moat be cleared once more.  Tokugawa, outraged by this action, sent his armies to Osaka Castle once again.  However, rather than simply lay seige to the castle, Tokugawa planned to eliminate the Toyotomi clan completely.

He quickly succeeded.

Five years later, the new heir to the shogunate, Tokugawa Hidetada, began to reconstruct and rearm the castle.  He had an elevated main tower (five stories outside, and eight inside) built, and assigned the task of constructing new walls to the 64 individual samurai clans.  The walls built 400 years ago still stand today and are made with interlocking bricks rather than mortar and other similar materials.  Many of the stones were brought from quarries in the Seto Inland Sea, and bear the family crests of the people who laid them into the walls.

All that in 22 years.

Since that time, Osaka Castle has been destroyed and rebuilt several times, with the most recent renovations completed in 1997.  All in all, this is one of the places in Osaka that you do not want to miss if you have the opportunity to go.  There’s lots to learn, lots to see, and lots to eat.

Next Stop: 大阪水族館 (Osaka Aquarium)

The next stop on our list was the ever-famous Osaka Aquarium.  Situated in Osakako, this aquarium takes up a massive eight floors and has some of the largest completely enclosed water tanks I’ve ever seen.

Reiko and I managed to get through the whole complex in about three hours, and we were taking our time.  The nice thing about this aquarium is that there’s lots of windows and lots of space.  That said, you wouldn’t want to go on a weekend or during any of the standard Japanese holidays.  These attractions are really enjoyable only if you’re going while everyone else is at work or in school.  Anything else will turn out to be little more than a test of patience.

The Osaka Aquarium was not quite as educational as the one in Nagoya, nor did it have any outdoor attractions (that we saw).  However, to make up for this, there are an incredible number of fish and other water animals for people to enjoy.  Almost every tank was two stories or more, allowing people to see how the animals interacted with the land and sea, and there was nothing blocked from view.  If an otter was going to grab himself a fish from the bottom of the pool, then there was nothing stopping the crowd from seeing the animal catch its prey and devour it right in front of us.

But then … this is normal behavior at the dinner table, too.

I’ll write about the food and the hotel in another post, as there was just too many food places to write about.  Perhaps I’ll just pick the ones that we enjoyed … that should keep the post under 2000 words.  Have you been to Osaka?  What places would you recommend we see on our next visit to the Food Capital of Japan?

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People often ask me how I come up with so many things to write about, and I find the question strange, as my problem is just the opposite. I have way too much to write about. As it stands, my trusty iPaq PDA contains fragments of 40+ potential blog posts, and another 30+ possible subjects in a condensed list. There’s just so much out there for us to share, and an incredibly huge readership that’s just waiting to learn the things we might be taking for granted. If people really want to show how to use social media platforms to drive meaningful conversations rather than letting it continue to be advertised as yet another marketing tool, we have to run out and educate the Google-searchers at a ridiculous speed.

All this said, my sites are just not up for the content. For reasons I only partially understand, Google has spanked my sites pretty hard over the last 12 months, leaving j2fi.net as my best-ranked site with a meager PR2. The other sites I’ve operated have fallen from PR5 to a big fat 0. While it is certainly possible to bring these up, I’d much rather pass on these topics to Japan bloggers that might be fishing around for ideas.

So, without further delay, here are 40 topics that might stave off a drought in your site’s content:

1. How I Use JapanSoc
2. A Community I Love
3. Japanese Technology that Empowers Me
4. How Mixi Got It Right
5. Ways to Kill Time on a Subway/Train/Bus/etc.
6. Ways to Save Time at a Bad Conference
7. My Children Will Do It Differently
8. How Schools Could Effectively Use Social Media
9. The Best [Food / Restaurant / Karaoke Bar] in [City]
10. Making a Mini-series
11. Manga I Want to Read (In Japanese)
12. Finding the Niche
13. If I Ran NHK…
14. What I Spend Money On
15. How To Find a Public Washroom
16. What To Do When You Can’t Find a Wastebasket
17. The Best Books I’ve Read
18. Ten Guilty Pleasures
19. When It’s Okay To Act Like A Tourist
20. The Best Places to Study Japanese
21. When I Feel Frustrated I…
22. My Day Job vs. My Passion
23. In 5 Years I’ll Be …
24. Fixing The Stereotypes
25. Friends I Can’t Wait To Meet
26. Could I Quit My Day Job?
27. The Art of Chaos (The Endless Crowds)
28. You Are Here (A City Guide)
29. Which TV Network Is Best
30. Attracting a Japanese Audience
31. News in Japan - Is It Useful?
32. Downtime - How I Recharge The Batteries
33. Ten Japan Blogs I Love
34. Handling Critics
35. Just When I Think I’m Done
36. Newspapers and the Demons Within
37. Buying [Product] - Where To Go and Where To Avoid
38. The Neighbourhood - Where To Live In A City Near You
39. How To Get By Without Language
40. Seeing The Forests For The Trees

So there you have it. 40 topics that can help stave off the potential for writers block. If you do decide to use one of these, I ask only one thing: a quick link back to j2fi.net

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What’s the shelf-life of a post on a semi-personal blog?  A Month?  Six Months?  A Year?  It’s something that I’ve come to think about as I watch the post counter on my administration screen edges ever closer to the big seven hundred.  This blog was created almost two years ago and, in that time, it has gone from being a site worthy of 400+ uniques a day to it’s current level of something closer to 210.  Aside from the recent and intentionally abrasive post regarding foreigners in Japan, nothing has warranted more traffic than this since February.  So how can we go about extending the life of some of our better older posts that we might have worked so hard to produce, which now sit on the way-side invisible to everything but the search engines?

Blogging seems to be all about fresh content.  People don’t want to read something from last Tuesday, because that’s old news.  We want the freshest and most current opinions, gossip, rumors and tips … even if the less-current stuff is just as relevant.  Perhaps this is one of the results of being part of the first Internet Generation, perhaps it’s something else.  But regardless of the real reason, many bloggers might see the countless hours of past work that now sits idle in our rapidly-bloating databases as a big problem.

But there are ways of extending the life of our older blog posts, and the number one way is to link to our older posts from new ones.

No duh, right?  Well, sometimes the direct linking method just won’t work.  So, to that end, here are a few different tips that might help out.  While it might not be feasible to try all of these, I’d suggest picking just the ones that would work best for you and your readers.

1. Display Previous Posts on Your Sidebar - Blogger-based sites have this as a standard option, and it can be found in several hundred of the nicer WordPress themes as well.  By displaying a list of recent entries in an easy-to-find location, visitors will be more likely to click on links with interesting titles.  One problem with this, though, is when the post titles are just a bit too long … this can cause some formatting issues.
2. Post Your Related Entries - There are lots of plugins that will do this for you, and most put these links at the bottom of a post while saying “If you’ve liked what you just read, here is some more on a similar subject.” While this is a standard sight on several larger websites, many smaller blogs can benefit from this simple form of greater exposure.
3. Stealth Linking - This is when you link to one of your older blog posts without making the link so obvious that people ignore it.  These links tend to naturally fit into the content of a post and is a great way to have people look a little deeper with your site.
4. Highlight Important Posts - For magazine-style blogs, rather than display posts in some random or time-based order, it might be beneficial to highlight the higher quality posts somehow so they remain on the front page longer.  By doing this, you not only let new visitors see your premium content, but you make it easier for regular readers to focus on the better (or more important) material that deserves attention.
5. Write Follow-Up Posts - How often do you find yourself thinking of a topic to blog about only to say “Ah, I wrote about that a few months ago!” ?  I’ve been saying this quite a bit lately, as there are just way too many posts on too many subjects.  However, why limit ourselves to just one post on a subject?  Times change, opinions change, new bits of information are revealed, and new insights into a matter can be discussed.  Heck, if that’s not enough reason to re-visit a subject, why not examine your writing style?  Many people have some incredibly casual writing styles when they first start blogging, which can later evolve to become both richer and more mature.  By reviewing a previous post and freshening the language, you can breathe new life into a worthy article.
6. Learn From Past Mistakes - Many of us make some pretty big errors in judgment during our blogging careers.  Perhaps we insulted the wrong people, or maybe we were just wrong about a subject.  There’s no shame in saying “I’m sorry” when we’re proven to be a little inaccurate in our statements.  Heck, depending on how well we present our apology, it could even be a great way to boost readership!  How often have we seen well known bloggers link to a site that apologized for an unfair comment or insult?  If there’s something in our blogs’ past that can be corrected, there’s really no time like the present.

Hopefully there’s something on this list that can help you bring more traffic to your sites.  While I don’t do many of these on j2fi.net, there are a few other sites where I help out with content where these tips have proven to be invaluable.  Regardless of which method you choose, it’s definately worth a cursory examination.  When I look at the statistics of people visiting this blog, the exit rate can be disturbingly high.  This clearly means that they come from somewhere and leave without clicking deeper into the site.  This is pretty unfortunate because, while some of my content can be quite questionable in terms of quality, I do have some well-written posts that might be on a subject that interests them.

I can say with certainty that if you have a blog, you also have some great content that is just waiting to be shared with the world.  Why not make it easier for people to find?

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It’s that time of year again. Typhoons are fast on their way, and it’s just about time to harvest millions of kilograms of plump rice from seemingly endless fields of green. Students are back in school, and the summer vacations have long since passed, putting the public transportation systems back on their regular schedules, allowing millions of people to get to work within their comfortably hurried schedules. Autumn is here, after all, so it’s time to rejoice.

But it comes as little surprise to find one group of eternally disgruntled individuals marking their territory with their smug attitudes and self-righteous indignations. Yes, I speak of course about some of the less-popular English Language Instructors in this country. Now that the summer heat is on the decline and daily humidity levels have dropped below 300%, they are airing out their list of non-weather-related grievances with this country and thumping their chests as though people actually care about what these people think.

Would You Like Some Cheese With That Whine?

Over the last few weeks there has been a growing number of people posting negative comments about Japan, a country that 99% of all foreign people consciously chose to live and work in. Here is a brief list of the ones I’ve encountered so far this month:

• House prices are falling too fast
• Kids are treated as Gods in the Public Schools and teachers have no control
• School lunches are bland and boring
• The Olympics only showed Japanese athletes
• The only shows on TV are cooking shows or restaurant reviews
• The Tokyo Airport is in Chiba Prefecture
• Coffee beans are two years old and there is no cream (from milk), just the powered cream
• Bureaucratic nightmares requiring endless confirmations
• Crappy service sector employees
• Lack of accountability
• Lack of responsibility for personal actions
• Lack of respect for everyone’s personal space
• Personal space is limited to a 1mm radius away from our body
• Nobody pays attention to their surroundings when walking, driving, riding a bicycle, etc.
• Mind-numbing noise levels
• Childish mentalities
• Things are either “kawaii” or ugly
• Too many people fart in public
• The Japanese Police are about as effective against crime as dirty kleenex
• People pick their nose, trim their nails, put on makeup and shave in public
• Poorly timed traffic lights
• Excessive traffic lights
• Hidden traffic lights
• Japanese girls think it’s okay to be stupid if they have a nice body
• Japanese people can’t act, only react
• Japanese men only care about sex
• Japanese people are too concerned about status quo, and won’t think outside the box
• Japan still thinks it’s a victim and never an aggressor
• Everyone is racist
• Nobody wants to hire a foreigner
• Nobody wants to sit next to a foreigner
• When there’s a problem, they never tell you directly what the issue is

The list goes on and on and on and on … and all I could think of when I was listening to this drivel was this:

Shut up and go home.

I’ll admit that sometimes I find certain things in this country frustrating, but it’s no different than the garbage that one would find in any other country of the world. Well, no. I take that back. There is one thing that really pisses me off in Japan: Whiny, bitch-ass gaijin who think they’re so smart and genuinely believe that Japan should become the next .

If people really think their home country was so great, why did they leave? While this next part does not apply to every foreigner I’ve met in Japan, there is one common truth about many of the English-speaking whiners that have felt the need to stand on their soapbox around me: they’re all failures at home, so escaped to Japan where it would be easier to pass themselves off with a delusional identity.

You’re Not a Teacher. Get Over Yourself

I refuse to call myself an English teacher. Not because it’s a career I had never really seen myself getting in to, but because I did not go to university or college to be a teacher. After high school, I went to college to be a software engineer. While I can take some of the things I’ve learned all those years ago and apply them here in Japan, there is no way I could realistically call myself a teacher for anyone that I sit in a tiny room with as they practice their English language skills. Instead, I prefer to be called a “Language Facilitator” or some other crazy title that does not have the word “teacher” anywhere in sight. If I wanted to be a real teacher, I’d get the formal education to be one. Anything short of a proper Masters Degree in Education is just not good enough.

Being an “English teacher” does not make someone better than everyone else around them.

So when I listen to dolts grand stand about all the faults and failures they’ve encountered while in Japan, it’s hard not to imagine what their life was like back in their home countries. Something tells me it was quite a bit of the same. Politicians were lying and stealing. House prices fluctuated every few years depending on the general economy. People made racist or sexist comments. Discrimination against immigrants was common due to a fear of language and cultural differences (Lord help you if you happen to “look Muslim” in a Christian nation). Traffic lights were timed in a semi-frustrating fashion.

Seriously … these aren’t Japanese problems. They’re human problems.

Let Me Help You

In Vancouver, I liked to think of myself as a “solutions provider.” This is something that I think I’m quite good at. After being made aware of a problem, looking for possible solutions and then present them to the affected parties only seems natural. So when I hear people bitch and moan about how crappy life is here in Japan, I tend to ask some of the following questions:

• Do you have a plane ticket home, yet?
• Have you packed your bags?
• What will you do when you go back to your home country?

Typically, these questions will calm the moaner down long enough to hit them with the target phrase: Go Home.

There are quite a few people that I’ve asked if they needed help finding cheap airfare out of the country, or if they wanted a hand packing their bags. Life is just too short to spend it somewhere we don’t want to be. Heck, with all the economic issues happening in developed nations around the globe, now is the time to make our way back if we truly expect to afford the airfare. Hopefully, with the collapsing financial markets overseas and subsequent ripples it’s sent throughout the globe, a few thousand of the loudest complainers will make a run back to their parents’ basement before it’s too late.

If you know one of these moaners that have nothing positive to say about the country they were once so excited to live and work in, let me know. I’ll be sure to help them pack up and leave before it’s too late.

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This past weekend has seen a lot of money change hands, and a lot of people lose their jobs. According to every report that’s coming out of CNN and the Wall Street Journal, this isn’t over, either.

Despite the fact that so many financial institutions across America and Europe are posting record losses or going out of business, the market in Japan hasn’t been affected too much. Sure, there are pessimists who are saying that Japan is in a recession due to slowing sales, but this isn’t because of what’s happening in America. It’s because of the time of year. This slow-down has been seen every two years around the summer and fall seasons, and typically sticks around until February. Whether this will continue to be the case, however, is not exactly clear.

Aside from all this, one thing is definitely certain: the big Japanese companies are going to be losing some big money in the near future, and this means that there will be fewer people sent to English-speaking countries through employee-exchange programs. As a result of fewer international postings, there will be fewer people sent to study English and other languages. This means that there is a real concern in the language-instruction industry here in Japan as many people are now finding themselves to be sitting idle for too many hours a day.

English teachers in Japan are a dime a dozen. Other-Language teachers are not so common, but there are certainly a fair number of them available in the larger cities. Will we all be able to keep our cushy jobs in this ever-competitive market? Will language schools continue to seek out more foreigners to fill their ranks, or will they start to ask more from the ones currently employed? Only time will tell, but it has quite a few people worried.

Looking at the Trends

Now that September is in full swing, and people are getting back into their 10-month routine of working while impatiently waiting for summer, the number of language teacher positions has dropped significantly. This is to be expected, of course, as any respectable organization would have made their hires in July or August, with the hopes of having people trained and ready to go for the start of September. However, unlike in previous years, the number of open positions this year had dropped significantly.

In 2003, there were approximately 8,000 language positions open between the months of June and August. In 2004 this number increased to 9,000. 2005 and 2006 saw increases to 11,000 and 12,500 respectively *, while 2007 saw a slight drop due to the impending doom of Nova. After that company’s demise, tens of thousands of foreign people were left out of work and had very few options available to them. Some companies tried to pick up the better teachers, but this put the remaining education centers in a pretty tight spot as they tried to find enough work to keep everyone busy and making money in an industry the general public had lost faith in.

As the months wore on, the full effect of the Nova collapse made itself apparent as fewer people came into the various language schools and instead started looking for discount packages online or through language exchanges. To combat this sudden drop, several schools started offering contract discounts of anywhere from 10-40%, which has cut into the bottom line by such a margin that regular staff are being put on reduced hours of laid off in order for the company to make ends meat. Several of the smaller schools are earning just enough to get by thanks to juicy contracts with the local elementary and high schools, but these will soon dry up as the Ministry of Education continues to make changes to how the ALT and JET programs will operate. Larger schools, on the other hand, are busy considering how many part-time teachers to keep and what new lesson packages they can offer their bigger customers in an effort to remain afloat during this period of financial instability.

Is It Really So Bad?

Luckily, I am not part of my company’s sales team, so I don’t know just how well my employer is doing at the moment. If I did, I might be sweating bullets as the number of available customers continues to dry up as fast as spilt water in the Sahara. My own contract is coming up and, while I don’t think I’ll be asked to work less hours or for less money, I am concerned about what the future holds. Reiko and I are still discussing some of our upcoming big purchases, and we’ve been looking at houses with the intentions to buy one in the next five to seven years. In order for any of this to go through, though, I’ll need to be at least 90% confident that I’ll have work during this time. While I’d love to get back into freelance programming at some point in the future as a primary source of income, I’m nowhere near where I need to be for that to happen.

So what does this mean for the foreign language teachers in Japan? It means that we need to start thinking about our options, and making sure that we have enough money saved up should something occur in the next twelve to fourteen months. The questions we need to ask ourselves are these:

• If I don’t have enough work with my current employer between now and 2010, can I get work elsewhere?
• Is my Japanese strong enough to allow me to work at a Japanese company as a translator or a bilingual assistant?
• Do I have enough money to survive for a few months without work?

Some people may have the option of flying home and starting life over again there, but many might not find this prospect very attractive. It takes a great deal of effort to live and work in another country, and many of us have put in countless hours at government offices, embassies and consulates just to make sure that we’re on the level and following all the little rules necessary to have a little fun in our new home nations. On top of this, how many people have decided to call Japan home for the rest of their lives? While I don’t hate Canada, I certainly would not look forward to pulling up roots yet again to move Reiko and I there for something like a severe employment drought. Not yet, anyway. Give me another five or six years here first.

Considering Our Options

Judging from the reports in the news, and the current state of Japan’s larger organizations, this is certainly going to be a big challenge for every language school in Japan. Sure, some of the more established institutions will manage to find ways of cutting costs without interfering too much with their customers’ needs, but this isn’t going to be the case for some of the smaller schools or sole-proprietorships. While the coming months will bring more than a fair share of troubles for people all over the country, there are some great opportunities out there for anyone that is willing to put in the effort.

One of the options that I’m particularly fond of is to work (even part time) for an employment services company. There’s no doubt that many foreigners will turn to places like Addeco and Human to help them find some line of work should the economy shrink too much. If a bilingual (or multilingual) individual were to work at a place like this, then an employment agency would have the opportunity to bring in even more potential revenue. This is, of course, assuming that the person seeking some temporary work was able to speak the minimum amount of Japanese required to work in a factory or some other line of work in Japan.

Another potential consideration would be somewhere in the services industry. Be it a concierge, hotel support staff, call center, tourist destination or whatever. So long as you can get to a place that may require your ability to speak to foreign visitors, you may just find yourself with a stable job in adverse times.

That said, it’s now becoming even more important that we treat any future employment as a “real job.” We’ve all met several people who have viewed language instruction as some sort of “working holiday”, never putting any real effort into the position and wasting considerable amounts of people’s time as the months and years wear on. Within an ever shrinking economy, and a fiercely competitive job market, there’s no room for laziness. The nice thing about this is that many of us will have the opportunity to show many companies that foreigners are not all lazy people who seek to do the minimum amount of work for the maximum amount of money.

Well … let’s hope so.

The next few years could be quite difficult for millions of foreigners all over the world who will find themselves passed over in favor of the local population. But, with diligence and the drive to succeed, we can come out of this recession with some great work experience and a better understanding of the language. I, for one, will certainly do my best to make the best of whatever life might throw in the coming months. So, on that note, it’s time to get back to studying Japanese.

What do you think of the coming economic hiccup? How do you plan on getting through the worst of it should you find yourself jobless?

* rough statistics came from a report I had read a few months ago on one of the Japanese employment boards. I’ll add a link as soon as I can find it again

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