June 29th, 2003
5:02 pm
I’m getting a little bit desperate here. Yesterday I went to the Working Holiday Maker’s office again, and again no restaurant job available. I asked where I could use a printer to the nice girl that I’ve spoken to before. You see I had my resume in the computer, but I couldn’t get a hard copy, oh to make matter even worse, my resume was all in English; in Japan it is usual for one to fill in a recc-sure, which is basically a fixed questionnaire about you. The girl there just happen to have some spare recc-sure, so she gave me two copies and told me that I can probably find a printer to use in a shop called Kinko’s. She told me that it’s an American company, but I don’t remember seeing it in Britain, do we have them in Britain? I went to a Kinko’s near Shinjuku, and wow, it’s a nice place all right, there you get to choose between using a PC or a Mac (they have three of each kind), and you get to serve the internet and use software like Office, Explorer and even Photoshop. They have nearly every kind of removable media drive attached to the computer, so it’s like an office that can be rented for a short time.
Anyway why am I telling you all this, get to something interesting you say. Well I decided that I’d go to Akihabara after I got my resume printed (by the way I couldn’t fill in my recc-sure; too many Kanjis). On the train I tried really hard to build up my psychology, I said to myself.
“Joe, you have to find a job there, and don’t go back home until you do. After all wouldn’t many people there would like to have a staff who can speak both English and Chinese?”
After I got out of the station I started walking around the place, I immediately saw a duty free shop there, but I thought I’d walk around a bit more first. After a while I got my eye set at the first duty free shop I saw, although for some reason I just couldn’t walk into it, it’s just that difficult, I waited around for what must be about 15 to 20 minutes. I then decided that I’d be brave and march in to the shop; I went up to a lady there and said
“sumimasen ga, demo watashi ha shigoto ga hoshi desu. Watashi ha, eigo mo, chügokugo mo hanasemasu.”
To my big surprise she immediately said “ni shi chong guo ren ah?” Which is Chinese for “are you Chinese”, so I said yes, and then I said, “Well actually I’m British”. She then asked me which is my better language, so I said English. She then changed to speaking to me in English. So this lady in the shop can speak fluent Chinese, fluent English and fluent Japanese. Her Chinese sound to me like a native speaker, so I thought she’s probably a Chinese or Taiwanese, but she’s got a Japanese name on her badge (four Kanji), so I don’t really know. She was really nice to me, she said that she’ll give my resume to the manager the next time he comes in to the shop, but when I mentioned that I’m going back on September the 9th, she said then they can’t hire me; since it’ll take two weeks for the training in the shop. So well that was quite an extraordinary experience.
I went up to another shop’s duty free department, this time I waited for another 20 minutes just hanging around inside the shop, there were about three men working in there. I then eventually walked up to one of them and said the same thing that I said to the lady earlier on, and this time I got quite a different response, the man just stared at my resume in a silence for about a minute, then he said “uh?”, I then repeated “watashi ha shigoto ga höshi desu ga”, and then he just looked really disapproved, so I walked out. By then even though I’ve only tried two shops, but I knew I just couldn’t face going into another shop and go over the same thing again.
This evening I went to the Working Holiday Maker’s party, I thought I’d wear my kilt there, since that would shoe my Scottish identity. I was a bit surprised that I didn’t get much stare on the way there, although a guy who sat beside me on the train kind of turned around to look at my face, and I could tell that he felt quite uneasy. When I got to the place all the girls were like “kawai”, although many of them keep calling it a skirt, so I often said “sukato janai, kiluto desu”, it was kind of fun, two people said that I look like a Japanese idol, but I don’t know what idol go round wearing a kilt here. A lady that works in the office there asked me that can I talk about my own country to a group of students there, I wasn’t sure what it was all about, then later realised that they would like me to be their English teacher! It was quite a surprise to me, it all happened so suddenly; we arranged to meet up next Saturday. Although one thing is that I’ve never taught any English before, and these people aren’t beginners, they can all speak English quite well already, so I’m sure what to do for them, the plan I got now is to go through a newspaper article with them. Although if any of you reader out there have any other ideas, please let me know.
June 26th, 2003
5:00 pm
Some of you might have noticed that this site had absolutely no updates, and then suddenly a big chunk gets uploaded. Well the reason for this is that I couldn’t upload my webpage when I was staying with Malcolm, and then when I had internet connection I found out that NTL wouldn’t let me access my web space from another ISP’s line, so anyway I had to sign up for a Apple’s .mac account.
But please let me know what you all think of this, if you think it’s boring and pointless then I probably won’t bother updating it, but if you people actually like it I would put more effort to it, and I’ll work on the photos section too.
And if any of you have a server with some spare space and bandwidth left, please be kind and host my site. Pleeeeeeeezzzzzeeeee.
June 25th, 2003
4:58 pm
This looking like a Japanese thing really doesn’t always work in my favour, although perhaps when I can speak fluent Japanese I’ll be glad that I blend in. Anyway I bought a copy of the Japan Times last Monday for it’s jobs section, and to my disappointment I couldn’t find any restaurant job there. I saw an small ad on the corner by a English language school that’s looking for native English speaker who have a little bit of Japanese ability, I thought to myself “I could do that”, so I phoned up the language school, the girl at the other end didn’t speak very good English, so we spoke in Japanese, she sounded really enthusiastic about hiring me, she then asked me whether I could go for a interview at 5:30 that day. When I arrived at the office (on time), they were like “who are you?”
I said, “I’m here for the interview.”
“Do you have a appointment”, said a girl with a very quiet voice.
“Yes, at 5:30” I said. Her and her colleagues looked really surprised. By that time I was a bit pissed off.
The girl then asked me “do you have a resume”, I couldn’t understand her, since she was so quiet and she didn’t pronounce re-su-me, instead she pronounced it as if the e at the end was a magic e, ok so maybe that’s the way Americans pronounce it.
Anyway, they then thought they couldn’t just ask me to leave, so they asked me to sit down in the waiting room. A few minutes later the quiet girl came back with a form for me to fill in, it was a crappy form that god knows been photo copied how many times. The form asked me for some basic information like name, nationality and when am I free to teach. Then she came back with a second form, which had three very difficult questions on it. I think the questions were:
Explain the difference between “I’m going to the park tomorrow” and “I will go to the park tomorrow”.
Explain the difference between “at first” and “first”.
Show the different ways word “would” can be used.
Anyway, the questions did really freak me out at first (who wouldn’t, unless you’re a real English teacher), but after a bit of thought I could answer them all pretty well.
And that was it! The girl came back and said to me that they would phone me before Friday if they would like to hire me, which I took it to mean get lost. Well the girl did then ask me “are your parents Japanese?” and can I speak Japanese. So anyway, in some language schools they don’t just want people who can speak English, they want white people who can speak English, but god know which is more important to them.