a brief introduction and summary: for new comers!

For those of you who may be reading this for the first time, let me welcome you to our vast readership. If we were taking subscriptions, I am sure the income would be enough to invite all of you over to share a stick of gum when we get back to the United States, and we’re grateful for the interest. By way of introduction and explanation, I am a 24-year-old Oregonian married to a 24-year-old Oregonian (Melissa), and our tree hugging arms are still sore from being ripped away from their rainy home. Together we have a two year old little boy (Callan) whose hankering for sushi is only bested by his love for everything baseball, which makes him a great fit here in Japan.
I work 28 hours a week at Marugame International Academy (MIA), a small private cram school in downtown Marugame that offers classes in all major academic subjects covered on Japan’s annual proficiency tests, the most important of which is English.
Thanks to an overemphasis on grammar in public school English curricula, Japanese English language students get little or no in-class speaking opportunities. This unfortunate reality is bad for education, but great for people like me who actually get paid to speak their native language. Thus my primary job function is to provide exposure, direction, and correction to potential English speakers of all ages. In addition to the several children’s classes I teach, I visit a half dozen preschools, and meet with a few adult students as well.
Though there are many teachers at MIA, there is only a handful that I work with closely. Besides myself there is one other full time American teacher named Pat, and my wife Melissa teaches just four hours a week on Monday afternoons. My boss is a native Japanese speaker with a love for English that borders on unstable (she once told me she used to approach foreigners on the street and ask them to teach her how to cook their country’s food, just so she could get some English practice). Her son and daughter-in-law help out at the bilingual kindergarten, and her husband, in addition to his regular job as an engineer, takes care of the paperwork and accounting.
Now that I am here working, it seems difficult to pinpoint exactly why I wanted to come to Japan. I certainly harbor no deep desires to teach English conversation classes for life, nor do I find the study of language particularly enthralling. However, having served a mission for the LDS church in Japan four years ago, in precisely the same region as my current placement, and having studied the Japanese language both in high school and in college, the opportunity to come back as a ‘civilian’ was certainly inviting. More than that though, I think my wife and I were looking for a change of scenery, an opportunity to branch out from our Provo home before our family gets any bigger. And of course, the money making opportunity was also a large motivator, as was the potential for real work experience.
To prepare for this little excursion, my wife and I checked out every travel book on Japan in every library from Point of the Mountain to Spanish Fork Canyon, frequented every major Japanese informational website, blasted the teachers we were replacing with email after email full of questions about what to expect in the country, and spent thirty bucks on all-you-can-eat sushi at Asuka Japanese restaurant on University Parkway in Provo.