Got to Work With Great People and Had Great Experiences

Japan's hospitality is somewhat legendary and it's largely embodied at Interac from the support staff all the way up to the CEO (story to follow on that one). I have lived in Japan previously and speak and read well enough that I made my way through university doing Japanese sales support and translation. That does little to change the fact that when my plane touched down I was on the other side of the world with a couple of suit cases and not much cash to my name. That's a fairly intimidating prospect.

Interac makes the transition easy though. We had someone there to meet our group and show us to the hotel we'd be staying at during orientation and in the morning we had someone to show us how to get to the office. The main office staff is a mix of native Japanese and foreigners all of whom are friendly and helpful. Even beyond the initial orientation phase some of the people in the home office kept in touch with me and a few of the others that came in with me and we would all occasionally get together to go eat or do karaoke.

The orientation itself was pretty useful. Obviously a portion of it was dedicated to administrative issues like how your health insurance works and such. That portion is not exactly a barrel of laughs but it was reasonably concise and conveyed useful and necessary information. The majority of orientation was devoted to teaching. That part is really useful if, like me at the time, you have little experience with teaching in a classroom setting. Basically it's a team of Interac's highest rated and most experienced teachers giving you a quick crash course on the cultural expectations of Japanese classroom as well as how to prepare good lesson plans and such. Again, they managed to condense a lot of useful information into a relatively short time period.

As for my actual assignment, I enjoyed it very much though I think the specifics of my assignment may be atypical. I was with Interac on a short internship contract so rather than being permanently placed at a few schools, I was placed with one of the branch offices near Chiba. While there, I had an elementary school that I taught at two days a week and spent the rest of my time working in the office doing various translation jobs. For example if any of the ALTs in the area needed to see a doctor but didn't have the language skills to handle that I would meet them at the hospital to serve as an interpreter.

Now to wrap things up, I promised a story about the CEO of the company. One day while I was working in the office we found out that the CEO was going to be in town for a surprise inspection and people were running around frantically tidying up and trying to make sure everything is in order. As you might expect, Japanese companies hold their employees to some pretty high standards (for example even the people taking your order at McDonald's are expected to practice their smile in the mirror so they can greet customers properly). As a result people were really freaking out over this inspection. Some of the Japanese employees told me horror stories about inspections at other companies where the supervisor would see some violation of company protocols and dock the branch manager a month's pay.

Needless to say I built up an image of the CEO as one scary dude in my mind. When he finally got there he and his assistant (who I assume was probably a VP or something) looked around for a bit and then had a meeting with the branch manager. I have no idea how the meeting went and I didn't ask as I didn't see that as my business. When they got out of the meeting though my manager said the CEO wanted to see me.

Oh hell, what did I do, right? Well as it turns out the CEO just wanted to take me to lunch to ask me about my experiences as an ALT and make sure I was being properly looked after and the like. He was actually a really nice guy. Anyway, the point of that story is this: Interac realizes their ALTs are critically important to the success of the company and need to be treated accordingly and that attitude starts right at the very top and proceeds all the way down to the rank and file.