Tokyo Orientation

(Little behind on the updates; sorry about that. Haven't had internet in my apartment until just recently.)

Self portrait at 4 in the morning.

Tokyo! Quite the interesting place. New JETs are required to spend three days in a hotel in Tokyo for the aptly named Tokyo Orientation, which consists of a lot of speeches, a lot of ceremonies, a lot of workshops, and a lot of sightseeing. Technically it is the beginning of our contract, so I guess that would make this the first few days of my new job. It was all very well organised and tooled to be extremely helpful and informative to all of us.

View of Tokyo from my room.

Tokyo is a very big city, and there is a great deal of things to do and see there. Coming from the other GTA, Tokyo - with an area whose population is more than six times larger than Toronto's - is a big adjustment to make. One important thing to note is that while Toronto is far smaller, it still much more multicultural than Tokyo is. Out of 35 million residents in the city, only 364,000 are foreigners. What this more or less means is that everywhere you go there are two inescapable constants; Japanese and Japanese people.

Japanese and Japanese people, Exhibit A.

It is still a massive hub of business and technology, however, so there are familiar brands everywhere you look.

Japan's take on McDonald's "I'm Lovin' It".

Aside from the informative workshops (the majority of which I had to sleep through thanks to jet lag), the most memorable thing about Tokyo Orientation is going out for dinner in the city every night. We were provided with vaguely Western-styled breakfast and lunch in the hotel (french fries and steamed veggies for breakfast, pasta and miso soup for lunch), but once the evening came we were on our own. The JET Programme draws all kinds of people with all kinds of skills, and one skill where there's a large decree of variance is Japanese language ability. I am firmly in the "little to none" category, which made going out for dinner and navigating the city both a lot more fun and a lot more anxiety-inducing.

Delicious pita "raps". And pizza sand! 

But despite how you might feel about venturing into Tokyo, you still got to eat. On my second night in Tokyo I went to a small Japanese restaurant, the name of which I never really learned, but it's certainly one experience that is going to stick with me for a long time. In Tokyo space is expensive, so everywhere you go you see restaurants, department stores, etc. doing more with less. Another way of putting it is that everything is small and cramped on the inside!

This is with the lens zoomed out.
Expect your personal bubble to be popped.

I somehow managed to land in the seat that also doubled as the menu holder. What this meant was that every time a server needed to grab a menu, they would reach into the back of my chair and grab one. Unfortunately this was never done delicately, meaning that periodically throughout the meal I would feel someone momentarily groping around my back.

It's a tight squeeze. 

One thing I should mention was that the restaurant we went to was very Japanese. There were no foreigners, no English speaking staff, no English menu. Even Arabic numbers (1, 2, 3...), thankfully in use in much of Japan, were not present here. Someone like me would find no success eating at a restaurant like this, but luckily I was accompanied by others who had a much better grasp of Japanese than I did.

I later discovered that the menu I was desperately trying to read was being held upside down by myself...

What we ate is a mystery to me. They dropped a big grilling pot on our table, filled it up with unknown items - the meat involved was liver, I know that much - and started to boil it all up. We were also given an egg to mix into the whole thing after ward, resulting in a thick stew-like dish. It wasn't too bad.

Dig in!

The presence of foreigners in a place so foreigner-unfriendly did not go unnoticed by the other patrons, either. Before long our neighbours (sitting close enough to occasionally bump with my elbows) were trying to talk to us. They offered suggestions in what we should eat and what we should drink. One of them actually worked for the Tokyo Bureau of Waterworks, and boasted in  broken English that Tokyo water was "very delicious". They were impressed when they heard that we were to all be English teachers in Japanese schools, and toasted us more than a few times before the end of the night.

It's cramped, remember?

I have little to say about the rest of orientation. As mentioned earlier I was dealing with a heavy amount of jet lag, so I wasn't able to fully take advantage of being in a city like Tokyo. After three nights of this it was time to get on the bullet train to Sendai City. On our last day we had a bit of time so we were able to climb to the top of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, which has a gallery that provides a nice view of the surrounding city.

Too cloudy for a shot of Mt. Fuji, sadly.

And that was Tokyo Orientation! As of writing I am already in my apartment in Sendai, so those of you hoping for a cliffhanger ending will not get your wish today, unfortunately. I'll update this soon with some Sendai-specific information, so stay tuned!

Also, for those of you interested, you can click here to view the entire Tokyo Orientation album.

(I have also updated my last post to show the entire Departure Album)

Bye for now!