Getting Ready to Leave

Hello, everyone!

My name is Sean (Atten-Sean, a nickname given to me because of my alleged tendency to always try to be the center of attention). Nice to meet you!

I currently live in Los Angeles, California. I moved here about 4 1/2 years ago, from Boise, Idaho. I went to school here, and graduated recently with a degree in Japanese. Right now I’m in the middle of preparing to move away from California, back to Boise. The purpose of this move is to prepare for an even bigger move – to Japan! This is the real reason for the existence of this blog. I decided to establish this station on the internet to keep the people that know me updated on my travels and life in general. I think it will also be interesting even to people that don’t know me but have a bit of an interest in Japan or living abroad.

So that’s my introduction! Now I will get down to really blogging.

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Right now I am sitting in my room in LA with a good 3/4 of my belongings already in boxes in transit via UPS to my house in Boise, or already piled into my old bedroom there. I accepted a job offer with a company called Interac that staffs ALT English Teachers (Assistant Language Teacher) at elementary and junior high schools in Japan. Based on the info I’ve received, I am to be teaching English at an elementary school or two in Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan, which is the second-biggest city in Japan. This location basically perfectly matches up with the kind of location I stated as a preference at the original job interview, so I’m really excited.

I decided to go for an ALT job in Japan because.. well isn’t it obvious? My major is Japanese, and I think getting some real-world experience living in Japan and experiencing the culture first-hand are pretty much essential to making anything of my diploma. The way I came to have Japanese as my major is a bit unconventional. I was originally studying graphic design while continuing my study of Japanese language (which had been ongoing since high school where one semester of language classes is mandatory), when I realized Japanese was more interesting to me than graphic design. So I switched over.

The reason I requested to live in a place like Yokohama is that I have already had a bit of experience in the area and really liked it. I went to Japan with my girlfriend for a month in the summer of 2005 and stayed just a bit south of Tokyo and liked it a lot. Now that I’m graduated it looks like I’ll be going back, and I am experiencing a mix of excitement and nervousness.

I haven’t done any big moves like this since I moved from Boise to LA without knowing anything about LA at all beforehand. It was almost like moving to a foreign country. A lot of the things I’m experiencing now facing my move to Japan remind me strongly of just before I moved here to LA.

The lyrics to Rivers Cuomo’s demo “Blast Off” match the way I feel pretty much perfectly. It’s a song he wrote based on the feelings he had every time he was about to embark on a long tour with his band Weezer. He wrote the lyrics from a few different perspectives. The first perspective is the part of him that’s already feeling homesick before even leaving home. I understand this a lot, as I sit in my room with bare walls and extra toys, microwave food items, and other fun things that I bought in good spirits never thinking that I’d be moving out of the country before even using them. It’s a feeling that’s hard to express but it’s something you feel if you’re like me. Not to mention that I’ll be leaving my girlfriend of 3 1/2+ years behind in America. Another of his perspectives in the song is part of him that knows that the trip he’s about to embark on is going to be a lot of fun, so he should just relax and have a good time. I know this is true, too! I plan on having a “BLAST” of a good time in Japan. GET IT! BLAST OFF is the name of the song and i said BLAST of a good time!!!!!!!! I’m planning on just going for the one-year-contract anyway, so I might as well go have as much fun as I can and then come back here and unpause my real life.

Anyway this isn’t a JOURNAL, it’s a BLOG, so no more of this going on about wistful feelings and emotions. I am gonna blast off and be positive and have an awesome time in Japan!

So, just to prove I’m writing this all out in one take with no planning or good formatting or any foresight whatsoever, I’m going to write more info here. I only found out exactly where in Japan I’d be going two days ago, and since then I’ve been on light speed mode getting ready for it. I just put in my 30 days’ notice on my apartment today, and I’m already online looking at apartments in the Yokohama area. The only hitch is that based on what I’ve read on other peoples’ accounts on the internet, there’s a chance that I’ll get to Japan, go to my training week, and then find out they’ve reassigned me to a different location in a completely different area of Japan. So at this point I’m still just kind of going with the flow and I guess I’m just going to wait and see where things take me.

In the meantime, I’ll update this blog and let you people know what’s going on! As of right now, I’m waiting for the company to get the documents necessary for me to get my VISA to me so I can go to the consulate here in LA and have them processed. Then 3 days later, I’ll have my actual VISA for entering Japan and working there! Once I’ve got that, I’ll decide on a good pair of days and drive back to Boise.

Anyway, see you next time!