Yashiro Prison: August 15-18

Last week over a hundred gaijin (foreigners) descended upon the sleepy town of Yashiro to participate in the yearly prefectural orientation for new JETs. Basically, all the new JETs from my area (many of whom are stir crazy from being placed in the country where there are no other foreigners for miles) were sent to the teachers prefectural training facility. There they were expected to attend various seminars on living in Hyogo-ken, team-teaching, and Japanese language. Many of these meetings covered the same things we heard at the Tokyo orientation, at our home city orientations, and amongst the thousands of JET web sites on the internet.

So after a long day of lectures, everyone (especially the stir crazy JETs) were looking forward to a free evening. Unfortunately in the small town of Yashiro, the nearby convenient store is the extent of entertainment options. So people hung out and played games while drinking beverages of a refreshing nature purchased at the aforementioned convenient store. Unsurprisingly, there are a certain amount of disturbances caused by JETs followed by complaints from local residents.

Perhaps to try to prevent such incidents or maybe just to instill a certain level of Japanese discipline, the Yashiro teachers facility maintains a strict curfew (hence the Yashiro prison nickname). The gates to the facility closed at 10 p.m. and “lights out” was supposed to be 11 p.m. This, coupled with a menu that was less than gourmet, meant it was impossible to avoid lots of complaining-JETs for four days. In truth, it really was a fun time. The stuff that was review wasn’t too bad and many of the other seminars were really quite helpful. Of course, the best part was re-meeting JETs from Tokyo and meeting a handful of new JETs as well.