1. Determine how comfortable you are with lying to your students. Your relationship with your students will be built on them asking and being asked simple questions such as “What is your favorite musical group?”  Now, maybe your favorite band is Neutral Milk Hotel—and why shouldn’t it be?  However, the person who asked you the question has no idea what the fuck a Neutral Milk Hotel is, and you aren’t going to be able to explain it to them.  Your answer will be met with blank stares and disappointment.  Conversely, if you answer “Green Day,” or “Avril Lavigne,” or even “Nirvana,” suddenly the person who asked you this will get excited and say, “Oh, me too me too me too!”  You have just established a rapport.  You can definitely make the case that this is a disingenuous, Machiavellian way to live—and you are well within your rights to decide that you don’t want to lie to your students under any circumstances.  But given the limitations on your ability to communicate, it is also a very effective way to ingratiate yourself to the people whose continued goodwill you rely on.
2. This is prison rules. Since your job description is quite poorly defined and subject to the whims of the Japanese teachers you work with, it’s important to establish expectations early on.  If you want to go to clubs after school and hang out, do it as early as possible.  Don’t arrive super early or stay late on your first day.  With such a poorly defined position, the expectations of those monitoring you will be formed in large part by your own actions.  You want to ease into certain things, but do everything you can to establish your identity and “character” quickly before you get stuck doing things you don’t want to do.
3. If you do not have the ability already, learn to snap your fingers, moon walk, and do that thing where you put your fingers in your mouth and whistle really loudly. Many of your students, especially the younger ones, will have never seen someone do these things and will thus be very impressed.
4. Buy some weird ties from someplace like CyberOptix or similar. It is not easy to establish your identity as the cool teacher through words since very few of the kids you are teaching can understand what you are saying, you need to establish a persona through nonverbal methods.  Oddball ties are a great way to do further this goal, assuming you are a dude… or a lady who is inclined to incorporate ties into her daily ensembles.
5. Set your hipster street cred on fire. Japanese high schoolers love American music.  More specifically, they love the kind of American music that no self-respecting, tight-pants-wearing “Pitchfork Media” enthusiast would ever listen to even under penalty of death, but you’d have to be stoned or stupid to think that you are somehow earning any points with your students by giving them a bunch of obscure German synth-pop bands no one’s ever heard of when they ask you what kind of music you like.  Additionally, none of the bands whose CDs made your “Top Ten” list this year will have any songs you can sing at karaoke, so stop being a pretentious dick, have another beer, and sing “Wonderwall” already.
6. Don’t like sports?  You do now.
7. Incidentally, your new favorite baseball team is either the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox. Those are the only two American baseball teams your students have heard of because those two teams have popular Japanese players on them.
8. Learn to sing “Linda Linda” by the Blue Hearts. It is a great sing-along sort of tune that is well known by almost everyone in Japan, perfect for breaking out at karaoke while in the company of Japanese people—be they your coworkers or just some people you met on the street—who will be thoroughly impressed by your performance.  Luckily, the chorus is pretty easy to remember.  It goes “Linda Linda, Linda Linda Linda, Linda Linda, Linda Linda Linda.”  Think you can manage that?
9. No one in Japan has ever heard of the pillows or “Cowboy Bebop.” If you have made it to Japan, you have probably watched and enjoyed Cowboy Bebop and downloaded the entire pillows discography after hearing their music in FLCL, and are excited to be in the land that created both of these things.  That’s fine; they are both quality works, and anyone who gives you shit about being a fanboy or whatever is a bad person who doesn’t believe in intellectual curiosity.  If a Japanese person asks you your favorite Japanese band, you will want to say “the pillows.”  This is only natural.  But that person will almost never know what the hell you are talking about.
10. No one will understand any of your jokes. You’re probably a very hilarious person back home, but the rules of humor changed while you were in the air over the Pacific Ocean.  In the context of your daily life, humor consists entirely of sight gags and references to Japanese pop culture.
11. Eat lots of Japanese food. Besides the fact that Japanese food is often delicious, “What are your favorite Japanese foods?” will almost always be the first question anyone in Japan asks you.
12. Figure out your blood type. Offhand you probably have no idea what your blood type is, but blood types are a Thing in Japan.  Your blood type is believed to say something about your personality, like your astrological sign or the results of a Rorschach test.  Your students will want to know what your blood type is, and you run the risk of sounding like a dweeb if you can’t answer them when they ask you.  Not knowing yours is an excellent excuse to give blood, which is a thing that you should be doing anyway.

Professional Aspects

1. Your training will be worthless. Despite the fact that the people doing the training at these things are likely veteran teachers, every suggestion they give you for how to conduct yourself in and outside of class will instill you with a deep sense of terror while still remaining utterly irrelevant to the ways that people actually live and work as ALTs in Japan.  Additionally, the sample activities your trainers teach you will, for one reason or another, not apply to any of the classes you teach.  For example, someone at some point during training will mention that “Battleship” variants are a great way to have students practice combining different phrases to form sentences.  This is 100% bullshit; your students will have never heard of “Battleship,” and trying to explain the rules of such a game to your them using crude hand gestures and bone tools will take up more class time than actually playing it.
2. Even if your training isn’t worthless, it will still be worthless. The job description of an ALT is so poorly defined that every teacher you work with will have different expectations from you: some will want you to teach the entire class all by yourself with no help at all, and some will want to stand you up at the front of the class while they teach and periodically have you repeat words and phrases like a trained monkey so your students can hear the correct pronunciation.  Depending on what company you work for, elementary, junior high, and high school teachers will often be trained together, despite occupying radically different positions.  So even if you receive good advice at training, it will likely be advice for someone who will be doing a totally different job.
3. Learn to speak Japanese. People will tell you that you do not need to know any Japanese to teach English in Japan.  This is true, in that you will not necessarily catch fire if you set foot in a Japanese classroom without being able to compose a haiku in kanji, and you are usually discouraged from using any Japanese in the classroom anyway.  But living in a foreign land—especially in the small town off the beaten path that you are most likely to be sent to your first time out—is not very much fun when you can’t speak the language, and neither is trying to communicate the concept of words like “pudding” or “dugong” to Japanese teenagers entirely in English.  Additionally, since learning a language is an exponential process—that is, the more of a language you know, the easier it is for you to learn said language—you will most benefit from the immersion if you already have a firm grasp of the basics.  Your experience will be so much richer if you are able to at least get by in day-to-day conversational Japanese: you’ll be able to form stronger bonds with your coworkers, you’ll be better able to understand the dynamics of your classes and connect with your students more as a human being and less as a walking test of their knowledge, and you’ll have an easier time getting around during your off hours.  You will be able to have confusing cultural oddities explained to you, which will in turn help you to get a much clearer picture of your host country’s ins and outs.  This is not to say that you should let a low level of Japanese proficiency keep you from seeking a teaching position, but do be aware that there are real and significant downsides to coming in blind.
4. Word Searches are your master. You probably hated doing word searches when you were in elementary school (unless you were clinically insane), but you’ll find that in many cases there are students who never pay attention in class under any circumstances except for when you put a word search in front of them.  You should come to every single class with two sets of word searches with relevant vocabulary for extreme emergencies—one short word search for when your lesson goes south, and another longer word search for when your lesson goes to hell.
5. Over-preparedness is sometimes worse than under-preparedness. Just because you are given five hours each day to do lesson planning doesn’t mean you should actually use all that time to plan lessons.
6. Activities will always end five to ten minutes before you want them to. This is, of course, unless they take twenty minutes longer than you want them to.

Things to keep in mind.

1. The city, town, or small fishing village you are sent to will suck.
2. If the place you are sent to does not suck, fuck you. Lucky bastard.
3. Japanese teenagers do not speak English. Despite the fact that you are teaching them English—which would suggest that it is not something they already know—it is easy to forget just how little of what you say is really understood by your students.
4. Japanese English teachers often do not speak English. There are plenty of Japanese teachers whose English is excellent, but many (if not most) will be deficient enough that communicating with them will be difficult.
5. You are the least important person at your school. Japanese high schools are swirling nexuses of psychotic activity.  Many of the students commute up to an hour to get to school and stay until 6 or 7 at night and come in for several hours on weekends doing club activities.  The teachers routinely work 10- or 11-hour days on weekdays and often come in on weekends to help with the clubs they sponsor or catch up with grading.  Everyone is busy with matters that they take very seriously.  Most of the teachers took English in school but remember about as much as you remember of calculus or art history, so unless you can manage conversational Japanese you will not have a very easy time making small talk with them.  The chair you sit in all day will be the shittiest back-pain-inducin’ torture device they can find, and if you even have a computer it will be an old ThinkPad from like 2001 with unidentified sticky goo all over the keyboard and an ancient Japanese Windows ME install.  And since the students clean the school themselves, there isn’t even a custodial staff for you to feel superior to, just one janitor who takes care of the real heavy lifting.  Your coworkers may or may not even tell you when there is a fire drill scheduled.
6. Most schools will not care if you fall asleep at work. Since the teachers at Japanese schools work such long days, it is viewed as perfectly acceptable for them to catch a few quick Z’s at their desk.  This is usually interpreted not as slacking off, but as some sort of demented dedication.
7. If your schools do care that you are falling asleep at work, they will not tell you. Since it’s not worth worrying about and won’t affect you either way, you might as well just go for the snooze if you are tired.
8. Your kids may be Japanese, but they are still high school students. Your students will probably be much more polite and attentive than American students at a similar sort of school (that is to say, a poor, rural school may still have some punkass kids in it, but they will be less punkass than punkasses in America).  However, a typical Japanese high school curriculum consists of 10 – 12 classes per year, each class meeting two or three times per week.  Statistically speaking, those are not good odds that the class you are teaching (which was not optional and is held right after lunch) is any one random student’s favorite class.
9. Learn what your hometown is famous for. Every town in Japan is famous for something, be it a style of traditional dance specific to that region or a particular kind of food or whatever.  People assume that this is the case for American cities as well and will want to know about it.  If your hometown isn’t really famous for anything in particular, or the thing it is famous for is too complicated to easily explain (“My hometown is famous for being the home of the biggest magnet laboratory in the Southeastern United States”), you once again have to decide whether or not to just make some stuff up.
10. You are probably going to get screwed by your landlord. In Japan there is a practice known as “key money” where your pay your landlord a cash tribute (usually equivalent to one-and-a-half to two months’ rent, although it can be higher) as a way of thanking him or her for renting to you even though you are a dirty foreigner before he or she gives you the key to your new place.  And I know that you are probably saying to yourself, “Yeah, that’s called a deposit, asshole.  They do that in America too.”  But no, key money is not a deposit, but a bribe.  The money goes directly into your landlord’s pocket and will never be seen by you again.  The deposit (also equivalent to two months’ rent) is a separate expense, and If your apartment has tatami mats, a good chunk of your deposit will go towards replacing them when you move out regardless of whether they actually needed replacing.  If you manage to bypass one or more of these issues, you are the lucky exception rather than the rule.
11. Regardless of the age of your students, one or more of them is almost certainly going to try to stick his or her finger up your asshole. This prank is known as a “kancho.”  If none of the kids you teach tries this during your entire tenure as an ALT, you should consider it not the normal state of affairs but a very pleasant surprise.

So the pillows are a good band, and “Hybrid Rainbow” is perhaps their masterpiece, a song that I would say almost justifies humanity’s existence despite centuries of war and hatred and every kind of depravity imaginable. I can recall being nineteen years old, a recent high school graduate, watching FLCL for the first time just a couple of weeks before I headed off to college and my first real taste of the great unknown and thinking, man, it would be awesome to see these guys play live.

Imagine my surprise, then, that my arrival in Japan, already a fulfillment of my wildest outdated high school fantasies, coincided with the release of a new pillows album and a tour (codenamed the “Pied Piper Tour,” which I can’t turn into anything symbolic no matter how hard I try) to support said album. The pillows were playing in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi prefecture, easily within the range of a driven individual such as myself. Phone calls were made. Tickets were purchased. Travel arrangements were made. The thought rang clear in my mind: “I might get to see ‘Hybrid Rainbow’ performed live.” If that happened, I’d have another item to check off on my list of things I needed to do before I died.

The concert was to start at six o’clock on a Sunday evening in late September. The plan called for me to take the train to Sendai on Saturday morning—this was before I knew about the wonders of highway buses, which are cheaper and faster than trains when going between big cities—and stay with a friend of mine from back home who also does the teaching thing in Marumori, a small mountain town about an hour away from Sendai that feels a lot like what South Park would feel like if it was a real place and in Japan. We would check out Sendai on Sunday morning, and then hit up the concert, which started at six. Since it was a Sunday, I needed to be back in my own place for work the next morning, so I got a ticket for the 8:15 Shinkansen (bullet train) back to Morioka in time to catch the last train to my little podunk farming town. I figured the concert wouldn’t last much longer than two hours, if it even lasted that long, so not a huge loss. It was a perfect plan that failed in a spectacular(ly unspectacular) fashion.

The first stages of the plan went smoothly enough. I made it to Sendai without any problems, and Saturday night passed pleasantly, with much Melon Fanta consumed while complaining about the Japanese public school system and playing videogames. Sunday passed quickly as we explored the shopping arcade that Sendai is famous for, and soon enough it was time for our concert preparations to commence. We met up with another group of Americans, college exchange students or teachers all, and loitered in Sendai Station for a while swapping anecdotes and blocking pedestrian traffic. At about 5:30 I asked everyone assembled if maybe we shouldn’t head to the venue since the concert was going to start in a half hour.

“Doors open at six,” one among us said. “The concert doesn’t actually start till seven.” This was a serious problem.

My friend James, who had handled logistics, had misread (or not bothered to read) the kanji on the ticket, believing it to say “Starts – 6:00, Ends – 7:00” when it actually said “Doors open – 6:00, Concert Begins – 7:00.” Oddly enough, being illiterate does indeed suck as much as the public service announcements on teevee say that it does; that extra hour was kind of a big deal, upon which my entire plan for the evening hinged. In America it would only have taken me about 30 seconds to say “Well, I guess I’m calling in sick tomorrow” and enjoy the concert with no worries a’tall, but in Japan taking an unexpected day off from your job—even your stupid job where you spend the great majority of your time reading novels and and can’t even communicate with 90% of your coworkers—is a big deal that requires an excellent excuse and documentation. So that meant I had a ticket for an 8:20 train and a ticket for a 7:00 concert, which are good things to have by themselves but not such great things to have at the same time.

I was not very talkative as we made out way to the venue and stood waiting in line for the doors to open. Even when the show started I kept vacillating between “To hell with it, I’m just going to stay and figure out what to do afterward,” and “Well, I guess I’ll just try to enjoy the hour that I have.” This process preoccupied me, but I tried to enjoy the show as best I could. The pillows put on a good show, although I was mostly interested in hearing them play a handful of songs that I knew from FLCL, which was older material that they were less inclined to dip into. I was not pleased.

About 30 minutes in, during a pause between songs, someone in the audience shouted ”Hybrid Rainbow!“ and I held my breath.

The lead singer chuckled. “Too fast,” he said, in English. “Too early.”

Fuck, I thought, they’re saving it for the encore or something.

The band played a couple more songs that I was not familiar with and which were hard to enjoy given the circumstances, and during another pause someone else shouted, “Hybrid Rainbow!” At this point I had maybe 15 minutes to get to my train, enough time for maybe one more song before I absolutely had to leave.

“Too fast. Too early,” the lead singer said again. The members of the band began whispering among themselves.

I turned to leave, defeated, as more banter ensued.

I was just reaching for the door to the lobby when the band seemed to reverse their previous decision and started to play “Hybrid Rainbow.”

During those four perfect minutes, I was truly, unabashedly happy. Between the beginning and the ending of that one song, I was exactly where I wanted to be in the world, doing exactly what I wanted to do, and had no reservations or regrets. Just then It did not matter that I had to leave the concert early to go catch a train so I could be on time for a job that I did not enjoy, nor did it matter that I was aimless and unmotivated, that I had so far been too lazy to create anything that felt meaningful out of my time on earth, that I was weird and awkward and unsure of my place in the world; whatever choices I had made in my life up until that point, at that moment they were all the right choices because they had led me to that venue next to the Sendai train station where I watched the pillows play “Hybrid Rainbow” in front of an enthusiastic crowd. My triumph was utter. It was transcendent.

And, like most transcendent moments, this one was not able to support itself for long under the weight of its own quality.

After the song was over there was a short period of silence, and the band started retuning their instruments and talking amongst themselves. I headed towards the door, but, feeling invincible and uninhibited in the afterglow, I turned and shouted “Linda Linda!” before finally making good my escape. I thought this was hilarious at the time, but, given how irritated I used to (and still do) get at those assholes who shout “Freebird!” at concerts by bands who are decidedly not Lynard Skynard, I at least had the decency to feel bad about it later. I stopped just long enough to make a last minute impulse purchase at the merch table in front of the venue to celebrate my newfound enthusiasm for life and love and all the rest, and then I was ready to bounce.

After hearing “Hybrid Rainbow,” the decision to try and catch my train was a much easier one, and the emotional high of that one perfect moment propelled me forward as I ran through the station, retrieved my bag from the storage locker, and hoofed it up to the Shinkansen platform. Hoisting a big backpack and carrying a demented teddy bear in one hand, I’m sure that I made a deeply troubling sight. People left my path well alone. I quickly inquired about what platform I should go to—the guy I asked was trying to convey something to me that I could not get, but he eventually pointed me in the direction I needed to go—and took the stairs up to the platform three at a time.

Panting from the run, I stood and waited, my thumbs looped under the shoulder straps of my backpack, underarms and back starting to feel maybe just a little bit moist from the weight of my load and the unfamiliar exertion, ready to slide into a Shinkansen’s spacious seat and think happy thoughts all the way to Morioka, where I’d catch another train over to my town of residence. I was about seven minutes early. It had taken me less time than I thought it would to get to where I needed to be.

I paced up and down the platform and noticed with some trepidation that there weren’t very many other people waiting for this train. My trepidation turned to panic as the time listed on my ticket came and went. I went back down to the ticket area and made an inquiry of an older gentleman in a station uniform. Unfortunately, his English was not up to snuff, and neither was my Japanese; I couldn’t even remember how to say “I do not speak Japanese” in Japanese, which is a problem that I had had before and have often had since. Finally, after what seemed like an interminable period of him repeating the same phrase I did not recognize really slowly and with different inflections and pointing to different places on the small train schedule in his hands in a coded sequence that I was not able to decipher, he motioned with his hands and said “Wait, please.” About ten minutes later, a young-ish woman dressed in civilian clothes walked up to where I was standing. After exchanging a few words with the station guy, she turned to ask me what I needed help with. I explained my situation to her again. “The train is late,” she said. “Instead please take the Shinkansen headed for Akita when it comes and get off at Morioka Station. The Akita Shinkansen is also late, but it is less late.”

It turned out that “less late” meant “still more than an hour late,” which was especially galling after spending all that time being told at teacher training that the Japanese are shuffling automatons of soulless efficiency and woe be unto he who is even one minute late for anything. I was not happy about having to waste away in Sendai Station when there was still a perfectly good pillows concert going on literally next door. Eventually my consternation gave way to anxiety over whether or not I would make it to Morioka Station in time to catch the last train out to Ho-mu. Things did work themselves out, although I had to do some sprinting once I got to Morioka Station in order to facilitate this. I was told later that the show had gone on for about another 70 minutes after I left, but that only one other song I’d have recognized was played. And on Monday morning I was able to shuffle into work at my School of Suck, tired but on time, and totally tank my lessons for that day just like normal. God was in His heaven. All was right with the world.

So in the end I guess this concertgoing experience is a good representation of my time in Japan as a whole—a bunch of stupid bullshit punctuated by fleeting moments of blinding awesome-ness, a neverending footrace between elation in lane one and despair (or at least extreme irritation) in lane two. Additionally, in some kind of ridiculous Russian doll situation, maybe that is a pretty accurate description of life in general.

Supplemental:
Ride on Shooting Star (Ganbatte-Fest ‘08, Part 3) : Photos of the events described in this entry can be viewed on my Flickr page.