This was actually the second place I worked in Japan but if I say anything at all about my first job there, I shall probably end up getting sued.
Anyway, Matsuyama has a lot to recommend it including a (fairly) authentic castle, nearby sea / beaches / islands, relatively unspoilt mountainous areas within easy cycling distance and a calm rural feel, quite different from such places as Nagoya, Osaka and Tokyo. Another good thing about living away from major cities is the availability of cheap spacious housing. You can forget all those (unfair) cliches about "rabbit hutches". In both Matsuyama and later in Fukuyama I was able to rent three / four room apartments - comfortably on the salary I was earning.

The teaching was very different from Greece. Okay, so I was still working for a "private language school in a provincial city", but there the similarity ends. In Greece the emphasis was entirely on exams and coercing teenagers to memorize huge lists of words. In IMA, the school where I worked in Matsuyama, the emphasis was on FUN. The most important thing to consider when planning a lesson was to keep it "Genki"! This is an untranslatable Japanese word that encompasses the English meanings of both "Happy" and "Healthy".

Strangely I (for one) found this style of teaching much harder to pick up than the more labour-intensive Greek style. In Greece it was simply a matter of putting in a lot of hours and earning the students' respect by knowing the subject extremely well. Japanese students, though were looking for something rather different and even after five years, I'm still not sure whether I was able to deliver it. Anyway, the students in the picture seem to be having a good time so I must have got it right sometimes. Much of the material available on this site was written around this time so you can judge for yourself.

An important feature of IMA classes was discussion - the type where the teacher steps back from a group of students and encourages them (by what ever means) to talk to each other in English. Sounds easy? Maybe you are more gifted than I am at handling group dynamics, but I have always found this really hard. One of my weakest points is an inability to use teaching materials that are just about right for a group, but have one or two problems. I just cannot do it. So of course, I ended up spending hours writing my own - with mixed success.

Among the many things I found that worked, was discussing the lives (and problems) of imaginary characters, which were actually based on the students themselves. One of them in particular was a big hit. "Imako" was a young female character who was painfully indecisive and needed a class-full of wise students to sort out her problems. Her name -by the way - is a compound of the school's name "IMA" and the Japanese feminine name ending "ko". And she is still with me today as the name of my "Hotmail" account.

My next job was at a steel plant. No, I'm not joking. Actually, the office (and classrooms) where I worked, were just outside the plant itself but close enough to offer a fine view of industrial goings on, as you can see in the picture. Oh, and yes, I was still an English teacher, albeit of a slightly different flavour. My new students expected at least part of their training to be in "Business English", which I knew almost nothing about and it's probably fair to say that I would never have got the job if it hadn't been for the recommendation of a good friend of mine (see acknowledgements). Another totally new aspect to the job, which I found interesting and sometimes challenging, was dealing with the Japanese corporate culture.

NKK was a huge mutinational steel and heavy industry corporation, employing thousands of staff directly and further thousands indirectly in susidiaries ("ko gaisha"). Since my time there, the company has amulgamated with Kawasaki Steel to form the new giant steel company, JFE. Out of a group of large Japanese companies of similar size and stature, NKK had a bit of a reputation for being conservative in its corporate culture, but while I was sometimes aware of this, I never really found it an obstacle to getting on with the other staff or with my work.

Actually, I quite liked many of the cultural differences - once I'd got over the initial surprise. A good example of this was the morning exercise routine that most staff took part in, five minutes before their official work shift began. (I joined in too, for the six months that I shared an office with the personnel department.) This is exactly the kind of thing that has western employees aghast - at the thought of being "forced" to do exercises first thing in the morning. But in fact, where I worked, there was no coercion whatsoever and most of the people I observed seemed to enjoy the exercises themselves and find work less of a grind afterwards, having shed their morning grogginess and aching mouse-muscles.

Surprisingly, many of the classes were not that different to what I had (nearly) got used to in Matsuyama. Much of the business oriented stuff I picked up from text-books and my Japanese and American bosses in Tokyo, who were always there at the end of the phone line, ready to patiently guide me out of my latest difficulty and in the right direction.

The one major difference I did notice, though, was the state of near exhaustion that my students often arrived in for my evening classes. It was probably the hardest thing to handle about the job, accepting that I was working in the middle of a very intense hive of activity and that however much time and effort I put into my classes, they would always be - for everybody else - at the low-ish end of a very long list of other priorities.

Despite their heavy workloads, many of my class members managed to fit in some hard study around their busy schedules and in several cases their "TOEIC scores" jumped upwards by hundreds of points in a mere six months.

For teacher training courses, English courses in Bristol UK and free interactive exercises, visit The Language Project Website.