JET alum Japanese teacher’s class visited by Delaware governor
Cultural Outreach, JETs in the News, Language Study, LifeAfterJET, Local Government, Return on JET-vestment 
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Thanks to Virginia Murray for catching this article and posting it to the JETAA Southeast Facebook group. It seems that Linnea Bradshaw, a fellow JET of Virginia’s from 1988, is a Japanese teacher at a high school in Delaware whose class was recently visited by Delaware’s Governor Jack Markell. Go JET!
Markell shares travel experiences with Appoquinimink students
Delaware’s Governor visited the Level II language class at Appoquinimink High School Tuesday morning to share his experiences in Japan and to take questions from the class he video-chatted with from the foreign country during his trip last year.
Here are some excerpts from the article:
“Governor Jack Markell told students in Linnea Bradshaw’s Japanese class Tuesday that speaking multiple languages gives them a leg-up in the job market. Delaware’s Governor visited the Level II language class at Appoquinimink High School Tuesday morning to share his experiences in Japan and to take questions from the class he video-chatted with from the foreign country during his trip last year.”
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“Markell wasn’t the only one in the room Tuesday who has experienced Japan. Last summer, Bradshaw took 23 students from both Middletown and Appoquinimink High Schools to Japan to immerse them in the culture. Bradshaw said that her highest-level students can speak sentences, and understand, write and read Japanese.”
…….
“During his multi-city trip of the country, Markell, his wife, and staff, met with several businesses in the Miyagi area in hopes of building a stronger partnership between Delaware and Miyagi.”
Click here to read the full article on the Middletown Transcript’s website as well as see a photo of Linnea with the Governor: http://www.middletowntranscript.com/article/20130108/NEWS/130109810/0/SEARCH
CLAIR Magazine “JET Plaza” series: Austin Moore (Yamaguchi)
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Each month, current and former JET participants are featured in the “JET Plaza” section of the CLAIR Forum magazine. The January 2013 edition includes an article by Austin Moore, a former Monbusho English Fellow (MEF), the forerunner to the JET Programme. Posted by Celine Castex (Chiba-ken, 2006-11), currently programme coordinator at CLAIR Tokyo.
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“Sometimes I joke that back when I began what quite unexpectedly is turning out to be a lifetime in Japan, the local men carried swords and wore topknots.”
Austin Moore was born and brought up in a house that was built in 1830 in a small town of Massachusetts. After graduating from Syracuse University in 1984, he came to Japan to work as a member of the Monbusho English Fellow Programme in Yamaguchi Prefecture. Three years later, he moved to Tokyo to join the organization which is today known as CLAIR. Austin has been working for the Japan Intercultural Academy of Municipalities in Shiga Prefecture for the past twenty years. He is also the head of the Historic Preservation Society of Hino town, where he lives in a house that dates back to Edo period.
Adoption Of and By Japan
Sometimes I joke that back when I began what quite unexpectedly is turning out to be a lifetime in Japan, the local men carried swords and wore topknots. While that is more than a small exaggeration, the changes in Japanese society that I have witnessed during these three decades are nearly as significant.
In 1984, immediately after concluding my studies at Eisenhower College and Syracuse University, I was accepted into the Monbusho English Fellow (MEF) Program (preceding JET and run exclusively by the Ministry of Education) and spent almost three years in Yamaguchi Prefecture – the philosophical birthplace of modern-day Japan. There, for the first year, I had the distinction of being the only American employed by the prefectural education board and, as such, visited most every public high school in the prefecture, as well as numerous junior high schools.
It was the very beginning of July when I arrived in Yamaguchi. My supervisor was a kind man who spoke extremely good English – the only one in the office who did. But a week into life as an MEF, my supervisor, my ‘life-support system’, left for a month-long training seminar at Tsukuba University. And so it was that I promptly learned to breathe on my own. Read More
Kyodo News “Rural JET alumni” series: Rashaad Jorden (Yamagata)
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News agency Kyodo News has recently been publishing monthly articles written by JET alumni who were appointed in rural areas of Japan, as part of promotion for the JET Programme. Below is the English version of the column from December 2012. Posted by Celine Castex (Chiba-ken, 2006-11), currently programme coordinator at CLAIR Tokyo.
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Born in Japan, Rashaad Jorden (Yamagata-ken, Tsuruoka-shi, 2008-10) has lived a bit of a nomadic life, having lived in Virginia, New Jersey, and several times in France and Japan. He attended Coppin State University (Baltimore, Maryland) and graduated with a degree in English. He came back to Japan on the JET Programme and worked for two years in Yamagata Prefecture, in Haguro, a village that merged into Tsuruoka. Currently, he conducts English classes for Japanese adults at an online eikaiwa school named Hello English and is in the job hunt.
Same Country, New Experiences
I was born on a naval base in Yokosuka, where I spent my first 18 months. After graduating from university, I spent a year working at an eikaiwa school in Yokohama.
However, Japan was pretty much a mystery to me. My co-workers were all Westerners, so I was obviously missing out on a true Japanese work environment. If I went somewhere other than Shibuya on an off day, it was a miracle. And despite taking Japanese classes every Wednesday morning for several months, I struggled mightily in the language.
Needless to say, I had not gotten the most out of Japan during my year in Yokohama. But there was definitely an itch to discover more of the country and its culture. So after working as an assistant English teacher in France, the decision was simple: I was applying for the JET Programme.
In late March 2008, I learned Read More
JET alum Bruce Feiler set to publish latest book: The Secrets of Happy Families
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The latest from JET alum Bruce Feiler (Tochigi-ken, 1989-90), author of Learning to Bow, The Council of Dads, and, most recently, The Secrets of Happy Family, as well as several books on the Middle East including Walking the Bible, Abrahamand Where God Was Born. To read prior columns, please click here.
In a few weeks Harper Collins will publish Bruce’s new book, THE SECRETS OF HAPPY FAMILIES: Improve Your Mornings, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More.
From Bruce: “Like many people we know, my wife, Linda, and I felt squeezed between aging parents and rising children. So over several years, I set out to find the smartest ideas and cutting-edge techniques to make our family happier. Avoiding the usual “experts,” I sought out creative minds from Silicon Valley to the set of “Modern Family” to the country’s top negotiators, asked what they were doing with the families, then tested their ideas at home with Linda and our girls. Some of these solutions failed, but many more improved our lives deeply and brought us all a lot closer.”
The book will be excerpted in the New York Times and appear on the cover of PARADE. Bruce will be featured on Good Morning America, Katie Couric, and other shows. Bruce will also be touring around the country.
There will also be an event in NYC at the Barnes & Noble on 86th Street on the East Side on February 20. (Stay tuned for a JETAANY announcement about going to the event followed by a happy hour.)
Learn more here: http://amzn.to/QwQxP5.
For more regular updates, follow Bruce on Facebook: www.facebook.com/brucefeilerauthor.
And Twitter: www.twitter.com/brucefeiler.
LifeAfterJET: JET alum makes Korean gay rights public service announcement video
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Patrick Lee (also known as Pat Leezy, Nagasaki-ken, 2010-2012) specializes in videography. His videos can be seen on his Youtube Channel. He can be contacted through Facebook and Twitter.
Here’s another interesting video Patrick recently wrote/produced/directed/edited while in Seoul. It’s a gay rights public service announcement set in Seoul. He also had the video translated in 5 different languages (English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French). Click the Closed Captioning “CC” button to choose the language on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMywAnbMHKY
Life After JET: Matthew Kohut, Psychotherapist
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Matt Kohut (CIR Aichi-ken, Shitara-cho, 1998-2000) is a psychotherapist is New York City. He is not a writer but wrote this piece. For more about Matt please visit: www.mattkohut.com.
*Have your own “Life After JET” story that you think would be of interest to the JET/JET alum community? Email jetwit [at] jetwit.com.
PRACTICE
Matthew M. Kohut, LMSW
JET was always part of the plan. Since studying abroad in Japan in my teens and twenties I felt the need to keep my love for Japan alive. I had each step planned. First do JET, learn Japanese, then work at a high-profile company pushing billions of Yen around the world, bow, firmly shake hands, exchange business cards without pocketing them until outside the room, guzzle Kirin black-label with colleagues until shuden, show up for calisthenics the next morning, pretend like none if it happened, live long, prosper and die. It was a nice plan, cinematic and to the point. But, exciting? Debatable.
I did ok at making the plan work until I got to the point of pushing billions of yen around the world. Upon returning from JET in 2000, I landed a job at the Consulate General of Japan in San Francisco as Assistant to the Cultural Attaché. I was hobnobbing with National Living Treasures, speaking Japanese in huddles of diplomats by day, and lazing around home with my Japanese boyfriend by night, ne-ing and yo-ing about it until bedtime. It wasn’t the plan, but it was close enough.
And it was good enough too– for a while. But about my third year of working at the Consulate I Read More
Life After JET: Return to Japan? You can, and I did, as a Rotary International Peace Fellow
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Mark graduating with his MA in Peace Studies from ICU, Tokyo
As a JET alum, have you ever thought about returning to Japan in a different capacity? Are you interested in earning a fully-funded MA in Peace Studies in Tokyo? You can, and I did, as a Rotary International Peace Fellow. (In fact, there have been at least five JET alums who have gone on to be Rotary Peace Fellows) For me, it was a perfect chance to return to Japan and advance my career at the same time.
Like many JET alums, I’d always thought it would be nice to live in Japan once again, but was not as interested in taking the Eikaiwa route. I had a wonderful experience as an ALT in Nagasaki (2000-04) and truly treasured my time there. After my time on JET, I had returned to the States and was living and working for the US Govt in Washington, DC through the Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) Program. Still, I missed the experience of daily life in another culture and was looking for a way to make it happen. Through a friend of mine named William Daniel Sturgeon, who is also a JET alum and a former Peace Fellow, I learned about this great opportunity. Thanks to his great advice and mentoring, I was able to complete the application and selection process successfully and become a Rotary International Peace Fellow in Japan in 2010.
Through the Rotary Fellowship, Read More
