I arrived in Tokyo, pretty much as an accidental tourist. My wife secured employment with an IGO in Tokyo and so here I am, fresh from Seoul, Korea. I was of the opinion that I could do what I wanted to do anywhere while my wife absolutely had to come to Tokyo. You can try to get into the environmentalist field anywhere in the world, right? However I can now appreciate how naive I was. Moving to another country is like opening a can of beans in that you need to employ the right tools. It most certainly isn’t something where you try out a new tool in order to open it up so you can get into it, in a manner of speaking.
This seems to be pushing me back towards the English education field in Tokyo, not something I’m looking forward to, since I was a university instructor in Seoul, which as you will know is the top of the ladder with a wonderful view. Standing at the bottom of the ladder again, not even a ladder I have much enthusiasm for, is very depressing.
I’m not going to talk about English teaching in Tokyo, doubtless there are already many brilliant individuals mining that particular vein of gold. I would much rather spend time talking about the things that I spend a lot of time thinking about, namely what is wrong with the world and how to make things better.
It occurs to me that the way people live has direction and momentum and both things are taking us, all of us, towards a place we don’t want to go. As I see it people are social animals want to fit in and be part of the group, goods and services are sold to groups and not individuals. If you want to move in a different direction then you are basically on your own and more often than not you can’t find the tools you need or space in rules of how things are done to go your own way.
Going your own way isn’t much, unless you can persuade other people to go with you. The question then is how do you persuade other people to go with you when you don’t share a common language? So you see I’ve arrived in Tokyo with a corkscrew and have discovered that I need a can opener. While it’s still possible to open the can with a corkscrew it’s much harder and there’s the chance you could end up sitting in an emergency room.
