Gunma Orientation Day 1

Today was the Gunma Prefectural Orientation at Maebashi! Woke up early at 7:00am this morning to cycle to Takasaki Station in order to catch the train to Maebashi Station. From there, there were people who guided you to the Maebashi Prefectural Office via taxi. Once we arrived, there were even more people directing you to the room where the orientation was being held – each seat was set out with an orientation book and a fan! Today was extremely hot (a high of 36 degrees!!!) so the fan was definitely a necessity!

The orientation started with many talks about various aspects of life in Gunma specifically, as opposed to Tokyo Orientation which was very general and broad. They started off with a more detailed explanation of our contracts, focusing mainly on the different types of leaves. Then we moved onto health, insurance, counseling and other support services, and social etiquette in Japan. Lunch was in the hall’s cafeteria, and I had the cold udon again because it’s still super hot and I love udon!

After lunch the talks continued, with the topics moving more into teaching aspects – working as an ALT in Gunma, and what to expect when working in your respective school level. There was also a nice talk about how to handle cultural and communicative issues, and this was an important reminder for me to truly be more proactive and ASK lots of questions at my school! In Japan they don’t really tell things to you directly, and they expect you to know the information from reading the atmosphere or just gaining the knowledge by observation. I really need to work on this as I’m not used to asking a lot of questions to my colleagues, but I will have to here in Japan because my school really didn't tell me anything much!

We then moved into a more relaxed session where they introduced a series of games we could use at our schools. Various JET related and non-JET related groups then came out to do their presentations. One thing that is really lovely about Gunma is the truly active JET community – there are lot of people volunteering to organize events, run various activities, and just really working hard to help every JET person integrate into the community and enjoy Gunma life. It sounds like there’s going to be a lot of events this year! I’m already super looking forward to the Gunma Games, and the Canyoning event! They finished the day off with Q&A, and I like how they gave the option of writing down your questions throughout the day, and they would then be answered altogether. I definitely found this prefectural orientation much more helpful than the Tokyo Orientation – everything was more relevant, practical, and useful. It’s also great to meet all the other Gunma JETs, and knowing that you’ll bump into them again!

Day one of orientation finished officially at 16:30, and then we walked to our hotel (15 minutes walk), checked in, had a little rest, before heading right back to the building opposite the prefectural office for the Gunma Welcome Reception dinner. The food was really nice (fried chicken!) and plentiful. After that it was back to the hotel to change into casual clothes, and then on towards a night of karaoke! The Gunma AJET group had booked out rooms at a nearby karaoke place, and people were allowed to buy their own alcohol at a convenience store and bring it in! That was new for me because in Kyoto I don't think I went to any karaoke place that allowed you to bring your own alcohol in. Everyone got really hyped up at karaoke and kept pushing the time back later and later – it was originally supposed to finish at 23:00, which got pushed to 23:30, which got pushed to 24:00 (I went home at 23:45!) and the last group apparently left around 24:30!