Everyone that had recontracted for a second year on JET was required to attend a conference hosted by CLAIR in Kobe. The conference was for three days, but the first and third day were only half days – no problem.
I met up with Antoine in Sannomiya before the conference, and there were lots more foreigners than usual walking around. The hotel itself was on Port Island, a landfill island built mainly for industrial purposes, but there are a couple of hotels out there, as well as a spooky half-abandoned theme park.
The conference sessions themselves were interesting, but some were pretty bad. I got stuck in a couple were I was ready to walk out – a few were just a complete waste of my time. Others were quite good, and you could tell who was adept at public speaking and who needed the practice.
The first night Antoine, Nel, and I went out to dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory, a restaurant that I had enjoyed in California. The food was great, and the menu was exactly the same. They even had blue cheese dressing for the salad, which is pretty rare here in Japan. Later we bumped into Struan, who led us to a strange bar called Soul Blood. Whatever you are imagining about that place right now – you’re probably right. Picture tall skinny Japanese stoner dudes with giant afros spinning loud beat-heavy music in a tiny almost completely dark smoke filled room. There were only a few sources of light and beers were 500 yen. We stuck around for a while, but somehow lots of JETs started pouring in, so we got out of there.
We took the last train back to the hotel with all the other drunk JETs, and we had a group on our train that was yelling loudly, cursing their teachers, their students (!), and the program in general. In between that and bragging about who they were sleeping with, they were not making a great impression. The Japanese people on the train were visibly shocked, and they stared hard at the floor wishing we would all just go away. Antoine, Nel and I talked about it later, and it was definitely one of those moments that you’ll remember forever. We agreed that it was a dark side of the internationalization of Japan on JET.
