Tag: postpone

The recent pandemic has led to a lot of changes and disruptions. There is no vaccine yet and there’s no way of knowing for sure what the near future holds. This means that my postgraduate plans are at risk of being postponed, and before that, whether I can even get out of Japan is unsure. My current situation is that I am working from home while schools are planned to stay closed until May 6th. I’m mostly staying at home in my apartment except for grocery runs. In the meantime, I thought I’d sum up what my experience has been so far and what my contingency plans are.

Background

To start, some quick background on my situation. I’m currently in my 4th year on the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program (JET). I teach at a prefectural high school and was planning to finish my contract and return home this summer in August before starting my postgraduate program at Bristol University in September. I live in Hyogo prefecture, one of the prefectures with several cluster outbreaks and one of the original 7 prefectures that Abe declared a state of emergency for before it was extended to cover the whole country. And currently, school is closed until May 6th and I am working from home.

The Beginning

Japan gets a lot of tourists from China, so when cases spiked and travel restrictions were enacted on China’s end, Japan took notice due to the large drop in tourists at popular sites. Many places banked on reservations for tourists traveling during the lunar New Year, and the decrease in tourists was noticeable in places like Kyoto and Nara which are regularly packed. However, at this point, Japan seemed less concerned with the possibility of the disease spreading and more concerned with the economic repercussions. In February, there was a new tourism campaign where posters of nearly empty sites were put up encouraging people to take advantage of the rare lack of tourists.

I’ll admit, I did make a trip to Kyoto (2/24) as there were still very few cases (2 in Kyoto at the time) and an uncrowded Kyoto was too much to resist. I headed to Arashiyama since I had already planned to go and enjoy the hot springs and had made a trip only a few weeks before that. I planned to limit where I would be going, just the hot spring, the main shopping area, and park so I wouldn’t be traveling that far and I could get there without going through Osaka, a travel hub. The lack of visitors was refreshing but locals were already feeling the sting. I talked with an artist selling postcards of his work and he said that an art conference he was planning to attend in Tokyo had been canceled. Stories in other areas were starting to come out of drastic declines in visitors and sales while it seemed Gion was happy for a break from the tourist hordes.

Watching and Waiting

As a member of an international exchange program, belonging to several program-related groups on FaceBook (prefectural, regional, etc.), and having friends from a variety of different countries, I had a lot of virus-related information flowing through my feeds. I also had some insight into what was happening in different areas of Japan. Many were skeptical and suspicious of Japan’s handling of the virus. The cruise ship quarantine was botched and a story came out of people disembarking from a flight from Wuhan, which had passengers who tested positive for the virus, who did not get tested. Testing was voluntary but if you tested positive hospital quarantine was mandatory. Have fun picking through that logic loophole.

A lot of us suspected Japan was refusing to test and covering up cases in a bid to have the Olympics continue as scheduled. (We were unsurprised when suddenly after the Olympics were postponed there were a large number of cases reported in Tokyo.) Finally, there was an outbreak in Hokkaido and Japan had to start taking things more seriously. Hokkaido closed schools, but things still somehow felt far away as everything in my area seemed to be business as usual, except for masks being completely sold out.

I decided not to do any more travel for the time being and start gradually buying some extra food supplies to have on hand. The end of the academic year was coming and I was focused on getting through my last few classes, preparing for spring English programs, and saying goodbye to my 3rd-year students. Then, the evening before my school’s graduation(2/27), Abe made a surprise announcement. Large crowds were a risk factor for the spread of the virus and it was graduation season. Ceremonies were to be minimized, shortened, limited in attendance, or altogether canceled. Schools nationwide would be closed until the spring holidays to try and curtail the virus spread. Parents and teachers rejoiced at being given no notice and no time to plan for this change and suddenly have to make arrangements for their children at home while still going to work. (sarcasm)

Schools Close (The First Time)

Luckily for our school, students would still be able to have their ceremony but there would be a hand disinfectant station at the gym entrance and all but the core parts of the ceremony were cut. After ceremony celebrations were to be kept short, although seniors still took a couple of hours to take pictures and say their goodbyes, and as usual the English club party was on the long end. Once students had left the teachers had one of many meetings to try and figure out what was next. Essentially, the school was closed to students, spring day camps were canceled, and no club activities for 2 weeks. ALTs began to watch what was going on closely as we had already been watching how the virus was hitting other countries.

With the best interests of students, staff, and ourselves in mind, ALTs wanted to stay at home during this period. Despite an implied need to limit outings and keep gatherings small, the board of education would not let us stay home unless we used paid leave. Usually, this is the norm during spring break but we were hoping that in these circumstances the rule would change. It did not. I took a couple of Mondays off and one week of half days. Waiting to see more aggressive containment policies or signs that the virus was being taken seriously, as we watched nearby Asian countries take more serious measures such as South Korea’s aggressive testing or Taiwan and Hong Kong’s strict travel and quarantine restrictions. Surely Japan would do something any day now?

Starting to take it seriously?

More and more cases were starting to pop up. Online, ALTs shared that coworkers were coming in coughing, sick, but being denied testing. Or, not wanting to get tested because of the social stigma. Japan, perhaps still in denial, limited the testing to those who had been abroad recently or in contact with someone who had. Typical of Japan, they said they didn’t want to fill up hospital beds as positive cases were required, per law, to stay in hospital. It didn’t occur to them to change the law for asymptomatic cases. And despite aggressive testing leading to positive results in places like Italy and South Korea, Japan decided to focus on backtracing cluster outbreaks. In other words, wait for an outbreak to happen and then take action rather than try to identify and isolate before it spreads.

Like in the U.S., some governors seemed to take things more seriously than others. Before a holiday weekend (3/19), the governor of Osaka requested that those in Hyogo, which had growing numbers of infection, refrain from traveling into Osaka and vice-versa. Osaka is a large city and a travel hub which is the perfect recipe to spread the virus. The Hyogo governor, instead of supporting the moderate restraint requested by his neighbor, claimed he was being overly cautious. I wonder what he thought when news came out that Hyogo residents that had attended a concert in Osaka then tested positive for the virus?

Not what you thought. . .

With community spread confirmed and cases growing by the day, Hyogo finally had to face the facts. The school closure was to be extended with some modifications. Were those modifications online classes? Nay! Despite the image many may have a high-tech Japan, it is far surpassed by its Asian neighbors which were able to set up virtual classrooms for their students to stay on track through quarantine. Computers at home in Japan are not as common as many rely on smartphones for their internet browsing. Schools continue to almost exclusively use chalkboards with limited use of technology in the classroom and many teachers lack experience or confidence in using it.

So what were the modifications? To reduce the number of students at the school, they split the attendance and had each year group come on a different day to pick up/turn in assignments and receive updates. Clubs would be canceled (there was a brief period during the first school cancellation when clubs were allowed with reduced duration, only 2 hours allowed). In the meantime, ALTs were in an uproar. The best way to reduce the spread of the virus was to stay at home, and it looked like schools were resistant to this idea. Many ALTs e-mailed their embassies, their prefectural advisors, CLAIR (manages the JET Program along with the government), and Boards of Education outlining their worries and reasons why we should be allowed to work from home.

Logic Finally Wins. Sort of.

Many excellent points were made. ALTs travel throughout Japan and internationally a lot more often than our co-workers, so there was a higher chance we could have picked up the virus. Many are not fluent in Japanese and could have trouble navigating the healthcare system if we were to get sick. We are also far away from our home countries and families and so lack social support in the event of having to quarantine ourselves. On top of this, we were dealing with the anxiety and worry for our families back home. We don’t receive sick leave and the amount of paid leave varies. This means that if we become sick, we may run out of paid leave, and because our contracts may not allow unpaid leave, we could lose our income and position within the program. Otherwise, we could have our pay reduced because of missed working time.

As educators, we are also very concerned with protecting our students and coworkers. If students continue to attend school it increases opportunities for students to spread it among themselves, or to us, and vice versa. The staff room also breaks most of the “3 c’s rule” Japan has been touting to reduce risk. Avoid closed spaces with poor ventilation, crowded places with many people nearby, and close-contact settings. Desks are close together in tight rows and people covering their mouth when they cough or sneeze (let alone washing their hands with soap) is not as common as you would hope. Many teachers may be older and so at increased risk from the virus. Meanwhile, ALTs, which are supposed to be assistant teachers, have fewer administrative responsibilities and a lower workload. Most of us are used to using technology in making our lessons (google drive, PowerPoint, etc.) and are better positioned to do our work at home with our personal laptops.

With all this considered, in addition to official recommendations for social distancing and self-quarantine, we had good logical reasons to work from home. However, that would be deviating from the norm, the established rules, and Japan doesn’t like that. Even in a global pandemic. Luckily, it seems there was enough pressure, between embassies, ALTs, and finally an announcement from Abe declaring a state of emergency for 7 prefectures. Word came down that ALTs would be allowed to work from home given some additional paperwork and restrictions.

Work From Home

Sorry, some ALTs. In some places. In my case, prefectural ALTs directly hired by the BOE would be allowed to work from home on days students didn’t come to school. That would be 2 days a week. Meanwhile, municipal ALTs living and working in the same city as us could not. (Not long after this staff from a local elementary school would test positive. The municipal ALTs did finally get work from home permission.) It was very haphazard. At any rate, we took it as a win. Implementation of this varied among schools (some people had already been allowed to work from home and others had different requirements for showing their work) but it was better than nothing and honestly more than I expected to get.

The new rules were we had to fill in a form showing which days we would work from home and then outline what work we planned to do for those days. We have to email at the beginning and end of our shift and cannot leave our apartment within those hours except for our lunch break. We also have to report what work we have done during the day by the next working day. (This part has been vague in my case since I haven’t been told what exactly they want so I’ve just been attaching whatever I’ve done to my end of shift e-mail.)

Schools close. . .again

This lasted all of a couple of days before there was another change. Despite splitting year groups, having hundreds of students still commuting to and from school from the surrounding cities on public transportation doesn’t do much to reduce the chances of catching and spreading the virus. The first week into the modified schedule and school was abruptly closed again to students. Some students in Kobe were among another spike in cases. This meant that students would not be coming to school at all and we could increase the number of days we would work from home. It also meant that the Japanese teachers would also finally be allowed to work from home some days.

Getting Back to the Point

Sorry, that was a long ramble and I still haven’t addressed the main subject of this post: how the pandemic may affect my ability to start my postgraduate program. As this whole situation has devolved there has been a weird disconnect between the inaction and small changes I was experiencing in my daily life while there was a massive influx of information and updates online within the JET community and the news I was reading. I may go through some of those moderate changes in a separate post but let me explain how it is finally starting to affect my future.

When cases started to increase in Japan and international flights were being reduced, the U.S. Embassy sent out e-mails advising travelers to return home and refrain from any unnecessary travel. Initially, this was aimed at short-term travelers in Japan who might not have the income, health insurance, or resources to be able to quarantine in place. Later, another e-mail was sent advising English teachers specifically to either return home immediately while there were still flights or be prepared to stay in Japan indefinitely. It will come to no one’s surprise that as an American I opted to stay where I had affordable health insurance and income and not risk my family’s health with an international flight back or my financial security with the U.S.’s hyper-inflated healthcare costs. (Let alone use up funds earmarked to pay my tuition.)

The main problem here is whether I will be able to get a flight out of Japan in August. International flights out of Japan are down to about 6% of the normal volume. In light of this, and Japan’s lagging response, a fair number of ALTs cut contract and flew home early to be with loved ones. (This may also have helped push BOEs to allow work from home as that would be preferable to suddenly having no ALT, no replacement, and getting left dealing with their remaining belongings and bills.)The situation is constantly changing but seeing as we are most of the way into month 2 of the outbreak and conditions are not improving, it’s hard to say if things will have settled down by the summer. Even if they do, we don’t know what restrictions may still be in place. I would have to make 2 international flights, one home to the U.S. and then on to England. If quarantine was still required for international arrivals that could add up to 4 weeks for me. That doesn’t give me much time to move back to the U.S. and prepare for another year abroad.

In light of this uncertainty, I have been e-mailing people within the JET Program, the embassy, and my University to find out if there are any plans for if conditions do not improve. Bristol is so far still holding to the September start date. Within the JET Program, some areas may be considering extending our contracts into the summer if ALTs are not able to get in or out as planned. In the meantime, contracting organizations have been encouraged to support ALTs leaving and paying for their flights home. Normally, COs pay for our flight back after completion of our contract. Leaving early would void this and the ALT would be on the hook to pay for their flight. Now though, with the global situation and the fact that schools are closed for the foreseeable future, they are being advised to consider our contracts as fulfilled and still pay for our flight.

Contingency Plans

Like I said before, I’m going to stick it out until the end of my contract. Hopefully, things will improve by the summer and I can return as scheduled. If not, there are a lot of alternatives I have to juggle. The main factor being Bristol. If I cannot get to Bristol in time, I would need to defer. Difficult because I have already used my one deferral and haven’t heard back yet on the possibility of a second. If they push back their start date that might give me enough time to move and repack. If I can and do defer, I will probably look for an internship to pass the time and work on my career skills. Possibly return to one of my previous internships. It’s all still up in the air. Not reassuring or helpful for making plans.

In the meantime. . .

I’m enjoying work from home, although having to turn in work every day when normally my work at school would be sporadic is a little annoying. It is nice though to do things at my pace in the comfort of my home. Before stores closed I picked up some additional craft supplies and I already had a healthy stockpile at home to work with. Surrounded by books, crafts, and my trusty internet connection, staying at home isn’t that bad. I still go into school once a week to help record and upload English videos for the students, and since my school is right down the street I don’t have to use public transportation. Now that Japanese teachers can work from home too, my exposure to other people is limited. So I’m going to keep holding down the fort here and wait for any more updates.

Further Reading

This was a long and roundabout post, but if you are interested in reading more about the situation in Japan, and why certain things are happening (or not) the way they are, I am linking some articles below. Some interesting stuff in there.

Note: The Japan Times limits the free articles you can view. Try opening an incognito window if you reach your limit.

• Unofficial English summary of COVID cases in Hyogo
• Comparing Japan’s “State of Emergency” to other countries
• Why Japan’s work culture prevents widespread work from home.
• People in Tokyo not social distancing
• Academic bureaucracy in Japan hindering online transition
• Discrepancies in online learning between Japan’s public and private schools