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Whether it’s Nintendo, Pokemon, Hello Kitty, sushi or anime, most Americans have been brought up on elements of Japanese popular culture.
For two University of Maine students — senior English student Joseph Kester and senior journalism and new media student Eryk Salvaggio — these were not just passing childhood fancies. At some point in both of their lives, they decided to pursue their interest in Japanese language and culture.
The students have been accepted into the Japanese Exchange and Teaching Programme — a yearlong Japanese government program in which college graduates are given salaries upward of $38,000, housing and a free plane ticket to Japan to fulfill one of three designated duties.
From 2009 to 2010, 871 of 1,586 JET first-years were from the United States, according to the program. Kester said about 5,500 people applied for this year. Ninety percent of hires will be assistant language teachers, or ALTs — placed mainly in public schools or on boards of education.
Salvaggio, a columnist and former editor-in-chief for The Maine Campus, will fill one of those positions, but doesn’t yet know in what part of the country he’ll be.
“I know I’ll be placed in a Japanese high school and work as an assistant to a native Japanese English teacher. My job is to talk to the kids, to help them speak and hear English in a conversational way, while working as a kind of cultural ambassador for the States,” Salvaggio wrote in an e-mail.
The students’ interviews took place at the Consulate General of Japan’s office in Boston. According to Kester, the interview was about a half-hour long. He had to read two Japanese “newspaper article-like samples” to a panel and was then questioned in English about his background. He said teaching applicants are expected to give a mock lesson in simple English.
“They want to make sure you’re a qualified, outgoing and flexible person,” Kester said.
Kester is one of 10 percent of hires to be placed as a coordinator for international relations. CIRs work to assist local government offices in international exchange activities.
“I can carry on a conversation about just about anything,” Kester said. “I’m fluent enough that I’m going to be getting a job possibly doing translation in a city hall.”
Neither Kester, of Auburn, nor Salvaggio, of Bangor, had the opportunity to formally study Japanese in high school. Both students have exhausted UMaine’s limited Japanese language course offerings, but said they picked up the language through less traditional avenues as well.
After preliminary and interdisciplinary studies of the language at UMaine in his first two years, Kester saw a flier seeking English-speaking conversation partners for Hirosaki University students studying American language and culture at UMaine as part of an intensive three-week course.
“I ended up loving it — talking with them and hearing what they had to say and learning something about Hirosaki and Japan,” Kester said. “That was probably the biggest motivation that sent me off. Right after that, I looked into studying abroad.”
Two years ago, Kester spent a year abroad at Hirosaki University, located in the northern prefecture of Aomori. He said the first thing he noticed in Japan was how compact cities and towns were – the first visible difference he saw between there and Maine.
“A 30-minute walk would get you all the way from the edge of town, where I was, to the train station downtown. Obviously, if you have a bike, everything goes even faster,” Kester said.
Salvaggio has never been to Japan, but wrote that his grandfather triggered his curiosity about the country.
“I’ve wanted to go to Japan since I was a kid, when my grandfather was working as an engineer in Hokkaido,” Salvaggio said. “I basically only knew my grandfather from postcards and coins from Japan when I was little, and ever since, I’ve had an enormous appreciation and emotional connection to the country.”
Salvaggio is happy to be realizing his dream, but said his proficiency with the language is less than ideal.
“I could probably introduce myself and order food at a restaurant at this stage. My conversational skills are pretty meager,” Salvaggio wrote. “For my position, the program says you don’t need to speak any Japanese for the job, which is good news for me.”
He said even though UMaine’s program is largely interdisciplinary and “self-study,” it helps students gain interest in a culture different from their own.
“It just sort of works that practicing the language facilitates this miniature cultural immersion. I don’t know if that’s the point of the program, or what, but it seems like it works,” Salvaggio wrote.
But it wasn’t language courses that were the driving force behind his application for JET.
“Oddly enough, the biggest factor for applying to JET was Jeff Goolsby in the art department. He teaches a class called Japanese Cinema, and when I approached him with questions about teaching abroad in Japan he had a lot of great ideas,” Salvaggio wrote.
Kester said his basic training in the language at UMaine helped him, but it paled in comparison to his real-life experience in Japan. He said he didn’t really get to know the language until he went to Japan.
“Once I was there and starting to be able to speak it every day — that’s obviously a huge motivation to learn it,” he said. “That’s how you have to survive.”
The cultural differences between Maine and Japan, Kester said, are “too many to list.”
“It’s still very much a culture steeped in tradition, a culture of respect. There’s a very clear hierarchy within Japanese culture and society — even in high school and college,” Kester said.
Kester said he joined an outdoor exploration club open only to juniors and seniors within his first two weeks in Hirosaki. Seniors, he said, ran the show.
“They basically have every right to talk down to you and tell you to do things and you have to do them and be polite to them and not talk back,” Kester said. Despite the differences, Kester said he made many friends and contacts in Japan and had a wonderful time there.
“Going through all of this experience, it seemed like kind of a waste to not go back, at least to do something and give back and be able to utilize my Japanese language abilities,” Kester said.
“Joe and I have really different backgrounds and skills,” Salvaggio said. “He’s way ahead of me on the language. But it seems like we’re both highly motivated to learn things on our own.”
Kester and Salvaggio are two of approximately 750 American college grads accepted to the JET Programme.
Bangor Daily News