Departures (Of Pre-Departure Orientation)

This was originally written for the JET Alumni Association of Toronto's Monthly Newsletter as a report on the Pre-Departure Orientation event that took place in June for the 2013-2014 crop of Toronto JETs. However, as is my way, I couldn't resist the temptation to do a little more with it, and I feel like it rather accurately captures the sometimes-sad, sometimes-amazing roll of being an active JET Alumnus.

Over the weekend of June 22-23, The Japan Foundation of Toronto opened its doors for the 2013 Pre-Departure Orientation for Toronto. More than a dozen Toronto JETAA executives and members welcomed the 60-some new ALTs, presenting detailed sessions on all aspects of the JET experience.

It was the material you would expect: the kind of thing we all encountered at our own PDO events or Tokyo orientation: how to travel, how to teach, how to save, how to survive, how to not get konchoed. Each presenter made the material his or her own, seeking to add spice to the same material we teach every year.

What I believe to be remarkable about PDOT, though, has little enough to do with the content of the session. For me, the most salient, most worth-writing-home-about thing about PDOT is the feel of the event.

If you’ve never had the opportunity to volunteer at PDOT, it is part blessing and part curse.

The blessing? Getting back to that JET high by sharing in the excitement of the new ALTs. The event is the closest that one can get to returning to the JET experience. Being around all of those genki, hopeful, Japan-loving ALTs, you can close your eyes for a moment, detach your mind, and almost come to believe that you are back in Keio Plaza, JET-lagged at 5am and resorting to talking about the only thing you have in common with your roommate (Chrono Trigger) to while away the hours until the sun comes up.

To work with the new JETs at PDOT is to ride a vicarious high as you elect to forget for the moment that all of them are heading to Japan while you remain firmly right here. It is to feed on their genki, like getting dizzy on new baby smell from the downy heads of the freshly born. That high rides highest on the Saturday night, at the after-conference nomikai, when the beauty of nomunication strips away any remaining barriers and everyone lets the raw Japanalove flow forth.

The curse? That Sunday afternoon. As we JETAA volunteers tell our tales for our selected photos, the vicariousness begins to sublimate. We share our pictures and our few hundred words about the best times we had on JET, and we realize that these wonders that we share as prophecy for the new ALTs are our fading mythologies. We pass these adventures on to the kohais now, as each year we senpais grow further from our own experiences. 

They will go forth; 

they will watch as Japan opens before them. 

We will stay right here.

And yet we keep coming back. 

Every year we volunteer to do it again, to ride the emotional wave, from high to come down. We do it over and over, and it is for the fire in their eyes: for the spark, for the expanding, encompassing realization of the weight of the adventure that lies before them. We tell them all of the things that we were glad to hear, all those years ago, and we hope that they’re still true. We tell them that it will be alright; that we, too, shared these worries once-upon-a-time, that it all wound up happily-ever-after.

From now it will be a breakneck slide to August: to AC001 and that fateful Saturday. We will put them on that plane, these new little brothers and sisters of ours, we will wish them well, and we will return to our city to wait. We will keep the home fires burning—the JETAA legacy—so that it is there for them when they return.

After one year.
Or five.
Or seven.

We will be here. 

We will be waiting. 

We will see you again soon.