GRIFTER’S TALES · BY COLIN LEE MACLEOD
Rice fields, a family beauty salon, and a first teaching job. My working life in Japan began close to home—then sent me driving into the unfamiliar.
Life around the family home
When I first got to Japan, I didn’t really speak Japanese and I didn’t know anyone outside the family welcoming me. My family there, the Aizawa family, lived on a farm.
There was the family house. Beside it was Kiyomi-san’s beauty salon, and on the other side was great-grandma’s house. Around us were rice fields and farmland. That was the setting of my early everyday life in Japan.
There was plenty of cleaning up and farm work to do. I helped out, spent time around the beauty salon, and began learning Japanese. Before there was an English classroom in my working day, there was family life, work around the farm, and a language I was only beginning to understand.
My wife found an opportunity
My wife found a company that wanted to hire me: an English school called Minerva, in Miyagi. That became my first job in Japan—teaching children in an after-school English program.
The children came to small teaching locations around the prefecture, and I travelled to those locations to teach them. A school might be in an apartment or another small space. It wasn’t one big school building where I went to the same classroom every day.
I was learning Japanese in my own life while going out to help children learn English. The farm, the salon, and the classroom were all becoming part of the same new life.
The drive I still remember
When I think about those first days of teaching, the moment that stays with me is leaving the house alone by car.
I was driving to a place I had never been, to meet people I had never known, without being able to speak their language. An unfamiliar destination, unfamiliar faces, and a job to go and do.
How did it feel? Exciting.
That is the memory I want to keep here: heading out from the family home, getting into the car, and going to teach. There would be more to learn and more stories from the classrooms. This was the beginning.
Grifter’s Takeaway
Help where you are, learn from the people around you, and be willing to try the next opportunity. An unfamiliar road can be the start of a skill—and a life—you haven’t built yet.
