I was accepted for an Interac position in 2019 and was supposed to go over in spring 2020 the exact week that all US planes were grounded. Originally, I was hired to work for Kanto North, who I know are by far the most reputable. However, when changing my arrival time, I was sent with North. The long I have waited to go, the more ambivalent I have felt about it. I will probably end up going, but working for Interac seems to have been a huge disaster for a lot of people. Honestly the only reason I applied with them in the first place was because I hadn’t finished my JET application in time. As it stands, I feel like my options are.
1. Just go with Interac come April and see how it pans out
2. Apply for JET
3. Apply for another private company
4. Just stay in the US
What do people here think is the best idea?
10 comments
1. Good luck
2. Why haven’t you been doing this already?
3. Same as Interac
4. Always the best choice at this point.
You’re 2 years removed from university. Time to start a career. If you haven’t been working in education already, you probably aren’t passionate about it. Just come for vacation in the next few years when the border opens for travel.
IF you apply for JET and get the interview, I believe you have to fly back to your home country for the interview. Might be a little different with the pandemic happening.
Just come in April with Interac, if you don’t like the job, get a better one after a few months. You can go on JET in September and get more money.
You guys need to do searches before posting questions, because this question has been answered many, many times before.
Not to be harsh with you, but it is pretty much de rigor when you visit a forum like this one to first check if others have asked that question.
The basic answer is this: no one is getting into Japan for quite a while, there is a glut of applications on the back burner, and you’re not likely to succeed in getting into Japan for at least another year.
You should proceed with that information in mind.
You should be applying for JET and any other companies that you think might put you in positions that you would enjoy more.
But the reality is, you probably won’t get into Japan in 2022. Maybe, but probably not. Get a job, start working where you are. Maybe you’ll find something you love and will just want to go to Japan for a vacation. If not, you’ll have saved some money while you wait.
As some other people have written, option 4 should plainly be your current course if you are trying to build a career of any persuasion. Getting a job with JET or Interac are fine, especially if you are trying to improve your Japanese or get some practical classroom experience for a future teaching career, but you should assume that until the world and especially Japan come to grips with the pandemic the borders are going to close to travel intermittently.
This will obviously put your ALT dreams on continued hiatus.
Try to find a job that suits your circumstances in the US. If you like it, stay with that position. If the ALT job materializes, turn in your two weeks and come to Japan.
For heaven’s sake, don’t let a middling ALT gig with the least bad dispatch company (debatable) keep you from building your life.
“go with Interac come April”
Good luck.
I’m in Interac north. Being rural, I have had no issues. But the Sapporo boe is not great and the company gets railroaded from what my coworkers tell me. Overall, if you can deal with the covid hoops you need to jump through to get to Japan, it’s not bad. But no matter who you go through, Covid restrictions are going to cause you issues.
1. Doing this requires no effort, so just whatever. They’re probably not going to take you over any time soon (borders being shut and all), but there’s no harm with listening to them pretend that they will, as long as you don’t start planning your life in Japan because some HR guy is being paid to send out emails from time to time to the people they want to keep waiting.
2. Why are you asking this? You should have done this already. With the same idea as #1, which is no matter how much they talk about you coming over, don’t believe it until it happens.
3. Meh? Go ahead. They’re not going to call up Interac and say “neener, we stole your foreigner who can’t get in the country”.
4. Do this while doing 1, 2, and 3, since none of 1, 2, and 3 are concrete or even possible at the moment. There’s no problem with moving on with your life while waiting for a global pandemic to cool down enough for a country where 60% of the population is elderly to start letting people in again. Yeah, I know, it has nothing to do with the elderly population, Japan’s just xenophobic. /s
You dodged a bullet not going with Kanto North. They do not make your life easy.