66.5 by 82 inches

I've been inspired to paint a mural in my dad's basement. Pictures will be produced when its finished but Daniela has to see it before anyone else can.

So disappointed...

If the thought of putting classic literature and poetry on an iPod doesn't do it for you, just skip this one.

I found a website, Librivox, that provides free audio recordings of books. After a little searching I also found readings from the work of some of my favorite poets. I was THRILLED to find, what I thought, was a way to put poetry onto my iPod and then listen to it while running. Try to imagine how let down I was when I found out that all the recordings were done by volunteers and these volunteers had some of the worst, nasally voices ever recorded. Oh man. Returning to one of my favorite sites online, The Gutenberg Project, I found they now also carry sound recordings and often there will be multiple recordings for one book. At least that affords some selection. Would you rather hear Songs of Innocence and Experience read by the guy who did the voice for Snuffalufagus or the guy who did the voice for Yoda?

女が階段を上る時

Thanks to Netflix and the Criterion Collection I've been watching a lot of old Japanese movies lately and I have some recommendations. I just finished 女が階段を上る時, or 'When a Woman Ascends the Stairs,' in its translation. The story involves a Ginza bar hostess in the years following World War II. She's a widow of 30 and her impeccable character makes her an anachronism in, what was then, modern Tokyo. I wouldn't normally post my thoughts on a movie from the 1960s but some idiot from Chicago posted his thoughts on IMDb and I had no one to argue with. 'Wallabee Champ' thought: "The biggest [flaw] is there's no actual drama, because the main character doesn't face any adversity. She's just a whiny woman who's upset with her lot in life, but too unmotivated to change it, and instead mopes around a lot." No. Totally wrong. I don't even know where to begin with why that statement is shit. I'm guessing that if Godzilla doesn't knock down the city, 'Wallabee Champ' won't register the adversity. The adversity in the film comes from working a job she hates (where she has to entertain and flatter people who are depraved and selfish) because its necessary, while trying to preserve her own dignity. I found that despite being a movie about a Japanese bar hostess in post-war Japan, I could totally relate to what she was living through. How do you define who you are and then preserve that in the face of modern society and its compromises?

In addition to this, I would recommend every movie directed by Kurosawa Akira (start with the more famous samurai films but don't skip Ikiru), the three films about the life of Miyamoto Musashi directed by Inagaki Hiroshi, and a bunch of other films that I'd be happy to elaborate on if anyone is interested. And a bunch of anime too.

Financial Advice

I want to write a long and thorough post later, but the gist of what I want to say is this: buying stock in NOVA is probably a good idea.

Taxes... 5 months late

I'm now filling out my taxes for the fiscal year 2006. I'm not actually late since I applied for an extension while I was traveling. If you've never needed an extension before, it gives you until October 15th to get your shit together.

While I was in Malaysia I met this girl who taught in Japan for three years and she told me which forms I would eventually need to file. I'm filling out a 1040 like everyone else (I have to use an arbitrary exchange rate and put all of my yen earnings into dollars), but on top of that I'm filling out a 2555 form, which allows me to exempt up to $82,400 of my earnings from taxes in the US. So, if you're thinking about working abroad, know that you won't need to pay taxes back home. I wish I could just call the IRS and tell them how much I earned, much less than $82,400, and they could just let me go. It's going to take me hours to read through the IRS website and figure this out with the ultimate result (a foregone conclusion) that I won't owe a penny. Can't we just skip everything in between guys?

By the way that girl I met in Malaysia was a total bitch. The second she told me she went to Wellesley I knew it was going to be a pissing contest. I was at an early disadvantage because I told her I taught at NOVA (JET being a much better choice), but I recovered some ground when I found out I was a few years younger than she was. She had found a better deal on her hotel room and rubbed in that it was a single. I played that off like she was being antisocial and told her making friends is the best part of traveling. I think in the end I won. After all, I'm me. There's nothing she could have said to recover from that.

Voodoo Chile Blues

I wrote back to the WinBe school and told them I needed an additional week to decide whether I would accept their offer or not. I explicitly told them that I had an interview at another school and without hearing their offer I'm not prepared to decide. I'm not sure if that will fly or not, but reading something in their contract is what made me go this route.

An Instructor who breaks the contract without an unavoidable reason (as defined through consultation with the Japanese Labour Law Bureau: Roodou Kijun Kantokusho), may find themselves the subject of legal proceedings in Tokyo Civil Court to recover costs incurred by WinBe as a consequence of the Instructor’s actions.　

I don't know what costs the school will incur if I say 'yes' but that scared me into being a little bit more thoughtful in my dealings with them. Hopefully I'll hear back from someone at Interac this week and then I can make a decision.

Details of the job

I just finished reading over the contract and rules and regulations. OK, so here's what WinBe entails and how it compares to NOVA:

My paychecks at NOVA were all over the place. The last three months I was in Japan I worked a ton of overtime and my paychecks reflected that. For the first 9 months I was there, I think I missed at least one day of work each month though, so those paychecks also reflected that. When all was said and done I made 2,623,605 yen that year. Because I left NOVA halfway through January and only started getting paid on the 9th or 10th of February 2006, I was almost a full month short of a year in days actually worked. OK, so if I count that 2,623,605 as 11 months it's about 238,500 yen a month. That's the number I'll use for comparison.

So WinBe pays 250,000 each month, but the hours are worse. I was only on a 34 hour week at NOVA and it'll be a full 40 at WinBe. Not actually 40 though since I think an hour for lunch is included in that 40. On the positive side, I'll either get Saturday/Sunday or Sunday/Monday off instead of Wednesday/Thursday like I had at NOVA. Having Friday and Saturday night off makes a huge difference in your options.

The school I get assigned to will pay 20,000 for my moving costs and if I stay until the end of my contract, I'll get a 100,000 yen bonus (assuming I don't miss more than 7 days of work outside of regular holidays).

At NOVA, I got two weeks of vacation time. That sucked cock. Big hard cock. I'll get somewhere around 5 weeks at WinBe, but I can't choose the time off. I get Christmas/New Year's off, Golden Week (a Japanese holiday in May) and Obon (in August).

Unlike at NOVA, I'll be expected to contribute to sales. This may be one of the worst parts of this new job. Plus, WinBe has a lame incentive thing where if you get 30 new students to sign up, they give you another bonus of 100,000 yen. I can already see how lame that's going to be. Acting like I really want these timid Japanese house wives to sign a contract because English is fun. Shit like that. Oh man I don't want to do that.


Actually, the more I look over this contract the more it looks just like NOVA and the more I don't want to say 'yes.' I recently gave Bruce good advice which was to go ahead and say 'yes' to NOVA and then if he hears back from a better company, just write them an email saying you changed your mind. I think that's how I might handle this. Write WinBe back, say I would love to work there, and then just pretend like that didn't happen if Interac calls me back. Hmmmm....

Hmmmm... do I go back to Japan?

I received the following email this morning:

Dear Mr.Egan,

I enjoyed speaking with you and believe that you would be quite successful
as an instructor at WinBe. Therefore, we would like to offer you a teaching
position.

I have attached a copy of a sample contract, along with a copy of our rules
and regulations. Please read over them carefully and provide us with an
answer by September 3rd.

If you have any questions or concerns, you may call us at ## #### #### or
send me an email to this address.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
----- ---------
Human Resources
WinBe English School

Sooooooo... return to Japan or not? If anyone has any advice one way or the other feel free to let me know. I changed the settings for this blog and now you don't have to be a registered member to post comments. I think.

Is 10:30 AM JST good for you?

I applied to the WinBe School in Japan at some point before August 20th. I think I submitted a resume through Gaijinpot, but I'm not sure. Anyway, I got an email on the 20th from someone at WinBe asking me when would be a good time to call for a quick chat on the phone. I told her any weekday between 2 and 6pm would be best. She wrote me back informing me that in Japan that's between 3 and 7am and their school wasn't open during those hours. Ah. I asked when the school WAS open. She said between 9:00pm and 6:30am, EST. I'm usually asleep by 9:30 now (the payoff is that I get to watch the sunrise), but I figured I could tough it out for one night. So I got an email from WinBe on Sunday night (Monday morning in Japan) telling me to expect a call on Tuesday night (Wednesday morning in Japan).

Not much to report really. The phone call went fine, much like the one with Geos did. The woman I spoke with obviously hadn't seen my resume. She wanted to know, in three adjectives, what my old students in Japan would say about me. I went with 'patient, dedicated, and kind' instead of 'sex-driven, alcoholic, and fueled by rage.' I thought using 'kind' was a good choice since most students I had in Japan described everything as 'kind' thanks to their limited vocabularies. She asked me to scan and forward her a letter of recommendation which isn't a problem. The earliest I can be in Japan through them is late November. It takes a minimum of 2 to 3 months to get my visa paperwork sorted out. When asked for a location preference (this school has branches throughout Japan and will probably look a lot like NOVA did) I gave southern Honshu or Kyushu as an answer. She told me that the only branch they were hiring for right now was Saitama and I told her Saitama sounded magical.


I don't know much about Saitama but it's a large city and about 45 minutes from Tokyo. It would put me closer to my old roommate David, who has returned to Japan and now works in Tochigi. The picture above is a view of Mt. Fuji from the area.

I don't know if this is going to lead to anything but unless Interac calls me back soon, it looks like my only serious lead.

Confrontation online and disheartening results

So I was a little hurt after receiving that email from Geos. Getting rejected by the two least competitive schools in Japan doesn't do wonders for your confidence. I mean, I did a bang-up job in Japan, so why the lack of love now? I was determined to at least get an honest answer out of Geos so I wrote them the following email:

Dear Mr. Avoine:

While I understand the need for a non-specific rejection, I simply refuse to believe that you wouldn't be interested in additional teachers. I am aware of the problems that all of the English conversation schools have in keeping fully staffed. Given the demand in Japan for native speakers and the unfortunate insufficient supply, it would make sense to at least keep my application on file for a time when positions became available.

I have just received a similar rejection from NOVA, for whom I worked for a year. I believe that someone from Geos called NOVA to inquire about my employment there and someone from NOVA said something untrue. I state it again: untrue.

I had a wonderful working relationship with everyone at NOVA, none more so than the students, but for one incident with a superior who was very rude to me, repeatedly, and who received similar treatment from me on one occasion. I refuse to believe that someone as qualified as I am (with a year of experience in Japan already) wouldn't be able to make your final cut.

I would love the opportunity to explain the situation that I was unfortunately a part of in Japan, especially as... BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH

To which Mr. Avoine promptly responded:

Dear Mr Egan

Thank you for your message.

No-one from the GEOS office contacted Nova regarding your application or history with them. That is something we reserve for the final stages of the hiring process, not at this stage of screening. And, I almost hate to add, they would not be a source we would take very seriously anyway.

Once again, thank you for your interest in GEOS. I wish you the best in securing a suitable position in Japan.

Sincerely,

Michel Avoine
Recruitment/Training Coordinator
GEOS Language Corporation, Vancouver

Ouch. I made sure to follow-up with an apology for my accusation and thanked him like a good little applicant. Damn. I guess I just got rejected. Daniela and I came up with a bunch of great reasons why they might not have wanted me, but it doesn't really matter.

So! I've been applying to other jobs in Japan (there is no lack of schools looking for teachers) but I feel very underwhelming as an applicant. I asked my friend Sunshine (a NOVA co-worker) who she returned to Japan through and she gave me the names of two companies that place ALTs: Altia and Interac. I applied to Interac and got an encouraging response. In addition, I've been applying to jobs through Gaijinpot, which feels like the English teacher's Monster.com. And just like Monster.com I expect a whole lotta nothing from them. One nice part of applying through Gaijinpot is that they send you an automatically-generated email after you send your online resume to someone. It confirms that you applied for job #12345 and it tells you how many other resumes have been sent for that same job. I found four jobs that sounded good and found out that 7, 159, 20, and 57 other resumes had already been sent. SIGH. Looking for a job sucks.

A conspiracy!

Dear Mr Egan

Thank you for your interest in a position with GEOS in Japan.

Your application was reviewed by the hiring officer for your area. I regret that the application was unsuccessful and the officer declined to proceed with a formal interview. Please understand that we receive nearly 5,000 applications every year for about 200-250 positions, so competition for these positions can be very severe.

Once again, thank you for considering GEOS. I wish you the best in your future endeavours.

Sincerely,

Michel Avoine
Personnel Coordinator
GEOS Language Corporation, Vancouver

What a bunch of bitter little bitches they have at NOVA! I had a phone interview yesterday with someone at Geos and today they sent me this email. I'm still interested in returning to Japan but now I have be a little bit more clever about it. I have to either pretend like I never worked for NOVA or I have to apply to a place that's not gonna call them and check up on me.

It's a challenge!

oooOOOh SNAP!

NOVA was taking its sweet time in getting back to me, so last night I thought I'd confront them with an email. I mailed the Boston office this:


NOVA Recruiting Group:

I haven't heard back from anyone and I was wondering where we were in the application process. Is there any additional information you need from me?

Hope all is well,

Benjamin Egan


They replied by early this morning with:


August 8, 2007

Dear Mr.Egan,

Thank you for your re-application with Nova Corporation. Re-employment is based on previous work evaluations. Your personnel file was reviewed in Japan and the Boston Office was informed that we are unable to consider you for re-employment.

The Nova Corporation Boston Office team would like to take this opportunity to wish you all the best in your job search in the future.


Sincerely,


Nova Group Boston
535 Boylston St, Ste 204
Boston, MA 02116
617-437-7977


OH!! I had no real desire to return to NOVA but now, with a Geos application in the works, I'm worried that someone is gonna call NOVA and they're gonna badmouth me. I have no doubt that I got rejected thanks to this conversation. Oh well. I sent another email to the Boston office just a minute ago asking for an explanation. Honesty would be awesome. I'd love to post it.

Housekeeping on a Tuesday

I uploaded the rest of the pictures that Luke and I took in Nepal and India. It took me 2 months, but I got around to it.

I'm also putting them in chronological order and adding comments so they make a little bit more sense.

Important Anniversaries

Where were you 62 years ago? I've given it a lot of thought and we were wrong. We never should have dropped those bombs. Conventional wisdom aside, Japan wasn't prepared to fight any longer. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey corroborates this. According to McClain, the army estimates of a 1,000,000 US casualties upon invasion were completely made up. The real estimates produced put the number closer to 30,000.

Some also defend Hiroshima on the grounds that between 80,000 and 200,000 died in the Tokyo fire bombings of the previous year. Those were conventional weapons and the number killed was significantly larger than Hiroshima's 140,000. Far more than Nagasaki's 74,000. They were unnecessary deaths. That's why it was wrong.

Japanese gameshows are brilliant

Game show clips of Silent Library, Human Tetris 1, Human Tetris 2, and the Hot Water/Tits Game.

In the Hot Water/Tits Game they announce that the water is 51 degrees Celsius, which is about 124 in Fahrenheit.

Having kids? Teach 'em self-control for the best results

Found this article online. Since a lot of my friends are getting engaged, married, and knocked up now, let me weigh in with some child-rearing advice. According to the link above, children who are able to exercise self-control are more likely to get better SAT scores in high school, be less likely to have drug addiction problems at 32 and be less likely to become bullies.

GEOS' reply on August 1, 2007

I got this today from GEOS:

Dear Mr Egan

Thank you for your interest in GEOS.

We need to collect a little more information to complete your application before forwarding it for final review. Please call between 9am and 5 pm (Pacific Time) by August 7th (Tuesday). Please note that our office will be closed for a public holiday on August 6th. The call will take approximately 5-10 minutes. Our toll-free number is 1-877-584-4367.

I have also attached a document which may answer some of your questions about working for GEOS in Japan. Please take the time to read it before placing the call. Your Application ID number is ##-###. Finally, please note that the four main recruitment centers in North America are New York City, Toronto, San Francisco, and Vancouver. We will also be recruiting in Dallas in October. We regret that no interviews are held outside of these locations.

We look forward to hearing from you.

I'll make the call when I'm good and ready. Am I really ready to return to Japan?

"...the world's cities painted with sound."

A few weeks ago I finished Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities. The book is centered around a fictionalized series of conversations that take place between the Mongol emperor, Kublai Khan, and the explorer Marco Polo. Polo has been hired by the great Khan to travel around his empire and describe to him its cities. Kublai Khan, with few years left, wants to understand the empire he has created, and of all his advisers he shows the most interest in the stories Polo has to tell. The book contains the descriptions of 55 cities but fairly quickly the Khan realizes that Polo is actually describing the same city over and over again. I'm not sure how far I can go into explaining the plot of a book before I begin to ruin it, so I'll stop there since it's irrelevant to what I want to say anyway (plus, for much better plot summaries go here or here).

After I finished the book I went online to see if I could find a relevant discussion group and stumbled onto something even better. An electronic music label, Fällt, has created something called the Invisible Cities Project. Artists in 24 different cities around the world were asked to make 5-minute field recordings in order to paint pictures of those cities using sound. I listened to a few of them and think the idea is brilliant, even if the execution on a few fell flat.

The Invisible Cities Project can be found on the Fällt website or simply follow this link. If you use the link provided, the recordings can be found by clicking on the grid about halfway down the page on the right. The Moscow and Delhi recordings were cool, not so much for Tokyo.

I'm motherfucking rich!

You see this graph? You know what this means? It means I'm motherfucking rich.

This is the yen-dollar exchange rate for the past three months. This number drove me nuts while I was traveling because my yen-denominated account kept shrinking and I wasn't even getting high for it. Now its on a rebound and at least this guy thinks it will continue to get stronger.

Right now I have all of my money in three very inconvenient places. I have my Citizens bank account in Boston, a wad of Thai bhat that I haven't converted back to dollars yet, and my Citibank Japan account (denominated in yen) that I was able to draw funds from at ATMs in Asia (very convenient if you ignore the 3% transaction fee for doing so).

A 4% appreciation in the yen doesn't mean much to someone like me (I think I have an extra $56 in my account now) but it's like getting free money and that rocks. You would think with a background in Economics from a respectable university I would fully understand why this is happening to the yen, but I don't. It makes me feel better to know that very few other people do either. Reading online financial opinions from February and March, this wasn't something everyone agreed upon. I hope it lasts.

Drug busts, a murder, and the METI

is in trouble! But what else is new?

I spent the entire day yesterday in front of this computer. Most of that time was spent reformatting this blog but I also had time to do some Japan-related searching. I have been in the dark about what's been going on in Japan, and specifically what's been happening to NOVA since I quit on January 13th. On June 13th, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry imposed a 6-month ban on NOVA, preventing it from signing up new students to contracts longer than 1 year (this is aimed at the core of NOVA's business since 90% of their revenue come from new contracts). The sanctions are in response to NOVA policies for refunds on canceled contracts. There is a law in Japan that says you have eight days to cancel contracts without penalties but NOVA claims this law doesn't apply to them. That's where the problem seems to lie from what I've read. Officials at the ministry described NOVA as "organized and malicious" and have received over 7,000 complaints against the company since 1996.

Unrelated, shortly after I left Japan 7 NOVA employees were charged with possession (of cocaine and marijuana) in the Tokyo area. This was all over the national media. The charges result from a drug bust made back in November, while I was still an employee but safely in Nagoya and drug-free. I remember hearing about this at work and it seemed like nothing was going to happen to them. They might still get off but NOVA's instructors aren't new to drug charges. In response to the charges against two teachers in 1994, NOVA started its drug-testing policy. This was fought in court but before I went to Japan I remember I had to sign a form that said I would consent to be tested. According to the union, no instructors were ever required to take a drug test.

Additionally, on March 27 of this year, a 22-year old NOVA employee, Lindsay Ann Hawker, was found murdered in a sand-filled bathtub in Chiba. The police suspect one of her students but he remains at large.

Financially, the company is in rough shape but that's not new. I looked up the following data on Yahoo! Finance this morning. The company's stock has been on a steady slide since at least 2 years ago. When the news of NOVA's most recent troubles was released, the stock tumbled 25% in just a few days.

So what does all this mean? Everyone who maintains a blog is predicting the end of NOVA. They say all of this is irrefutable proof the company is fucked. One guy advised all current employees to not even bother quitting, but to just not return and start looking for another job immediately. I think everyone needs to calm the fuck down. I'm not sure what the steady slide in NOVA's share price means, other than it's a great time to buy if NOVA doesn't go under. As for the the sanctions against NOVA, they're only for 6 months and they can still sign up students as long as the contracts are for less than one year. I know NOVA has recently opened schools in Taiwan and earlier this year some spokesman for the company said they have plans for mainland Chinese schools as well. This is a lot of bad press all at one time, but I don't think I should cross NOVA off of my list of places to apply to.