Somehow I became a JET

bairen asked: Hello! I was wondering what you like about living in Fukoaka. I'm going through the JET interview process now and I think that it would be a cool place to live. Any thoughts? Also... any suggestions/tips for the interview?

I really, really love Fukuoka. It’s got all the good points of a big city, with less of the bad points. (i.e, it’s got pretty much all the things you’d want shop-wise, but it doesn’t feel as crowded or overwhelmingly busy as other big cities in Japan.
It also has a lot of history, being one of the oldest cities, which is interesting to learn about. Also, because of its location (in the South, literally 3 hours from Korea by ferry) it quite famous for being an international port, which means there seems to be more foreigners than in other parts of Japan. (In my experience, anyway.) It’s also a really pretty area in general. The main downside is that, apparently, the humidity here is much worse than other more northern parts of Japan, but then again, while the winters are cold they’re not as intense as the more northerly parts either.
Of course, Fukuoka is the only place I’ve actually -lived- in Japan so I can’t really compare how it is to live here to how it is to live in other places. (I lived here 6 months as an exchange student first, and wanted to come back because i liked the place so much but also because I made friends here). I’m sure there are plenty of other places that are good to live in too.

As for the interview, I suggest you do what I did and try to find as many accounts of interviews as possible to prepare because they are all different. (I just googled ‘Jet interview process what to expect’ and things like that. To prepare, I made a list of all the interview questions I could find that past interviewees had shared online, and brainstormed answers for them, so I was pretty well prepared. I’m really terrible with job interviews so I was nervous as hell though.)
It seems like the most common questions are pertaining to your ability to adapt to another culture, your experience with children, and your experience teaching (it doesn’t have to be as an actual teacher, my ‘experience’ was just doing volunteer work at my old primary school.) If you don’t have any experience like that, try to make up for it with enthusiasm to ‘gain valuable experience’, that kind of thing.
I’ve heard a lot of stories about interviewers that purposefully try to make the interviewee uncomfortable, solely to see how they react to stress, but that didnt happen in my one.

I’m a really awkward person, and to tell the truth I don’t remember the interview 100% because it was mostly a nervous blur, but I do remember they asked about my experience and also ‘how would you react if a teacher made a mistake and didn’t notice’. (My answer was to not point it out in front of the class, because given my position, that could be very impolite. I would let them know after and also ask them what they’d rather I do next time it happens.  As it turned out, my teachers do make mistakes and actually do like me to correct them in the class, but the whole point of the answer was to show that I was aware of things that could cause offense in other cultures. (They seemed pretty happy with this answer, though, so I guess i was on the right track with it.)

…it’s kind of surreal for me to be in the position to give other people advice at this stage, because I still feel like a huge noob, but I wish you luck in any case.