Gaijin-in-Japan

60% wow yuou lucky **%&*6$#
here it is about 30% of your salary or less. It is all done on-line now, however you need to fill out the cards every two weeks saying where you applied.
Also if you do any parttime work while on unemployment they will deduct that from your check. ( once down they want to keep you down)

What is weird is … this is money you worked to put in the system, then they make you sweat to get it back like it’s thiers!!

anyway. I’m filling out my first card today!
I start a new job in another week! I may not get anythiing since I got severance pay from my last job whihc they want to count as salary get though it can in one check 2 weeks ago.

I don’t get it!

as for you

ganbatte!

Congrats on getting a job! Chuhai on me.

I got one month of severance and still get the unemployment pay. I think there are A LOT of people taking advantage of the system unlike the honest people living here. Me being one of them of course. Sounds like it’s better over here.

Every two weeks. Wow. I don’t imagine the office is so nice also. Ours is empty. Nobody there. It takes me all of about 10 minutes to get my paper back.

Can’t find a job though. If I can’t speak Japanese fluently and be able to use a computer fluently in Japanese then I’m SOL. I have to remember that I am competing with Japanese for the same jobs in IT. They’sd hire a Japanese with English ability before hiring an American with Japanese ability.

Yea, sometimes the facts of life suck.
The option$ are limited there for us non-Japanese. Which is why I need to have a couple of plan$ that will work before heading over. At least some $aving whil$t looking for that teaching $upport.

@ Betty
Firefox Firefox firefox

Yeah, yeah. I use FireFox as my primary browser. But… I have a confession: I’m a tabwhore. One tab isn’t enough. Oh, no. I have 15 right now in FireFox. And I can’t stop. So I go over to Safari when I feel like I have the strenght to limit myself to *one* tab. And start tabbing there. I’m weak.

But Safari doesn’t automatically save tabs. No! Safari! Don’t make all my lovely tabs go away! But they do when I have to force-quit the only damned web page I’ve ever had to do this with; this here one. All my lovely Safari tabs. Gone. Away. Kaput!

Woe is me.

What I did while unemployed:

1. bought my Mac and futzed.

2. bought an iPod Nano and futzed.

3. signed up for Japanese classes at the local Japanese Heritage Centre.

4. listened to too many Pimsleurs and japanpod101.com language lessons and totally flummoxed the poor teacher by tossing full phrases and exclamations into our Japanese 101 class.

5. learned all sorts of not-quite-polite phrases that I sometimes forgot where not polite and shared them with the other flummoxed students in the class (by this time the teacher was just grimacing).

6. got another job two months into my ‘retirement’.

7. stopped going to Japanese class ’cause we hit “counters” and I just think having a counter for a bunch of CDs and another one for a tree is just weird.

8. did nothing creative or entertaining or thought-provoking and decided unemployment was a bit of a waste of time… which is strange since I was retired for five years and it didn’t seem to bother me then. Perhaps because I was in a far more vibrant city… I dunno.

Betty - it seems you have the perfect qualities to be a Japan lifer. Foreigners here are the same; work, retire, work, think about retiring, slow down, keep working kinda, slow down until they just can’t have you teaching anymore at 85 so they suggest retiring until you finally just tip over in class.

Mike… you insulting me or praising me? ‘Perfect qualities to be a Japan lifer’, indeed… .

I needed the first month to recoup from working, and the second month was spent thinking ‘where did my life go and should I go look for it’ and, as the immortal Ms. Peggy Lee say, ‘is that all there is?’

Then take the first decent-paying job that comes along ’cause you might as well get 100% rather than 57% (or 60% for you) and the job helps you stop thinking at all.

Maybe I didn’t come across very clearly. Sorry. I meant to say that working in Japan means making changes constantly. The search for a better paying job with fewer hours is always ongoing. By being a lifer in Japan I mean we spend every day of our life wondering what it is we are going to do while trying to think of ways to do what it is we are actually trained to do. Usually this ends up with a lot of Internet time and fluxing.

I’m getting ready to take that first decent-paying job. It’s been four months.

I just took the first paying job, barely decent, more than un-employment, way less than the last job.

crawling is better than sitting still or in sailng terms a light brezze is better than drifting. So we are reefing our sails (lessening spending alot). to wait for a fair wind. Hmmmm should have but that on my blog

If I could just hookup to the cities free interent taht would $ave some money, but my signal is not strong enough, grrrr.

Life is funny li that sometime.

So glad we made the trip to Japan when we did…fun !

Anyway there are worse things than teaching English, like being homeless with a family.
Suck it up dude, ganbatte!

“Have another drink, it’ll make you feel better”…The Kinks

I don’t know what it’s like in Japan but when I was going through the unemployment period the time before I got my 2nd-to-last contract, I went through two of these government-sponsored programs.

One was a job club. Total waste of time. There we were, three fairly arty-farties, one retail associate (who the hell can’t get a job in *retail*?), two IT guys who hadn’t worked in two years because they didn’t have ‘tHoSe papers’ (guess +15 years experience didn’t mean squat) and a newly-arrived Chinese girl who was going to be an accountant but couldn’t speak English all that well. The team leader was well-meaning but from a corporate background and basically showed us how to white-wash our job experiences and gave us parrotting phrases to use in interviews. I, being I, kept diplomatically telling her that, really, her spiel isn’t working for us… could we change the paradigm a bit, please? Strangely, the company went bankrupt three months after the session… .

The second one was a program to help people ‘find their passions’. The government seems to think that if someone finds something they’re ‘passionate’ about, they’ll be happier and make more money. I like that theory. We did a battery of tests (Briggs-Myers, personality tests, vocational tests, etc.) and some thoughtful writing stuff.

It was actually a lot of fun. But I, being I, kept telling the leaders that, no, I don’t have a passion. I am passion-less. I can do a lot of things well but I don’t have a burning desire (that I can legally get paid for, anyway). I am just like 85% of the other schmucks out there. I can whittle down what I definitely *don’t* want to do but I may very well end up with a list of traits and not skills and no definable job position title. And I blamed Oprah Winfrey a lot… . It was pretty good, though. It did help me realize that I had to STOP READING NEWSPAPERS. I’m not in the readership demographics of the papers so I had to remind myself not to be swayed too much by the blah-blah those papers were spouting about jobs and positions and employment crap.

And I want money. I want *things*. Not outrageous things. But, yeah. Things. A new mac every five years, a reasonable trip out of this burg every year or two, a 20% downpayment on a cruddy one-bedroom within seven years. Not even a car, man. Just… stuff.

And this city I’m in is just freakin’ weird when it comes to jobs. I ended up taking off *all* my international job experience, most of my educational background and basically had to lie to get a decent timeline for the boring-but-potential jobs I was applying for. I’ve met at least three fully-trained lawyers who ended up working with me at the temp. agency in $10-$12 jobs. It was crazy. I couldn’t even get an interview for a job packing coffee bags at a unionized factory (that paid $18.35 starting - not bad).

God knows what Japanese companies want to see on your resume (or not see, as the case may be). Care to enlighten some of us? Do they put a strong emphasis on education or are they really hard on having continuous timelines in recognizable companies and hate gaps?

Betty, I can tell you one thing….YOU CAN WRITE! That was a great comment/article! You might try writing content for web sites. Here is a site to get you started Click here.

Your experience with trying to find a job is quite interesting. I don’t know if there is anything like that here since we’re pretty much kept in the dark.

As for resumes…well, the system is a bit different. Most jobs are had after graduating from college. The resume is a standard application form bought at any stationary store which should be hand written. Once the school introduces you to the company you get an interview. If you are offered a job then you’re set for the next 40 years. That’s right. One job.

Getting a job in midlife is not the norm however it’s changing somewhat these days. Younger people are beginning to quit after getting marketable skills, and temp agencies are getting popular. The pay for factory jobs is around $10 an hour and unions are not as common.

English teaching pays $25 an hour and there are plenty of jobs, especially if you like children. Why should I be so greedy as to try to find something that pays more. Plus I’d have to learn ANOTHER skill; Japanese.

Thanks for the bit to chew on, Betty.