I am on my 8th year in Japan. To give a bit of backstory, I always show up early, put in extra effort and haven’t even taken a single sick day in the entire time I’ve been here. I go out of my way to help my students and the staff that work in the offices with the teachers. I even try to minimize the amount of work other teachers have to deal with since I normally know how things work so I can get things prepped pretty easily.
With COVID 19 being a major concern this year, I’ve cleaned tables, checked student’s temperature as they show up and done as much as I could to make them more comfortable regardless of how stressful everything has been for 2020.
Recently, I’ve been looking at labor law and rules concerning employment. In the 8 years, cost of living has gone up considerably, sales tax itself has doubled, work requirements have expanded and there is an endless amount of other details that have just naturally popped up.
What concerns me is that in this time, prices for students have jumped as well, but salary remains flat. Despite more work and growing skills, the treatment from an employment perspective are the most disheartening.
As a foreign resident living in Japan, it’s easy to see the imbalances. Japanese employees get regular bonuses or raises to allow them to have families, buy houses, get cars and otherwise just live more easily. As a foreigner, I have seemingly no access to those benefits. Hence, that’s why I’ve been looking at requirements but there is little protection for the occupation I have and little for the industry in a part of.
This entire ordeal has grown my sense of empathy toward foreign workers. While people in my position know that advancement would allow me to enjoy life more and improve my quality of life (in addition to helping me feel my job is worthwhile). But it always seems that the least hungry will always have the easiest access to food. The starving will almost always have to bare hunger pangs.
It’s difficult to have faith in systems when those systems forget you or walk all over you. Thus I can comprehend the difficulty of foreign workers in the USA. It’s not so much about a lack of a fair system, it’s that we are told the system is fair while knowing full well that system is consuming all of us.
I hope it gets better, and I can actually stay above water.
A Simple Post 