Japan–land of the cell phone, the super-robotic dog and the Starship Enterprise toilet seats. We all had various adventures with technology over there, or in some cases the lack of it. Here are some of those tales from your fellow JET alums.

I remember sitting at the one computer at the school I was working at. It was so old that the screen was black with green letters. It didn’t have auto-return so you had to hit the space bar. If you edited anything, then you had to go and delete all the spaces and start over. I had never used such an old computer as that. I also had the giant floppy disk thing going on too. It was like going back in time with the computer, and yet at the same time my Japanese friend was buying little state-of-the art mini-disks to copy CDs. -Jenny Jung (Fukui-ken, 1994-96)

I was in Yokohama with a Japanese friend from Hiroshima, and we were staying with his aunt and uncle, who were not at home the first time I needed to use their toilet. It looked like the cockpit of the space shuttle to me (we simply had a hole in the ground in Hiroshima), replete with buttons and dials and lights. The most interesting one, however, was the huge red one on the wall with the kanji for “push” on it. How I wanted to push that shiny red button. But, not knowing what it was for, I used my superhuman powers of restraint to refrain from its singularly attractive command, getting out of there before the desire became overwhelming.

My friend, however, had no such restraint, and so we quickly discovered the mysterious button’s purpose. It was a (loud) burglar alarm. Obviously, if somebody broke into your apartment, you could shut yourself in the toilet, hit the button, and wait until the police arrived. And it was not easy to turn off, there being two switches in different secret places in the house that must be switched simultaneously so as to prevent a burglar from disabling it on his own. Curse those childhood button-based toys which so conditioned us. -Ian Laidlaw (Okinawa CIR/PA 2001-04)

For two of the three years I was on JET, I lived across the street from an electronics store. I would often go in there to hang out and “try out” the massage chairs. Kimochi yokatta yo! -Lee-Sean Huang

When I was 15 years old, I went to live in Japan as a high school exchange student for a year. My host family was very wealthy and had a brand new house where everything was state of the art. On my very first day, within five minutes of arriving at this lovely house and being served my first glass of “cowpiss” (Calpis), I was already fighting back tears at the prospect of spending another 11 months in the home of these people who didn’t understand a word I said. So I retreated to the bathroom to pull myself together. Upon sitting down on the toilet, however, I was confronted with a huge panel of multi-colored buttons with pictures of water spraying up at little manga butts and lots of hiragana/katana that I didn’t understand. Which one of these buttons flushed the toilet? I pressed them all and ended up sprayed and dried from multiple angles, but never flushed. Now the tears were flowing full force. I couldn’t even figure out how to flush the *@!&ing toilet in this country! I slunk out of the bathroom, sniffling, and found my 19-year-old host brother, to whom I was able to communicate through an embarrassing series of gestures and pointing, that I needed him to flush the toilet for me. He loved it! The story of how Clara couldn’t find the flusher on the toilet became an instant classic for him (and the rest of the family) and is probably still told at family gatherings today. -Clara Solomon (Tottori-ken, 1999-2001)

When I was on JET, I had to walk five miles through the snow to the post office to send mail. Funny thing is, after I returned to the United States in 1995, I went to Chicago’s first-ever e-mail cafe to open up an e-mail account. I never got any e-mail, and coincidently, the cafe closed down. I suppose the cafe was opened two or three years before its time. Bummer. -L.U.

I moved to Japan in the summer of 1997, before everyone had cell phones and universal e-mail addresses. I was the first ALT in my town and left the states without an apartment address and a phone number. My parents were reassured by the fact that I had traveled to Japan and lived there before. Plus, they had the number of the Board of Education (not that it would do them any good since no one spoke English!).

After Tokyo orientation, I traveled out to the small city in Chiba which would be my home for the next two years. Once I settled in, my supervisor told me my home phone number, but said that I could not make long distance calls without going through an outside service. So, until I worked out which service to use, I decided to use the pay phone at the Fujiya Cake Shop down the street. I called my parents and told them how to call my home phone. Satisfied that I had effectively opened the lines of communication to my new apartment, I walked home to wait for Mom and Dad to contact me.

Several days went by and I didn’t hear from them. I figured they were busy and I knew I was, so I didn’t worry. After a week’s time, I called home from the pay phone and asked why my parents hadn’t called. My mom told me that she thought I had given them the wrong number because each time she tried to reach me, a nice Japanese woman would answer and my mother didn’t know how to respond. After several minutes of checking the number and the instructions for dialing Japan (country code, city prefix, etc.) I realized she had been calling my number, only my answering machine had picked up. I had no way of changing the “tadaima rusu ni shite orimasu…” message and my mom thought it was a real Japanese woman answering! I soon worked out an Internet service provider and our communication issues were resolved. -Cindy Hoffman (Chiba-ken, 1997-99)

My “high”-tech experience in ‘95 was playing Mahjong Solitare on one of my office’s two computers. The other computer was, of course, being used by the school’s other high-tech expert– the gym teacher.
-Andrew Barnes

I used to teach english online after school at englishtown.com. Basically, there was an online classroom and people from all over the world including Japan would call in and I would teach them English via a headset. Sometimes we’d get weirdos who would call in and just make random noises. Luckily, I could block people and mute their microphones. Also, while I was teaching, my cat used to love jumping up on the kotatsu and stretching out across my keyboard. It was definitely an interesting experience, and it actually paid pretty well for a part time gig. I kept teaching for Englishtown when I came back to the States for a while–it was a good transition while I was looking for a job back home. -Megan Miller (Hyogo-ken, 2000-02)

I was very lucky in terms of my placement. Although I was in a small village in the middle of nowhere (Hirukawamura = inaka), my two-story house was equipped with the very latest in technological devices! I even had a Western style bed upstairs in my bedroom, but I preferred to sleep in the living room, usually under the kotatsu in the winter. -Alana Alissa Yoshiko Anderson (Gifu-ken, 1999-2000)

When I was younger, I liked video games. Later on, I got into music. Put them together and you have the formula for an incurable addiction. Sure I knew about Dance Dance Revolution (it was already playable in the U.S. around the time I went to Japan), but I flipped over a helluva rock upon visiting my first game center. Guitar Freaks, Pop’n Music, ParaParaParadise, and Mambo A Go Go were all sensory overload for me, but the altar I worshipped at early and often was Konami’s DrumMania. This simulator was everything I could have wished for in a coin-op (complete with neon and stobe lights!), teaching me both music appreciation and J-pop history. Plus, with upgrades rolled out every six months, I never tired of spending that hard-earned JET money.

Five stages of my addiction:

· For a more “authentic” experience, I purchased my own set of legendary X Japan drummer Yoshiki’s signature sticks and made a habit of bringing them with me everywhere (splintering three pairs before returning to America). A set of Zildjian drummer’s gloves came later, as my fingers started resembling The Very Hungry Caterpillar after weeks of heavy play.

· On my first trip to Tokyo, I dragged a friend with me on a pilgrimage to Konami headquarters just so I could have the satisfaction of visiting the address on the back of the official DrumMania soundtrack CDs (of which I now own a dozen). Even though it was just an office building and it was already closed by the time we got there, it was a magical feeling. If that wasn’t crazy enough, I also contacted Konami’s branch in Kobe about a possible job interview as my time on JET wound down. In the end, I decided against going since “I’m in love with your game” was all I wanted to tell them.

· I’d often play during my lunch hour (if the seat was occupied I would race across town to two other locations that had it, and if those were similarly occupied I would—you know—eat lunch, which incidentally was far more economical than playing DrumMania for an hour). No one ever asked why I always came back to work panting and sweaty, but I’ll bet there was talk.

· When I visited Seoul with my then-girlfriend, I don’t know what irked her more—the fact that older versions of the game were available wait-free at every game center we stumbled upon (under the name Percussion Freaks, which I of course insisted on playing), or the fact that at the end of the trip I forced her to play it, as it was conveniently at the Incheon International Airport lounge (since my sticks were already in baggage, I pooh-poohed using the tatty tethered ones provided and encouraged her to rock out instead).

Eventually, I got good enough where people would take pictures with me, and I’d get hearty rounds of applause from girls who watched. All this attention had me wondering if I was the number one non-Japanese DrumMania player living in the country, and I fantasized about being the subject of one of those tabloid news segments that profile wacky gaijin. Since returning to New York, I’ve never seen the game here (sadly forcing me to quit cold turkey), but the recent domestic boom of (inferior) non-Konami home games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band gets me all natsukashii. -Justin Tedaldi, Kobe-shi CIR, 2001-02

How do people type on a computer in Japanese? Do they need a huge keyboard with every single kanji on it? That was the mystery I, a naïve Japan novice, was obsessed with unraveling when I arrived in Japan. So when I visited a Board of Ed member’s house on my first day in my town, I asked their teenage son to show me. Lo and behold, he typed using English letters to create Japanese sounds that turned into Japanese letters or kanji. Mystery solved. Now it seems so matter-of-fact, but at the time I literally couldn’t conceive of this concept. -Steven Horowitz, Aichi-ken, 1992-94

Have a story to add? Go ahead and share it in the comments section below.

Return to Newsletter Home Page