No Grasp of Your Reality

Paul asked why I was looking for a job in Japan. I think a response is worth a separate post.

My job has taken me to Japan quite a few times (I think my passport has 14 Japan entry stamps in it). Prior to taking this job five years ago, I had rarely left Pennsylvania, and had only once left the United States when we had driven through Canada when I was a kid (I slept the whole way).

My travel to Japan, and other parts of the world, has left with a real exposure to the huge differences in culture between the United States, Australia, England, and Japan. Since then, I wanted to make sure that my kids have an awareness of the different cultures around the world.

When Sarah and I made the decision to homeschool the kids, we both agreed that we wanted to make the most of the kids’ time at home with the family. Not being tethered to a school means that the family can travel with me, and we can move to different locations around the world and have hands-on exposure to the world around us.

Here’s my incomplete list of pros and cons for moving to Japan:

Pros:

• I did received a promotion to a senior staff position at Lockheed Martin. This usually requires a lot more experience than I have, and I’m excited to be “ahead” in my career.
• My company significantly reimburses us for different costs, which will allow us to save more money.
• Japan is a major country that is little known to the rest of the world. There is a lot of potential for outreach to a normally inaccessible culture.
• Despite the fact that over 128 million people speak Japanese, it’s one of the more little known languages amongst non-Japanese. One reason is that Japanese is a hard language to learn, but when my children learn the language, they’ll find that their skills as native English speakers with an understanding of Japanese will be potentially very beneficial to their careers.

Cons:

• Being away from my family is going to be hard. Despite Vonage, email, webcams, and other technologies, we won’t be able to just hang out like we do now. Plane tickets to Japan are not cheap either, but hopefully, our families will be able to come visit and have an experience they wouldn’t have otherwise
• While the weather is just as cold as it is in SE Pennsylvania, they get a lot of snow. They average 35 feet per year. That’s a lot.
• It’s not Tokyo. In Tokyo, you can eat at a different restaurant for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for a lifetime and never hit the same place twice. The area is pretty rural and poor, so we’ll be traveling by car and when we go out to dinner, we’ll probably hit the same few places.

I’m sure there are more, and I might edit this post in the future to add other reasons. But that should be start.

It’s been a while since I’ve written. Ron Paul mania has died down, we’re members of a new church where there’s a little more peace and quiet, and my month long trip to Australia happened to be to one of the more boring parts of the world.

For the last year or so, I’ve been browsing the Lockheed Martin job boards to see if there were any cool overseas positions. A couple months ago, I saw a position for a systems administrator in a small, remote village in Northern Japan called Shariki (even the Wikipedia page is extremely sparse). I applied for the position, and was rejected for the position, since knowledge of the program was required. I was disappointed, but life goes on.

A couple months ago, I got a email out of the blue asking me if I was interested in interviewing for an overseas position in Japan. The person who sent the email had a subject line that had the name of the program I had interviewed for earlier. I called the guy back and we chatted for a while. A few minutes into the conversation, I realized that I wasn’t interviewing for a systems administrator position, but for an Information Systems Security Officer (ISSO) position at the same site in Shariki. The interview went well, and a week later, I was told they were putting together an offer for me.

After talking to Sarah and my family, we decided to accept the offer.

The position will be for at least one year, but probably more like 2-3 years in Shariki. We’ll probably be living in a larger town further south called Goshogawara. I haven’t been up to the area, but I’m planning on heading up there next month after an upgrade in Tokyo next month.

The next few months are going to be pretty hectic, but I plan on doing a better job of keeping up with blog during the overseas travel. The Aomori area of Japan has some of the more remote and pristine areas of the country, and we’re really looking forward to some rural living over there.