Question # 54 - What if I become homesick when teaching ESL in Japan?
If you get homesick, you have two choices, get over it or go home.
Homesick is a terrible feeling and quite real for some people.
Japan is different from the West…Japan is the same…but when you are homesick, the differences are magnified greatly.
I had teachers who never got over their homesickness….they just lived, endured Japan for their time commitment and then went home.
Their service was substandard but they honored their contract.
Homesickness – comes during the holiday season usually, but not only and not always.
At Christmas, the Japanese like to hang out and have parties with friends. Westerners like to go home. At New Year’s Japanese want to stay home with the family and the teachers wonder ‘where’s the party?’
Everything about home seems better than they remembered…the food was better, the people back home drove better, everything was more convenient…and so on.
My experience has been that invariably, the teachers who suffered the most in Japan, AFTER they got back home wished they were back in Japan.
Homesickness – things back home are NEVER as good as one remembers them….it just seems so.
Homesick? – go out and play and don’t come home until you feel better. The Japanese can be warm and inviting as well as sensitive.
Is that the way it is back home?
And if playing doesn’t cure the homesickness…work harder, work more, study Japanese, practice Japanese…in short, get busy. And don’t stop till you feel better.
Do you ever get homesick?
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