So, after a couple weeks of buildup and about 6,000 words written and rehearsed I finally had my second interview for the JET Program over zoom. I have mixed feelings. On the one hand it definitely went much better than last year and I didn’t spend the majority of the interview feelings like I could literally see my metaphorical hopes and dreams be dashed across rocky outcroppings on a bucolic Japanese seaside. I left feelings actually pretty good and like I didn’t fuck up my once chance to fulfill a decade long goal, but after steeping on it for a week I question my performance. Perhaps this is just human nature or perhaps I was simply caught up in the afterglow of a minimally improved performance. I suppose I will have to wait about two months to find out. Last year the wait was excruciating because I knew I had done a terrible job on my interview and I also knew it was entirely my fault for not preparing more thoroughly. I assumed that because I spend the majority of my day acting in front of strangers that I could turn it on in front of a panel of seasoned interviewers, but I was sorely mistaken. I flopped and I flopped hard. I flopped like a lung fish ripped from a dry creek bed by a hungry carrion eater.

I spent a lot of time leading up to the interview thinking about what I wanted to say and assumed that that would translate into real world performant but again I was sorely mistaken. This year I looked up a list of the 100 most commonly asked questions for the interview and wrote the aforementioned 6,000 in response to them. I then sat in the basement of my work starring at an arrangement of boxes I set up to presuppose as an interview panel. I then spent hours voicing what I wanted to say and practicing looking dead ass at those boxes. I also spent a couple hours with my mother on zoom where she pretended to be a stern Japanese consulate member and asked me questions. The latter may not have helped very much in a raw mechanical sense but it certainly made me feel better the night before the interview as my mother and I are generally of one mind. The result of all this was that when I went into the interview I didn’t immediately recoil like a salted snail and I feel like I held my composure pretty well. I answered most of the questions asked fairly coherently and didn’t lock up and start sweating.

The Japanese section of the interview was maybe the most interesting to me because I literally haven’t spoken the language since my interview a year ago. I have spent hundreds of hours listening to and reading it but the occasion to speak doesn’t come up in my life. I was reminded of the scene in Old Boy where the captive comes out into the city streets for the first time after years of practice-fighting in a room alone. He wonders to himself if all the effort will translate into real world action and I can say from a language perspective it was a mixed bag. The way the language portion of the interview goes is that if you indicated that you had any Japanese ability on your application then the Japanese educator on the panel has a short conversation with you. They generally ask a series of questions of incremental difficulty and see when you tap out. The good news is that I immediately understood every one of his questions reflexively but the subsequent responses were still fairly childish. I’m legally disallowed from disclosing what was actually said but it was fairly common ‘get to know you’ questions. It felt much more natural than I would have expected and while in hindsight I made a lot of grammatical mistakes I still understood everything that was said and at least knew how to respond, even if the response wasn’t perfect.

So now I have to wait two months to get a final verdict. After reflecting on it for a couple weeks I still don’t think I will get in but I know that this time I did my best in the end that is all you can do. Maybe Japan just isn’t in the cards for me and while that is sad I at least have my interest and I’m motivated to keep learning. The only problem is that for the first time in a long time I don’t have anything looming over me to keep me purposeful. I had the JET interview last year followed by a long buildup to the JLPT test and now that this last interview is over I have nothing on the horizon. I also got covid and got to spend a week in bed feeling like garbage and wondering what I was doing with my life. I plan to keep learning Japanese but the future now stretches out like a desert road in front of me and I’m not sure what’s down it. I suppose one never knows what it coming for them but there are times when that not knowing is a weight around one’s neck.