Dominic Balasuriya

The JET application process takes several months from start to finish, with quite a lot of waiting in between. Even now, I’m still officially “shortlisted”, which means that I don’t know which prefecture or city I’m going to.

For me, it began on October 1st, 2014, when I attended an information night at the Consulate-General in Sydney. I’d expected it to be a large event, but in fact, just a few people came along. It was a great opportunity to meet some former JETs, as well as the Consul responsible for the JET Programme in Sydney.

Then, in November came the written application. Most of the application was quite standard: two references and a statement of purpose were required. But, there was also both a medical check and a criminal record check. ^[1]

As part of the application process, I was able to request where I wanted to be placed. I requested “Rural (small town/village/island”; the other options being “Semi-urban (small city/town)” and “Urban (large city)”. It took quite a while to make this decision, but it was mostly based on the fact that many JETs end up being placed in rural towns. I decided that I’d try and request somewhere as rural as possible: somewhere that would give me a very unique experience. I made that an important part of my statement of purpose.

Of course, we were told several times at the information night that we should expect to be placed anywhere at all. Based on that, I decided to request a prefecture that perhaps mightn’t be so popular, but had lots of great things. While speaking to other Australian JETs, I noticed that quite a few of them had been placed in Kochi-ken, in Shikoku. Co-incidentally, at the Sydney Japanese Film Festival, I’d already seen a film that was almost a tourism advertisement for Kochi-ken, Hospitality Department: 県庁おもてなし課. It seemed like a fantastic place: mountain villages, beaches, and rivers.

So, in the end, I requested Kochi, Tokushima, and Hyogo. All three prefectures are geographically contiguous, and have quite mild weather (compared to prefectures in the far north of Japan). Also, despite being quite remote, they’re all within a few hours of the major cities in Kansai: Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe. Of course, there’s still every chance that I’ll be placed in say Okinawa or Hokkaido, so I’m not too attached to my requests.

Of course, there were many other parts to the applciation, and many documents that needed to be certified and copied. In the end, it took me quite a few weeks to get everything done, and I posted almost 100 pages in all.

Then, on January 9th, I received an email from the consulate, telling me that I’d passed the first stage of the process, and that I’d been selected for an interview. I had about a month to prepare, using the hints that I’d picked up from speaking to other JETs and reading their blogs.

My interview was on February 10th, at the Consulate-General in Sydney. I’ll write more about the interview in a separate post, but it was definitely a tense experience. For about 30 minutes, I was asked a mix of difficult questions about why I wanted to be a JET, and what I could bring to the JET programme. After it was over, I wasn’t really sure how it’d gone, but I did feel that I’d done everything that I could.

I was told that the results would probably be released by the end of April, so I prepared myself for a long wait. It seemed fine intially, but as April began to approach, it definitely became more difficult. Luckily, the shortlist results were released in Sydney on April 2nd, just before the Easter long-weekend.

Right now, I’m still waiting to find out where I’m going to be placed. It looks like that information should arrive very soon, ^[2] so with any luck, I should know where I’m going by the end of the month.

On April 2nd, I got the call. Almost five months earlier, I’d applied to teach English in Japan as part of the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme. Finally: I knew I was going to Japan. ^[1]

Since 1987, the Japanese government has recruited college graduates from around the world to work as Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs). As an ALT in a Japanese public school, I’ll be team-teaching English classes and introducing students to Australian culture. And of course, I too have a lot to learn about Japan.

This story begins almost eight years ago, when I was 16. I’d just finished high school, and I wanted to travel. Japan was familiar from all the comic books and TV shows I’d loved in high school.

I spent two weeks traveling alone in Japan: Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Himeji, Nara. At the time, I didn’t know a single word of the Japanese language. But somehow, I found that I was able to see temples in Kyoto, visit the Imperial Palace in Tokyo (see above), and buy electronics and games in Akihabara. ^[2]

Of course, the experiences I had were no different to any other young tourist seeing Japan for the first time. ^[3] Because I couldn’t speak Japanese, I only spoke to a few people in English. I felt like I’d seen some amazing places, but I hadn’t really connected with many people.

This is the view that greeted me in Shinjuku, on my very first day in Japan in 2007.

Still, that didn’t stop me from going back. The next year, I convinced my family that Japan was an excellent place for a family vacation: just a week this time. Leaving Japan then, I felt like I had to return. But I promised myself that next time, I would return knowing how to speak Japanese.

Promises like those are hard to keep. Fast-forward to January 2014, and I still hadn’t started studying Japanese. Of course, I might’ve flicked through a phrasebook, and to be sure, I did do one term of Japanese in high school. ^[5] And, many of my favourite authors were from Japan. ^[6] But, at that stage, all I really knew was how to count to ten.

The reason was simple. I felt that Japanese was too hard: impossible, even. Three alphabets? Thousands of characters? No way!

But I decided I had to make a start somewhere. I was 24, and English was still the only language I could speak. ^[7] If I wanted to learn another language, I figured I should start now. Before it was too late?

Well, it wasn’t too late. Language learning turned out to be very logical, and unlike my high school German classes, this time, I had a real motivation. I wanted to read Murakami Haruki, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Yoshimoto Banana - in the original Japanese. I knew that would be a long-term goal. But along the way, I realised how satisfying it was to be able to understand a language that was previously incomprehensible.

It didn’t take me long to realise that to really learn a language, you need to be fully immersed in the country where it’s spoken. Around that time, I heard about the JET Programme. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to become involved in a small Japanese community, and to live in an environment where English is hardly spoken at all.

Over the next few weeks and months, I’ll write more about what it was like to apply for the JET Programme. Then, once I’m in Japan, I’ll keep this blog updated with stories about my travels, and what it’s like to live in Japan.

While I was applying for the JET Programme, something I really enjoyed was reading blogs written by former and current JETs. Each person had their own story, their own town or city, their own reactions to living and working in Japan. So, of course, now I have to write one of my own. ^[8]

Time magazine, reporting from the Venice Film Festival:

“Miyazaki has decided that ‘The Wind Rises’ will be his last film, and he will now retire,” Koji Hoshino, who runs the director’s Studio Ghibli, announced.

What will Studio Ghibli look like without Hayao Miyazaki? At 72, he’s retiring from a studio he founded in 1985, after the success of animated classic “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind”. Since then, he’s directed nine of the studio’s feature films, including the Academy-award winning “Spirited Away”^[1]. It’s fair to say that Miyazaki is synonymous with Ghibli: he’s had a hand in almost every film, even those that he didn’t direct.

With his retirement, Studio Ghibli will surely have to change. For the short term, things will go on as usual: another film is slated for release in 2013, directed by Isao Takahata, the other director most strongly associated with Ghibli films. But at 77, Takahata is older even than Miyazaki , and it seems plausible that he too might retire in the near future.

That leaves Gorō Miyazaki. The older Miyazaki son, Gorō was initially reluctant to follow his famous father into animation, spending several years in landscape design. But in 2006, after several years as director of the Ghibli Museum, Gorō was asked to direct his first picture, “Tales from Earthsea”. Rumor has it that his father was initially unhappy about this decision, but upon seeing the finished film, felt that Gorō had proved himself. Reviews were mixed, but the film still had Ghibli’s trademark brand of fantasy.

Gorō’s sophomore picture, “From Up On Poppy Hill”, was very different. Set in post-Korean War Japan, the animation, of course, was breathtaking. But the film told a high-school love story with a much smaller scale than any of Ghibli’s fantasy epics, and yet without the sweetness of “My Neighbour Totoro” or “Kiki’s Delivery Service”^[2]

It’s also worth noting that so far, Gorō has focused only on adapting existing stories^[3]. Indeed, every Ghibli film of the last ten years has either been directed by Hayao Miyazaki, or adapted from an existing book. Nothing wrong with adaptations, of course, but some of Ghibli’s best films have been Miyazaki’s original creations.

But an uneven beginning is not necessarily a bad thing — his father spent almost 25 years working in animation before he directed his first successful feature — Gorō still has time to catch up. The elder Miyazaki is expected to speak about his retirement from Tokyo later in the week, and it wouldn’t be surprising if he continues to be involved in film-making in some capacity. And with Studio Ghibli founder Toshio Suzuki staying on as producer, there’s no reason why they can’t keep making excellent films.

Wherever Studio Ghibli goes next, the films of Hayao Miyazaki will long be remembered in cinema history. It will be at least a few months before “The Wind Rises” is released to international audiences, but early reviews suggest it will certainly be a fitting capstone for a long and illustrious career.

“Elysium” would be just another summer blockbuster, if not for the fact that its director, Neill Blomkamp, was also responsible for a very different film: “District 9”. Sure, both films feature near-future dystopias, complete with gritty violence. But “Elysium” is missing much of what made “District 9” such an effective piece of science-fiction.

It was, I admit, a little surprising.^[1] “Elysium” was made with a budget almost three times larger than “District 9”: on the face of things, surely we should expect a much bigger film? Yet somehow, “Elysium” feels a great deal smaller in ambition.

Things start to make sense once you realise the kind of film Blomkamp was setting out to make. Tellingly, in an interview with Boing Boing reporter Colin Berry, Blomkamp revealed that:

“My whole goal was big-scale cinema and archetypal storytelling. It will probably be the most expensive film I’ll ever make… But to have a bunch of low-budget, super edgy films and not have something cinematic? I wouldn’t be happy not to have that in my body of work. Elysium really is the film I wanted to make.”

Spoilers Begin Here

The real issue is that what passes for “cinematic” today is mostly flash, not substance; with good-looking CG and action often used to paper over other shortcomings.

For instance: it seems that the plot of a blockbuster doesn’t always need to make perfect sense. At the start of the film, we see gang-leader Spider sending rogue shuttles up to Elysium^[2]. These people are risking a lot^[3], but when they get there, they don’t seem to have any kind of plan for dealing with Elysium’s security forces. Just one mother has the right idea: she manages to get access to a med-bay to heal her daughter, before both are deported. For the rest, it just seems like a bizarre suicide mission.

But a more egregious breach happens at the end of the film: hundreds of medical ships pour out of Elysium, going down to fix things up on the previously-neglected Earth. It’s definitely a feel-good moment, but as you start to think about it, it doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Why would Elysium have all those ships just standing idly by? After all, every home on Elysium already has a med-bay.

Plot shortcomings could be dismissed, if “Elysium” was filled with characters we cared about. But with paper-thin heroes and villains, it’s hard to engage with what we’re seeing. The relationship between protagonists Max and Frey largely rests on a few frames of flashback to their childhood in an orphanage. Playing a power-hungry defence minister, Jodie Foster is largely wasted: her motivations beyond simply wanting to seize control are never explored. And Sharlto Copley, who played the fascinatingly ambiguous Wikus van de Merwe in “District 9”, is reduced here to the one-dimensionally aggressive Kruger.

It’s a real shame, then, that “Elysium” doesn’t live up to its potential. Blomkamp’s next film is set to come out in 2015 : entitled “Chappie”, it’s about an AI robot who’s stolen by gangsters. An intriguing premise, to be sure, but everything depends on whether Blomkamp decides to return to the engaging characters and strong storytelling that made “District 9” such an effective film.

Enjoyed this review? Why not follow me on Twitter: @domwrites?

The New York Times :

Alice Munro, the acclaimed short-story writer… told a newspaper interviewer, “I’m probably not going to write anymore.”

At eighty-two, Alice Munro joins other writers who have laid down their pens, including Philip Roth, who announced his retirement late last year. But unlike Roth, Munro’s oeuvre is composed entirely of short stories: sixty-two years spent cultivating a single genre.^[1]

The results have been extraordinary. It really isn’t an exaggeration to say that Munro is responsible for the astonishing flexibility of the modern short story. In his introduction to the “The Best American Short Stories 2012” ^[2], editor Tom Perrotta wrote:

The fact that it’s no longer considered risky, or even especially noteworthy, to tell a story from multiple perspectives— or to range freely across the expanse of a character’s life … —owes a lot to Munro’s formal daring, her insistence on smuggling the full range of novelistic techniques into the writing of her short fiction, and the influence she’s had on her contemporaries.

If you’re wondering where to start reading her work, Munro’s most recent collection, “Dear Life: Stories” , is an excellent place to begin.^[3] “Amundsen”, a portrait of a young school teacher who arrives in a frozen Canadian town, is freely available on The New Yorker’s website.

I’m definitely going to miss reading new stories by Alice Munro, but it’s good to know that her influence on fiction is here to stay.

Javier Sandoval on The Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Join Medium:

People blog because they have something to say and want other people to hear them. They want the limelight and attention. Medium’s collaborative focus can help with exposure, but by making writing communal, the attention leaves the independent writer.

Without knowing, Medium may be stripping away the main reason people blog.

So, Medium clearly isn’t an individual-centric blogging platform. Writer accounts are nominally linked to Twitter profiles, but that relationship isn’t transparent to readers: there’s currently no way to follow writers on Medium.

Instead, Medium’s focus is on delivering the best content to readers, no matter who wrote it. That’s Evan William’s take on the modern web magazine, except unlike most other magazines, the majority of Medium contributors are unpaid.^[1]

So what’s the incentive to put your writing on Medium, if you’re not getting money or followers? Well, as Sandoval points out, the tradeoff is exposure.

Significantly, if you don’t already have a large social media following, Medium could also potentially help you reach a much larger audience. And since you can put any text you like in a Medium post, some writers are already appending biographical footers to their posts, with links to social media and content they want to promote.^[2]

A better question to ask: what will happen when Medium is eventually monetised? Advertising seems likely, and while ads will interfere with Medium’s clean, minimalist design, they probably won’t greatly reduce reader numbers. Medium could potentially move to a subscription model, but that seems at odds with Medium’s emphasis on freely moving from one good piece to the next.

So, at least for now, Medium looks like a great way to get more eyeballs on high quality content. Personally, I’m going to be experimenting with cross-posting some of my blog posts on Medium.^[3] I’ll let you know how that goes.

If you liked this post, why not follow me on Twitter?

Why should you read this blog? Well, with any luck, it’ll have a mix of magazine-style feature articles and topical links with commentary. The focus will be writing, publishing, and books: which makes sense, since I’m a writer.

I live in Sydney,^[1] and I mostly write short stories of the literary variety. ^[2] But I still have a fondness for genre, so expect to see writing about books of all sorts on this blog. From time to time, there may also be other miscellanea, from the arts in general, but also from technology. ^[3]

Of course, whenever you put new words out into the world, there’s always the danger that they’ll simply disappear, unheard. So, if you’ve enjoyed something on here, or if you’ve got something to add, let me know. The easiest way to reach me is on Twitter: @domwrites.

So, welcome. Let’s see where this goes.