Why I Really Quit My Teaching Job in Japan 10 Years Ago Today

This morning, the above photo randomly popped up on my laptop. One of those unsolicited "memory" photos designed to briefly jolt you into nostalgia before you go back to eating cheese over the sink.

But this one was worth pausing for. It was from July 2015, the day I finished my job as an English teacher in rural Japan, after three surreal, sometimes sublime, often confusing years. It also happened to involve one of the most absurd moments of my entire life.

I’d been teaching at the biggest senior high school in northern Japan. I look back on that chapter of my life with real fondness, even if the idea of returning to a classroom now fills me with a vague sense of dread.

The students were brilliant. Polite, funny, curious. Many would light up when I walked into the classroom, mostly because it meant a break from the daily drudgery of actual English lessons. I was the walking, talking human equivalent of a snow day. If students started to look bored, I’d joke about and spontaneously start beatboxing, which certainly changed the mood rather dramatically.

To my relief, I also managed to avoid any outright hostility from the Japanese teachers, which isn’t something every JET participant can say. A few friends had horror stories of colleagues who treated them with the same warmth you’d show a wasp at a picnic.

I was objectively rubbish in year one. I had no idea what I was doing, and I tried to win favour with students by showering them with sweets I’d bought at Seven Eleven. I felt sheepish walking down the corridor, more akin to a shadow than a person. But by the second year I’d hit my stride. I’d learned the ropes, ran classes on my own and gave a confident nod to students and teachers alike while strolling between classrooms.

By the third year, I’d hit a wall. I’d stood in front of a blackboard for over 2,000 classroom hours and started to resemble a man slowly fossilising into chalk dust.

And so, I decided not to renew my contract for a fourth, when my supervisor approached me at my desk one weekday afternoon. We had a fantastic relationship and he was disappointed and saddened to hear I’d be leaving.

The Abroad in Japan YouTube channel was starting to gain momentum and it was essentially my dream career. Leaving became a lot easier knowing I had something creative waiting in the wings. Honestly, if YouTube hadn’t been on the table, I might have stayed. I loved Sakata, even though in the last year of my job I’d started to feel like a bird in a cage most days. I remember in the closing months, increasingly spending more of my time staring out the classroom window, daydreaming of being anywhere else.

Being an English teacher in Japan rarely allowed space for initiative or creativity. I’d got students doing fun things like making their own magazines and scripting / shooting a video, but it often felt like I was having little tangible impact. Especially when online, the Youtube videos were engaging thousands of people at a time.

Natsuki, bless him, did his best to help me stay. He even half-joked about me joining his hair salon’s staff, though I suspect the clients might have had concerns about a random British man with questionable Japanese coming at them with scissors.

One of the bittersweet truths about the JET Programme is how it drops people from all over the world into the deepest corners of Japan. Mountaintops in Hokkaido, obscure islands off Okinawa, entire towns you couldn’t find on a map with a microscope. Then, just as they begin to build real connections, they’re shipped out again like diplomats at the end of a tour. Unless you marry a local or find an elusive job, your time is up. No safety net. No "next step." Just a gentle nudge out the door.

Still, when it’s time to move on in your life and career, you feel it in your bones. I felt it then, just as I’ve felt it more recently, as I’ve sought to shift to larger scale video projects.

And so, on a sweltering day in July, when Japan felt about two inches from the sun, I was asked to give my final farewell speech. In Japanese. In front of 1,200 students and 120 staff. In a gymnasium that sat at the literal gates of hell. It was 38 degrees outside, 45 inside. There were two electric fans, neither of which seemed to have a discernible effect.

As I began to speak, students started fainting. Literally fainting. Not because of my mumbling, shite Japanese, but because of the sheer heat. Carried out on stretchers like casualties from a heatstroke battlefield.

I’ve never delivered a speech where the audience collapsed one by one like dominoes. I got to do a TED talk two years later, and it wasn’t anywhere near as theatrical.

Every time a student was carried out on a stretch - and to be clear there were at least half a dozen - a few folks looked up for a passing moment and watched the spectacle before returning to their drooped down positions.

At first, when my speech kicked off, the students were curious. “Ooh, he’s speaking Japanese!” By minute five, curiosity had turned to glazed stares. By minute ten, full-blown sleep. A few teachers gave polite smiles. One openly laughed at a joke. Another kept checking his watch, probably timing his escape to the smoking area behind the gym.

My supervisor fired off a photo (as seen above) in the latter minutes of the speech. I look like some totalitarian dictator droning on about how our great leap forward will reduce wheat prices.

Somewhere in that sweaty chaos, I caught sight of a student I’d been tutoring for a speech contest. Her expression got me. The kind of look that said, “Please don’t go.” It hit me in the gut. I wouldn't be there to see her speech that we’d prepped for all month. I’d be long gone.

After fifteen minutes, and a new personal record for dehydration, I wrapped it up, said my thank yous, gave a deep bow and was rewarded with applause and a sense of overwhelming relief.

At 3:30pm, I was called into the principal’s office. The same room where I’d first sat, jet-lagged and overwhelmed, three years earlier. We talked briefly. I told him I’d head home to England, then hopefully move to Sendai. He nodded, with a confused expression when I mentioned “Youtube”, then we shook hands, and that was that.

At the entrance, the staff gathered to see me off. My favourite colleague, Chounan-sensei, the hilarious chap from the swearing video and the Marmite video, helped carry my things to the car. He gave me a proper hug. It was hard not to burst into tears.

And then I was off, rumbling out of the car park in my rickety Toyota Starlet, waving out the window, wondering if I’d just made the biggest mistake of my life.

I still visit Sakata a few times a year. But I’ve never gone back to my old school. Maybe one day I will. I’ve bumped into a few of the teachers at events over the years, and it’s always a joy to see them again. But stepping through those school gates would probably hit a bit too hard. Not only that, but the students I knew will have dispersed across the country. Teachers I worked with will have retired or been reallocated.

The older you get, the more you start to realise that time is its own kind of place. You can go back to the same building or street, but if the people you shared it with aren’t there, it just feels... off. Like returning to a party long after everyone’s gone home.

I wonder what became of the students I taught. Their ages will range from 28 to 31 years old. It’s a crazy thought to think many are older than Connor. My god.

It’s strange, really. I spent my whole childhood dreaming of escaping the classroom, of seeing the world and chasing adventure. And when I finally got there, it led me straight back to a classroom, just on the other side of the planet.

Still, I wouldn’t change that decision for anything. Those three years, locked away in the snow-covered corner of Yamagata, surrounded by students and Sea of Japan sunsets and far too many school lunches, were some of the best of my life. The memories live on in old Facebook albums, early Abroad in Japan videos, and more recently, the book. But the best parts are locked away in my head. And I revisit them far more often than I’d care to admit.