Join club activities
Joining club activities (部活; bukatsu) is a great way to get involved with your school. Club activities such as sports, art club, and music club, are a significant part of junior high school life. In Japan, each student participates in only one club and practices all year, including during vacation. Students do many things in club activities, such as making friends, playing with friends, learning discipline, and learning the sempai/kohai culture.
How to join club activities
Some ALTs have trouble getting involved with club activities, because they had no predecessor or because their predecessor didn't get involved either. Don't let that slow you down, because the students and teachers would love for you to join in. There are several approaches for getting started.
- Ask coaches when their club meets and if you can join. Have a notebook open to next week's calendar, and ask the coach if one of the days would be good.
- Ask students if they think it's okay for you to practice with them. They know their coach well, so if they say yes, it's a good sign.
- Show up and watch club activities. Some practices are difficult for ALTs to join, so scout out which ones you think are reasonable.
- Show up and watch, but be ready to participate. If you're watching basketball wearing shorts and basketball shoes, the players or coach may invite you to join.
- Ask the vice principal or principal about club activities. If the coaches are busy, the principal or vice principal might help you figure out logistics.
- Join gym class on occasion. If you demonstrate that you can play volleyball, the volleyball team won't worry about you joining practice so much.
- Show up to a practice, and if people don't give you weird looks, jump in at a reasonable point. If students are practicing something in pairs and there's an odd number of students, you'll fit right in. Pay attention to reactions, in case you don't.
When you join club activities
- If you join one activity on a regular basis, it's important that you aren't only a distraction. Everyone can tell if you're trying hard, regardless of your skill level, and they care. Of course you should still have fun!
- If you rotate among many club activities, you will by nature be a small distraction, because you're new and exciting when you show up. That's fine, because students practice the same thing all year and like occasional distractions. And, they all appreciate when you show up to their practice.
- If you can't do part of a practice, watch that part. Maybe you can do the first half of volleyball practice but can't join in the scrimmage. When the scrimmage is about to start, move to the sidelines and watch -- no problem.
Rob's thoughts on finding your place
Everyone has to decide their own role in club activities, but I think it is better to join club activities as a guest who wants to play with the kids as opposed to a teacher who wants to become a coach.
There are decided cultural differences between coaching philosophies in Japan and coaching philosophies in my home country and it took me 6 months of running with the track and field team before I started to understand these differences.
I am not much of a runner, so perhaps things would have moved more quickly if I were more skilled, but I was not given any coaching duties until almost a year after I started practicing with the track and field team.
When I did begin to move into a coaching role in the club, my vice-principal suggested that I really examine my intentions before proceeding any further. Actually becoming a coach for the kids would require a huge time commitment that most ALTs can't manage. My vice-principal noted that if I did become a coach, I would have very little time for myself and my image of Japan would be narrowed to just club activities.
I took a break from running with the track and field team at this point and examined my life. I realized that becoming a coach was beyond my ability in Japanese, that it was beyond my ability in terms of physical skill, and that it was beyond my ability in terms of the time I was willing to give.
The time required just to practice with the kids everyday was enough to cause me to fall out of the JET Community and become a hermit. Of course, this won't be the case for everyone - I live in a very isolated community and it takes me 25-35 minutes just to drive anywhere.
In any case, after my brief flirtation with become a coach, and the break I took to consider my role as an ALT, I started running with the team again from time to time. I think it was very important in the beginning that I made the commitment to run every single day, but now that I have become friends with the students, I am able to understand what they are going through from afar.
These days, I have other hobbies apart from the track and field team (it really was an all consuming commitment there for a good number of months in my life). The relationship I have with the students is a little bit different now. Last year at this time, I felt like I was a member of the team. This year, I feel more like a fan.
But moving from feeling like a member to feeling like a fan has had its upside too. I discovered that a lot of students had felt shy around me because I had chosen the track and field club and not their club. Now that I have stepped back from the track and field club, I find that I can really relate to all the clubs and I try to be a fan for all my students now.
I don't know if these reflections will be helpful or not, but I hope they will be. I think the most important thing to remember if you get involved with the track and field team is to keep track of what your role is; at first the kids love the novelty of having the ALT practice with them, then they become your friends, and then they start looking up to you. Once they start looking up to you, you should take care not to let them down. I know that I let my students down a couple times after they started looking up to me because I was still acting like the friendly, happy-go-lucky ALT who knows nothing and just wants to run alongside the kids.
