Abroad In Japan by Chris Broad (Penguin) ~Janet Brown

Chris Broad is a real-life incarnation of Forrest Gump. Looking for his first job after leaving his university, he applies to Japan’s JET program that supplies native speakers of English to Japanese schools, despite having no interest in teaching, no knowledge of Japan, and absolutely no proficiency in Japanese. He has one thing going for him. He’s savvy enough to know that few applicants will voice their preference for a rural assignment and this gets him a job.

He arrives in a city in decline where boarded-up windows are a common sight and the bordering mountain range makes the place isolated in winter. The most flourishing feature of Sakata is Chris’s workplace, a high school with 1200 students and 120 teachers. In this area with a population of 100,000, Chris is one of fewer than ten Westerners, one of whom is the only other gaijin in his school.

To anyone who’s ever taught in Asia, it looks as if Chris has fallen into a rather cushy gig. He’s never in a classroom without a Japanese co-worker and his workload consists of lessons taught straight out of the supplied textbooks. His apartment is ready for him upon arrival and costs a mere $110 a month. On the other hand, he’s had only three days of training, he’s given a workload of thirty classes with forty students in each, his Japanese colleagues who are seasoned English teachers speak minimal amounts of that language with maximum amounts of errors, and they’re the ones who have written the textbooks.

His sole compatriot in the school is a hard-drinking chainsmoker, the only affordable nightlife is found in a local tavern, and the winter brings two feet of snow every night, burying cars in drifts and making the mountain roads impassable. Out of boredom and in competition with his colleague who’s one of the few gaijin who has passed the Kanji Kentei, an examination that demands the knowledge of 3000 characters, Chris sets himself a goal of learning the basic requirement of 2200 characters, memorizing 25 of them every day.

His luck continues, first with a group of middle-aged adults who ask him to tutor them in English and who become his social safety net. But he hits the jackpot when he’s approached by a convivial passerby who insists on becoming his friend. Natsuki is a fearless English speaker who loves nothing better than sprinkling his usage with the f-bomb. He quickly becomes Chris’s mainstay and eventually his video co-star.

His biggest stroke of Gumpian luck comes through Youtube. Chris once had dreams of making movies so this becomes his way to stay in touch with family and friends while amusing himself in the evenings. Youtube is still a novelty back in 2012 and Chris becomes a version of Mr. Bean, bumbling his way through Japanese culture as he strives to assimilate. When he goes to the public baths and finds he’s meant to be in the nude, armed only with a modesty towel; when he ventures into the rarified atmosphere of a hostess club where a night out can easily cost $240; when he’s thrown out of a love hotel; when he samples McDonald’s fries drizzled with chocolate sauce, Chris begins to clock up views, sometimes a quarter of a million in a night. In a fit of daring that’s perilously close to madness, he decides to make Youtube his primary occupation--and it works. 

A friend in Sakato knows a man in a nearby city who works in “in-bound tourism,” went to school in Seattle and London, worked for years in Frankfurt and Sydney, speaks fluent British English, and has adopted a Western mindset. Ryotaro hires Chris as a videographer who explores Japan via Youtube.

By this expansion of his territory, Chris’s luck continues. A video of him leaping from his bed when a nation-wide alarm system announces an incoming North Korean missile makes him famous. A visit to an island recovering from the disaster of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami puts him up close and personal with his idol, Ken Watanabe. Even an earthquake that destroys his filming studio proves to be a bit of good fortune.

The same convivial charm that has made him a Youtube star makes this memoir irresistible. He’s a clever phrasemaker, describing his first breath in Japan as “so despicably humid, each breath was like inhaling a mouthful of steam.” On his first visit to a Tokyo sushi bar, he decides “The sushi I’d experienced in the U.K. felt like a hate crime compared to this.” Unlike far too many other expats in Asia, he reserves his ridicule for himself rather than a culture that is frequently confusing.

There’s little in his memoir that can’t be read in every book ever written about Japan but only this one is told by Forrest Gump. For a distraction from the bleak and the dispiriting literature that’s all too easy to find,  Abroad in Japan is hard to beat.