And now for the news

As of this week I officially start in my new job. Even though I’ve been working there once a week for the last month, this week is the proper beginning of my new job life in Japan. I’m leaving the ‘comfort’ of full-time teaching employment for the relative uncertainty of two part-time contracts which can be both be renewed or cancelled every three months. Thing is the ‘job security’ is actually not the biggest concern if I’m honest. What I’m more worried about, though putting it like that makes it sound worse than it is, is my new position as a copy-editor (aka sub-editor in the UK) at the Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s biggest English daily newspapers.

Why worried? Well cause it’s all turned out to be a bit of a blag. I applied for the job more as a ‘whatever’ moment than anything serious, considering I didn’t have the required qualification – that magical ‘previous newspaper experience’ requirement which you can never get until you find a job that will give you the job without the pre-requisite ‘experience’. A lovely catch-22 situation most university graduates only know too well about. Looks like I’ve managed to break it this time. Ok I’m not totally blagging it, considering I do have over 4 years of subbing experience, just not in a paper and while I guessed it would be a lot more different, I didn’t know how much.

Whereas a normal subbing position in an English speaking country dealing with writers whose first language is English, wire news and the sort, involves a lot of careful editing, tweaking, fitting in-house styles and the usual fun things like headlines, captions and so forth (I’m not actually being that sarcastic here, I genuinely think coming up with headlines is fun, maybe there is something wrong with me after all), subbing in my new job involves editing articles translated from Japanese, which is a whole entirely new ball game. But still tons of fun, and in a sense better because you can actually go in and rewrite the whole thing should you need to (keeping the facts and order and things like that) because sometimes no matter how good the translation, it still doesn’t read well.

That’s a lot though, seeing as I haven’t done this full time for nearly a year, and my head’s been filled with other worries, interests and pre-occupations dealing with teaching and the likes. Still it’s fun and challenging, and a nice change of pace from the teaching. Considering I’m now teaching two days a week and working at the paper the other three, it means I can actually start enjoying teaching more because I’m doing less of it and being faced with less bullshit, and also get back into doing what I like most, which is writing and playing with words.

There’s only one slight glitch. I hate the news. Well I don’t ‘hate’ the news, but you know I hate the news. I actually made a conscious decision over a year ago to stop watching and reading the news because I was getting so depressed and annoyed by the whole BS of it, especially the 24h news channels and overall lack of any real journalism in the UK and pretty much everywhere else. Coming to Japan was a nice touch, taking the whole news on TV thing entirely out of the picture, and I must check my news related RSS feeds once a month or so since I’ve come here. Now though I’m back on it, having been reading the paper everyday for the last month, and boy do I feel depressed again.

I haven’t really followed Japanese news either since being here, and now that I’ve caught up for a month it seems to consist primarily of political corruption and scandals, financial corruption and scandals, industrial corruption and scandals, crimes and other niceties commited by family members/relatives on each other, criminal negligence by companies and err… well business news and other news brief, which I’ve always found to be the most interesting of the bunch in the end. Mind you I could already guess all this by having only read the online Asahi Shimbun and Japan Times four times in 8 months.

Ok there’s likely to be a little bit of exageration on my part, but seriously this country is as bad as everywhere else. One thing I’ll give them is that we at least seem to run more ‘light’ news stories than I remember reading or hearing back home. Which is funny as it seems a lot of the editors at the paper don’t particularly enjoy the lighter news items, or the sometimes really cheesy lifestyle stories, but I actually do. Not sure why but I’d be willing to bet it’s to do with the level of depression that comes with pretty much anything else. And I haven’t even begun to deal with opinion pieces, though reading them is actually quite entertaining.

That’s at least one of the advantages of news on the internet, there is a lot more to choose from and therefore a lot less depressing stuff and more interesting stories if you know how and where to look. As far as the paper goes though it’s pretty amazing to witness how a daily paper comes together. One of the chief subs was remarking to me the other day that even though they know a huge proportion of their readership is foreigners (as well as Japanese people who apparently like to read the same news again in another language to see the difference, not quite sure I get that one to be honest) the paper still seems intent on running mainly political stories even though said readership can’t vote, and is therefore pretty limited in affecting any impact on the politics of Japan. And then you add to that the fact that Japanese politics seems to consist of corruption, scandal, apology, scandal, corruption, apology, roughly in that order.

Still it’s been good so far and I’m hoping that it continues to be so. For all the depressing and not so interesting stuff there is good stuff like writing about monkeys, planes, space crafts, food and all the really interesting stuff in the world. I know you’re thinking monkeys maybe a mistake, but you’re wrong, monkeys are cool. By far the coolest thing in the news I reckon, especially snow monkeys with their own private onsen. Anyways I digress.

Another nice aspect of the job change is getting to grips with a side of Japanese society I’ve yet to experience – office life. More on that later, but so far it’s definitely been quite enlightening and interesting to witness. Especially considering I’ve been out of an office environment for about a year now, and so I’ve had plenty of time to ponder how much of an impact it actually has on a person. On the plus side my new ‘office’ has a conbini, tennis court, ‘gym’, cash point, canteen, restaurants, bars, coffee shop and god knows what else all within the confines of the building block. Nice.