Today was the JET Programme Tokyo Orientation where 1,500 new JET teachers arrive for 3 days of being jet lagged, hungover and getting an onslaught of being thrown head first into Japan. It’s also the first time I’ve attended ( well, except for the time when I first came myself, of course).

And today was the AJET Orientation where companies pay a load of money to have a table to give free stuff away to JETs. And as AJET has always been really good to Genki English, this year I decided to help out as I’m going to be up here for my workshop tomorrow anyway. Joel also popped along and it’s just as well he did as there were hundreds of JETs!! Mind you most of the other companies were just throwing stuff at the JETs ( they had so many bags!), but it was cool that we actually got to chat to people and help them out with elementary school stuff. This year’s JETs seem a really good bunch of people. And at the end one girl came up to me and said “We used the NHK documentary about you in college last year, we had to answer a worksheet with questions like “Where does Richard live?””. Well, that’s not the usual sort of thing I hear everyday!

So quite a good day, and it will be interesting to see how the JETs go on knowing about Genki English from the very beginning. When I first started GE I was pushing it all the time, but over the last couple of years it seems that most people have just assumed that everyone knows about Genki English, so don’t mention it. Hence I was getting quite a lot of emails from people this year saying they’d only found out about the site part way through the year.

And now I have to go and squash down my speech for tomorrow, and think of new jokes as the old ones only work on JETs who’ve been here a while!!