Interview with Teresa Sasaki
Meet Teresa Sasaki, an MTSU alumni living in Japan and teaching English as a foreign language. Currently, she lives with her husband and two children in Tono, a city in the Iwate Prefecture of Japan. Teresa arrived in Japan in the spring of 2006, just a few months after graduating with her bachelor’s in English. Since moving, she has thoroughly enjoyed her time there in rural Japan, but starting out in a foreign country was a bit difficult for her — she hardly knew any Japanese when she first arrived.
“One thing that I wish that I’d done before coming here was learn more Japanese. If I had realized what I was gonna do sooner, I would have done that. But you know, this is the way that my life played out. I came here kind of determined to do what I could to learn the language. I just didn’t want to miss this opportunity. I was thinking more along the lines of ‘If I don’t do this, I will regret it.’ When I did first go, it’s true, I didn’t know much of the language. I had some Japanese language CDs with conversational Japanese. At first I would use very broken Japanese that I did know, which was little. And I’d end up speaking English to people too.”
This language barrier, however, didn’t keep her from interacting with the people around her in her new home. This barrier even allowed her to discover a beautiful aspect of relationships.
“I remember I had a really good friend that first year — she did not speak much English and I did not speak much Japanese. But somehow we worked through that. There are things that I learned, that even when you do have a language barrier, there’s so much nonverbal communication that people will understand. You know, a smile, a nodding a head, you can still kind of communicate your heart even when you don’t understand every single word.”
Luckily though, Teresa’s Japanese husband spoke English when she met him two and a half months into her move to Japan, and they were married about four years later. Now they live in the countryside where Teresa enjoys teaching English.
“I think it’s kinda special that I’m in the countryside because I have a chance to introduce the students around me to a world they’ve never seen before. A lot of times, I’m the very first American that any of these kids have ever met, the first person with blue eyes they’ve ever been up close with. I get to give them a little taste of another part of the world that they might not have otherwise.
“A lot of people in Japan are very interested in the United States. A lot of young people love baseball. People ask me questions like did I know Ichiro Suzuki or ‘Do you eat hamburgers every day?’ All kinds of funny questions. And I learned to ask them questions as an answer, like ‘Do you eat sushi every day?’ It’s a stereotypical image that they have, America equals Coca-Cola and McDonald's or something like that. When people find out I’m from Tennessee, young people don’t say anything, just ‘Oh Tennessee, okay where’s that?’ But older people will say ‘Oh, the Tennessee Waltz!’ or ‘Jack Daniels!’ or ‘Elvis Presley!’ [laughs].”
Despite the pressure of Japan’s workaholic culture, Teresa has been able to avoid most of that pressure and find a balance between work and her personal life.
“There’s so much group pressure to be a workaholic. That’s just the environment in Japan and that’s one of the negative things about it — is that people who have worked for the same company for many years, they can have 20 days of paid leave in that year but [laughs] they might use three days. People do not take vacation for anything. People you work with will kind of bully you if you want to take a long vacation. Like ‘How could you make it hard for the rest of the group to have to make up for you not being here?’
“I am very fortunate in that I have a great employer who’s very friendly to a working mother. My children — if they get a fever or if something’s going around nursery school and they pick it up, stomach virus, anything — I haven’t had any trouble taking off work. But it’s not that situation for all women who are working moms, so I’m really lucky.”
Teresa has been very successful in her teaching endeavors in Japan, and she gives some of the credit to the English degree she received as an undergraduate.
“What is a measure of success? It’s not necessarily whether or not you had the highest test score. It’s your curiosity to learn about the world and what you do with that in the future. And I think an English degree is helpful in whatever field you go into because you learn how to communicate. You learn how to persuasively argue for or against something. I had English classes that taught me editing skills that I use now. I translate some documents from Japanese into English, or I also check documents that other native English speakers have translated into Japanese, and I edit grammar, and make sure that everything is written correctly. I learned how to say something concisely. And also working with people; at MTSU I did a lot of learning service projects, and that really helped me with what I do now because I work with a lot of young people.”
For more information on opportunities abroad, check out MTSU’s study abroad page.
