I quit!

I love Japan.
I love living here.
I love the food.I love the people.
I love my students.
And I love teaching.

What I don't love, is my job. I'm not going to name my company, as that is super unprofessional, but suffice it to say, I am really unhappy there. And the situation is bad enough, that I realized that it is time to be brave and quit.

Japan is loaded with awful employers (English schools) that take advantage of and treat their foreign employees badly. I thought that I had done the right research and had picked a good one, but I guess I was wrong. Nearly everything I was told during my interview turned out to be a variation of the truth.

My grievences are too numerous to name, but some of the big ones include having to spend more than 50 hours at my 29.5 hour per week job, being forced to eat lunch and dinner 5 days a week from a convenience store, being forced and rewarded for milking my students out of every cent they have, being forced to teach more than the maximum number of classes listed in my contract, only to find out that the maximum number is something that is completely disregarded by my company, having to commute nearly 2.5 hours a day, and working at a company that consistently makes my Japanese coworkers cry as a way to "motivate" them to achieve their absurdly high and unattainable profit goals.

This isn't for me. And to be honest, it goes against my morals to even work at a company like this. So, on Friday, I drafted a carefully worded letter of resignation, and early yesterday afternoon, I resigned my position.

I don't have a job or anything lined up yet, but I gave 4 months notice (what my contract says I must do, but in practice isn't enforced), so I have lots of time to figure it out. I feel very guilty about leaving my students this way, but in my heart and in my head, I know that this is the right decision.

So, my last day will be January 10, 2007. After that, some options include:

Finding an assistant teacher position in a public elementary school or kindergarten.
Finding a part time job, and finding private students to teach.
Finding a non-english teacher position.
Moving to Thailand or Indonesia to teach.

I thought that I would feel really scared to have quit my job in a foreign country, but actually, I feel totally liberated. There are so many options and places I can go and things I can do. I'm really glad that I made this decision.