By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) It was 1980 in Kansai and there weren’t many foreigners from English speaking countries in the area. The English conversation industry was in full swing, but stringent restrictions on work visas made the number of “legal” teachers a rarity. It had taken almost two months from the submission of my application for a work visa to the Japanese Embassy to its approval while I waited in the US. When I got here I found that there were a lot of foreigners working illegally on cultural visas which they’d been misled to understand allowed them to work up to 20 hours a week on (the law at the time forbid working while staying in Japan on a cultural visa). The school I worked at had five legal teachers and I was one of them […]
Read more
