TEACHING FELLOWS IN JAPAN--MEF AND JET PROGRAM

Caitlin is one of thousands of English teachers from overseas hired to teach in Japanese schools

"She was increasingly grateful for teaching assignments that took her far beyond the city, to rural schools amid rice fields and cedar forests, where the ash collected in quaint wispy eddies, mere shadows, rather than the thick accumulating mounds in Kagoshima." (PAGE 46)

Caitlin lands in Kagoshima as a teaching fellow such as those on the Monbusho English Fellows, or MEF, Program. This government-sponsored teaching program was a forerunner to the current Japan Exchange and Teaching, or JET, program that began in 1987 and placed American college graduates throughout Japan as assistant teachers in public schools.

In the years Caitlin teaches in Kagoshima, only about 100 teachers were employed as MEFs throughout Japan; by contrast the JET Program now employs more than 6,000 assistant language teachers and international relations coordinators from numerous countries.