J2 – Gunma Prefecture Training Week
Gosh, where to start on this one? It was… a long and interesting week. While it wasn’t all the military style training I’d anticipated, it was just as hard!
The day before I left Mitch and I wanted to go to Ikea to get some house things, and also to check out a nearby park for the cherry blossoms. The park was incredible and going to Ikea was just wonderful; I love buying house things 😀 I also sorted a new phone out with Docomo… ended up still being stupid amounts of money per month but at least now I have internet and minutes. We also had a really lovely card from my Dad waiting for us when we got in that night ^^
So, from the 1st to the 7th of April, JINS took all the new recruits (260 in all!) to a lovely hotel in Gunma prefecture. The good part of this meant that all meals were provided and there was a lovely hot spring style bath we could use every evening. The beds were amazing too!
I’m obviously not allowed to go into detail about the training contents and stuff, but basically the first two days were run by a company that train staff in team building. It was horrific. I never realised such training methods would exist…. Basically they send you into a team roleplay thing purposely unprepared so you get told off for being unprepared by someone who is supposedly playing a role, but also seems to be the main orchestrator of the advice for your team. It’s so weird. They tell you you’re useless but also tell you how to improve?! So you keep going back for two days every hour or two a little more prepared each time. But the first day, I was really really lost because I just couldn’t keep up with the Japanese so I ended up being quite quiet. When I did try to help the team told me no anyway. At the end of that day, I told the advice person the reason I wan’t answering much was because I just couldn’t keep up and all of a sudden the whole team was getting reprimanded for not realising or helping me! At first I felt really bad because they shouldn’t be getting told off for my lack of skill but I gradually realised over the week that the way this works is that it’s not one person not pulling their weight, it’s the team not sticking together. So the next day was much better, as everyone kept making sure I understood and I was asking for more help. But it was still so tough. I think over those two days 250 out of 260 people cried. I thought Kawai san was half kidding when she said she did, but no… Those two days were crazy. Beat ’em down to teach ’em. I thought it was ridiculous at first but it did teach me some things.
Have some photos of food to break up the text 🙂 (I tried everything and surprised myself with actually liking the sashimi!)
The rest of the week was a little less hard core. We studied a load of JINS information about products and some more eye stuff, had a dodgeball match midweek, and spent the last two days practising customer service. Those two days were quite fun actually; although my voice wore out and I ended up with a cold! But the idea was that we had two competitions to practise for; the team that could recite the greetings and bow the best, and the team that could get the most points in the shop role play. We came 2nd in the greetings competition and we also got the highest amount of bonus points in the roleplay!
On the 6th we had a big old meeting with everyone where they popped up a slideshow of the week and announced the final winners of dodgeball, greetings, roleplay and the overall team winners (there were 4 large groups with subgroups), and our team won the week! They brought out a load of beer and drinks and let us socialise for a couple hours which was well won I thought.
The morning of the 7th we got back on the bus to go to the Tokyo HQ for our entry ceremony. It was sweet, if a bit formulated. “Clap when I clap, stop the second I stop, and make sure you clap at just the right volume” etc! But the fun came after, when we’d all received our certificates and they surprised us with pizza and drinks! That was brilliant; two hours of drinking and eating with the friends we’d made. It felt like a nice reward for working so hard all week. I am going to miss that bath every night though; it was heavenly.
All in all, a very interesting experience. Literally so many highs and lows that week. I cried both from feeling stupid and from happiness, ate loads of random things, made some great friends, and learned some very new team mentality. Thanks JINS 🙂
Maisy In Japan 