Yuya Yamada from Nagoya once had a vague notion of becoming a volunteer teacher. Starting with his boot-camp training, he never suspected what that would involve
Yuya Yamada hales from Nagoya, Japan. After graduating from Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, he decided to volunteer teaching Japanese in China. The 28-year-old passed the difficult selection and training of a Japanese government-backed volunteer training programme before arriving in Wuhan two years ago. He now teaches in Shenzhen. What did you do in Japan, and why did you come to China? I wasn’t a teacher in Japan. I came to China, for several reasons, after I graduated. The main reason was that my research topic for my master’s degree was Japanese-language teaching for Chinese-speaking students. China was naturally the place to make use of my specialties. I had also met many Chinese students at university and we became friends. I didn’t speak Chinese, although I had an interest in Chinese culture. Going to China would mean a chance to learn the language and culture. How did you become involved in volunteering? I applied to the government-backed Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) programme, which is widely known in Japan. They had many requirements. Probably the toughest were the strict health checks, which is also part of what the programme is famous for. I took the medical check up a couple of times – the medics just wanted to be sure we were 100 per cent well. Then I had to pass a paper exam on basic knowledge about teaching Japanese before I could move on to several rounds of interviews. After all this, I could finally join the volunteer programme. As ready as you were, was everything the same as you were taught before arriving in China? Actually, there were still big differences between the training and the real situation – language was probably the biggest problem. At the time my Mandarin was not good enough. And people in Wuhan speak mandarin in a very Wuhanese style. At the beginning I had really had problems understanding them.
