“Welcome to Hokkaido. You will never be warm again.”

Well, that’s not really how the JET Alumni we spoke to on Sunday June 21 started her presentation on what it’s like to live in the part of Japan I’m heading to, but it might as well have been. Despite my attempts to play down the threat of the sub-siberian Hokkaido winters—pleading that, surely, we people from Canada would be steeled against the cold—she would have none of it. She told us of houses offering little insulation and absolutely no central heating, of cars totally erased by snowdrifts overnight, of towns being snowbound for weeks, and of a damp, costal cold that can only be burned away by the sun of summer months.

“Once winter hits, you’ll never be warm again,” she summarized. She seemed to punctuate every sentence with a dour portent, giving a vague impression that we eager, uninitiated JETs were so many stary-eyed children who saw Hokkaido as a paradise of Dragons and Samurai. It felt as though she’d made it her mission to soberly bring down every one of our optimistic misconceptions about the place.

It didn’t work though…at least not for me. She emphasized each syllable of her sentences by shifting her gaze from one of us to the next, seeming always to land on me as she closed her most shocking statements.

But her every revelation just energized me all the more, and invariably I’d be smiling when she turned her emphatic gaze on me. Call me a serial optimist, or a hopeful fool, but everything she told us just seemed like one more part of a grand adventure. Even as she told us how the isolated northern island boasted the highest JET attrition rate, all I could think about was how phenomenally lucky I was to have landed in a part of Japan that promised an authentic experience unlike any I’d had before.

And this excitement didn’t diminish any as I and my fellow Hokkaido JETs moved on to the session for JETs placed in rural areas. The session itself seemed like a dry run for our sparsely populated towns as, presenters included, there weren’t more than ten of us in the room. We handled the mandatories, such as discussing the emotional consequences of prolonged isolation, as well as the odd kind of infamy and publicity that a foreigner can expect to be subject to in rural Japan. The presenters cautioned us to GET OUT, as often as we could, so as not to be strangled by the tight-knit communities. However, unlike our earlier encounter with the very serious Hokkaido JET Alum, these Alumni were wholly optimistic and encouraging.

At one point, the one presenter I had pegged as the more serious/dour of the two turned to us, and—without a shadow of doubt in her eyes—promised us that, as rural JETs, we could look forward to having the most authentic, the most integrated, the most fulfilling cultural experiences of any of the JET participants.

“Anyone can visit Tokyo, Osaka, or Kyoto,” she said, “but how many people get the chance to become a part of a real Japanese community. That is exactly what you guys are going to do.”