The group raised their glasses of Alaska-brewed beer in celebration on Friday at Tokyo Garden, a restaurant in Midtown Anchorage with decor inspired by the country that the recent college graduates would leave for on a 5:45 a.m. flight the next day.
After traveling thousands of miles for positions they applied for nearly a year ago, the seven graduates, all in their early to mid-20s, would land in Tokyo, where they will spend a quick few days crammed with workshops about the next year of their lives teaching in a country that some had visited before and some had not.
Then they'll disperse across the Japanese archipelago to work as assistant English language teachers for the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program, or JET, sponsored by the Japanese government.
Twenty-four-year-old Miranda Barril of Juneau would travel to Hamamatsu, southwest of the capital, and 22-year-old Sarah King of Fairbanks would go to Uto, on an island farther south. Ayshe Yeager, 22 and a graduate of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, would go north to Date and Jennifer Lorenz, a 26-year-old graduate of the University of Alaska Anchorage, would go to Oita, on the same island as King.
Once there, they'll move into their new homes, said Warren Roselius, senior political assistant and JET coordinator at the Consular Office of Japan in Anchorage. Before the send-off lunch Friday afternoon at Tokyo Garden, Roselius patiently and candidly talked to the seven Alaska "JETs" at a morning meeting about what lay ahead.
"This is real," interjected Yeager soon after the meeting began. She sat at the long wooden table with the other JETs in the sparsely decorated consulate room. "Oh my gosh, guys, this is really happening."
Through the JET Program, nearly 1,100 Americans will travel to Japan in two waves this summer. Roselius said the number of JETs from the United States has grown by 200 over the past two years, since Tokyo won the bid to host the 2020 Olympics and the push for more native English speakers increased.
The JET program, according to its website, aims to promote "internationalization at the grassroots level by bringing in young, college-age individuals" to work across Japan. And Japan picks up the bill for a lot of the expenses incurred by those accepted into the program, including their airfare and hotel stay in Tokyo. New JETs, Roselius said, earn an annual salary of roughly $27,000, paid for by their boards of education in Japan.
However, Roselius repeated at Friday morning's meeting, the JETs' work duties go beyond the classroom. They will serve around the clock as representatives of the United States and Alaska, he said.
"You're not just there as a teacher or a translator," he said. "You're kind of there as a grass-roots ambassador."
After briefing them on the responsibilities they must shoulder, Roselius provided some strong suggestions. Call your parents when you land in Tokyo, he said. Organizers will take attendance at the workshops there, he said, so show up and don't drink too much on the plane or do karaoke until 5 a.m. once in the city.
"If you do miss a meeting, you might have to pay for your hotel cost," he cautioned. "Your first day of training is your first day of work."
In between talk of vacation days and pensions, they discussed Japanese culture. They talked about outdoor shoes versus indoor shoes and how instead of saying "yes" in conversational agreement, people may grunt at you, and that's not rude -- it's typical, Roselius said.
Roselius held up an erratic line graph to help the JETs visualize what homesickness and culture shock could look like. The line rose and then rapidly squiggled up and down. It rose again, plummeted and then flat-lined before it went shaky again.
At first, Roselius told them, "you're going to go there and love every part of Japan." Then a damp winter will come. Stay active, he urged, having taught English in Japan himself. "I would have days four years in where I hated everything about Japan."
All JETs are contracted to stay for one year. Some may decide to stay longer. Most of the JETs from Alaska said they will work at more than one place -- ranging from programs for blind students to adult conversational classes to classes at traditional elementary, middle and high schools.
Brenden Martinez, a 23-year-old who majored in Japanese at UAF, said he will live in Myoko and work at two middle schools and four elementary schools.
"I'm going all over the place because I'm the guy for the entire little town," he said.
Martinez started the application process for the JET program last fall. He described the process as "long" and "grueling." Roselius said the process is competitive.
It starts at the Embassy of Japan in Washington, D.C., which selects candidates from a pool of applicants and forwards them to consulates across the country. Alaska has its own consulate office in Anchorage. Then, the consulates create a panel of judges who interview the applicants. They forward a list of recommended, ranked names to Tokyo, Roselius said. Officials in Tokyo then tell the consulates how many people they will take. Eventually, those selected are placed in schools.
For Martinez, the rigmarole meant he spent a lot of email checking.
"You get up in the morning, you look at your inbox, you sigh longingly and you check it again before bed," he said.
His girlfriend had already moved to Japan as part of the JET program. He said he hasn't seen her in more than a year. After months of waiting, Martinez got an email accepting him into the program. He was placed in a town about an hour away from her.
Lorenz, from Florida, graduated from UAA in December with a degree in elementary education. She said she knew she wanted to teach English abroad, but there are many programs that would allow her to do just that. According to the international TEFL Academy, an estimated 250,000 native English speakers work as English teachers abroad at some 40,000 schools and programs.
Lorenz said she became interested in going to Japan because it seemed safe and would give her a chance to immerse herself in a culture unlike her own. "I just wanted to try something different," she said.
She doesn't speak Japanese and has never traveled to Japan before, she said. Another JET on Friday offered to help her write her short introduction speech in Japanese.
Yeager said her interest in Japanese culture and religion began in elementary school and prompted her to study the language. She studied in Japan during college and traveled around the country the following summer.
Now, she said, "I'm getting paid to do something I like." The salary, she said, was "a great way to start right after college."
About her pending departure from Alaska, Yeager said she had dueling feelings.
"I feel partially like I'm digging my heels into the ground," she said, "but also I feel like I want to spring forward."