Being an EFL teacher in Japan is a great line of work.

There are places you can go in this world where — even if you don’t have a lot of teaching experience — they will hand you a full-time contract just for stepping off the plane and knowing how to tie your shoes. Where instantly, you are called “Bob-sensei” or “Britney-sensei,” and treated like a public intellectual. Where people ooh and ah over every word you emit, where they’ll let you ramble on about anything you want for an hour, they will call it an English lesson, and pay you three times what a mortal human gets paid for an hour of his or her time.

Japan is not one of these places.

It became steadily less so beginning in 1991, with the bursting of a long-standing asset bubble.

But let me reiterate — and I say this as someone that was actually teaching lessons at Lehman when the shock hit, and lived through the collapse of employment opportunities for foreign teachers — being an EFL teacher in Japan is a great line of work.

Come here. Leave whatever you are trying to accomplish in teaching where you are now, and come here.

Come to Japan. With the trauma of Lehman now rendered petty by the March 2011 East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, Japan has become a better place than it ever was to come and try to make a difference in education. And the reasons now are better than they ever were….

REASON NUMBER ONE: The Japanese are onto you, not into you. It was always true that most Japanese do not revere you simply for being foreign — in spite of their natural ability to to make you feel very, very special at welcome parties, goodbye parties, and all sorts of situations where, ritually speaking, you occupy the status of “guest.”

But it is now generally known that foreign teachers are unreliable, and that they care a lot more about being liked and being popular, than they do about second language acquisition and how to facilitate it. This would be an unfair generalization if it did not in fact correctly describe 90% of the foreign English teachers that you will meet if you come here.

REASON NUMBER TWO: True to form, the Japanese have watched and learned. Here is how not to get a job working for ProjectGENIUS (for those that don’t know, we send foreign English teaches to Japanese Private schools). In your interview with us, talk about how poor English education is in Japanese schools. If you are a foreigner working in Japan now and you are reading this, let me be explicit, almost all Japanese English teachers are better at teaching English than you are.

Meaning that guy that only speaks Japanese to the kids all the time, and never speaks to me? I’m gonna say … almost definitely. The kids may like you more, but he’s the main reason why they have what English skills they do have. Deal with it.Moreover, it is much much more common than it used to be to find fluent Japanese English teachers working with the kids.

And a Japanese junior high school student that has a genuine interest in English will no longer have that interest drummed out of him or her through rote-memorization drills. Schools are much more aware than they used to be of resources and learning opportunities that can be offered to such students.

REASON NUMBER THREE: Still, nobody knows how to teach English. Nobody has figured this out. TESOL fads continue to come and go. As difficult as it is to figure out what we need to do as teachers to make ourselves efficacious, the industry remains free of orthodoxy. So if you can help build a team of teachers that is having some success in connecting with a particular community of learners, then you really have the potential to forge a new frontier.And this means that — unlike most foreign English teachers, who come here as tourists — if you have come to Japan to build something new and help to exalt the teaching profession, you will attract the right people to you. It will take you a while to generate a descent income — especially if you do not have either a license to teach in your home country or a Master of Arts in some field of Applied Linguistics — but if you are sincere, you will stand out in such a way that people here in Japan will be eager to connect you with opportunities to practice your craft in exactly the way that you envision, and if you are open, they will open your mind to new ways.