Report and photos by Nicholas Jones
Carl called it when we arrived at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre for P-DOT this year.
“This orientation is going to be the best one yet!” he told Marcia, our illustrious JET Programme Coordinator and fearless leader for the P-DOT weekend.
P-DOT, or Pre-Departure Orientation Toronto, as it’s called by the uninitiated, is the JET Alumni Association of Toronto’s single largest event each year. Some two dozen alumni volunteers step up to present seminars on various parts of Japanese life (from Konbinis to Kancho) in order to prepare the incoming JETs-to-be for their departure on the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme in August.
This year, our genki JETAA volunteers were led by conference coordinator Cecilia Lam and JET Programme Coordinator Marcia Iwasaki. Together, they did a fantastic job pulling together the pile of disparate pieces that make up P-DOT and uniting them into a finely oiled machine that ran with Japanese-level, Voltron efficiency.
And us disparate pieces did pretty well on our own. Inspired by the challenge that Chris Draenos (former JETAA co-chair and veteran conference organizer) issued at our planning meeting, the majority of the presenters included some kind of physical movement or activity in their seminars to get the JETs up and moving. The most genki of these activities was either Cecilia and Clara’s presentation that had attendees throwing balls at one another in French, or Carl, Yuri, and my own presentation that saw the JETs miming out how to use a squat toilet.
However, regardless of how much we alumni planned and practiced our sessions, the reality is that P-DOT is all about the incoming JET cohort, and it lives or dies on their energy. This year we were fortunate to have a really phenomenal group.
Over my five years of P-DOT’ing, I’ve rarely seen a group of incoming JETs more energetic or outgoing. That was great news for us presenters as, when you’ve got that kind of energy in the room, your sessions pretty much power themselves! We’re really looking forward to seeing the JETs again at the other events we have lined up before their departure.
So, though it’s tough to call with an event as large and complicated as P-DOT, Carl may well have been right: this may have been the best P-DOT yet!
Speaking on the behalf of all the members of the JETAA Toronto executive, and all the alumni volunteers who came out for the weekend, I’d like to say that it’s a great honour for us to be able to help the Japanese Consulate to make sure that events like P-DOT are successful.
We’d also like to thank the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, and Executive Director James Heron in particular, for always being such good friends of the JET Programme and JETAA. The event wouldn’t have been anywhere near as successful (or anywhere near as Japanese!) without you welcoming us into your centre for the weekend.
Now, if you don’t mind, I need to get back to online shopping on the Aeon site. I hear they’ve got some pretty amazing jackets….
