Evan Kirby
Hometown: Dumfries, Scotland
In Japan: 13 years
Identity: GenkiJACS Japanese School Owner (http://genkijacs.com)
Ambitious, dare we say “genki”, Scotsman Evan Kirby runs GenkiJACS Japanese School in Fukuoka. At age eighteen Evan moved from his small hometown of Dumfries to Hawaii in search of warmer pastures. Five years and a university degree later he realized most of his friends were Japanese and decided to make another big move by coming to Fukuoka on the JET Program. After meeting his wife, then a teacher-in-training, the pair discovered a gap in the market for Japanese-language schools and launched GenkiJACS in 2004. Evan is now Director of the popular school, which caters to the needs of Western students who are mostly interested in Japan for cultural reasons. They organize up to ten activities weekly including tea ceremony, kimono-wearing, ikebana, as well as trips, film screenings and language classes. The school taught over 3,000 students to date – and they keep coming back, some as many as ten times! Evan finds it rewarding to have the opportunity to fulfil the dreams of his students, and enjoys working alongside his wife and dedicated staff members. Although the Fukuoka school will always be home base, GenkiJACS will soon expand with a new school in Tokyo later this spring! Read our full interview below to find out more…
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Tell us about your life before Japan.
Well, I was born in Scotland and I lived there for all of my childhood years until I was about eighteen. It’s a lovely place for about a week – and then after that you’re probably quite happy to go home. It’s very beautiful but it’s very, very wet, and in the end I really wanted a change of scenery. So as soon as I was old enough to go out on my own I moved from there to Hawaii, and I went to university in Hawaii. As I’m sure you know, Hawaii has the highest proportion of people with some Japanese ancestry of anywhere outside of Japan. And after I’d been there for a few years studying at university, I kind of realized that more of my friends were Japanese than American and I thought… maybe that means something. Maybe that means I should think about coming to Japan instead. So I joined the JET Programme and I was placed in Fukuoka, and I’ve been here for the last thirteen years – I haven’t left.
So how many years did you spend in Hawaii before you joined JET?
It was five years total – university plus a little bit of work. Hawaii’s a lovely place. I think my wife would quite like me to take her back there one day. We’ve been to visit, but I think she’d like a little house on the beach.
After moving to Japan, what kept you here?
It’s the people, to be honest. Japanese people often say that island nations have a specific mentality and I think it’s true. There are a lot of similarities between people in the UK and people in Japan in terms of, for example, social relationships and levels of politeness. I find it quite easy to fit in here in Japan coming from a background of small-town Scotland.
Tell us about why and how you started GenkiJACS in 2004?
Well my wife was a Japanese teacher prior to that. We actually met when she was training to become a Japanese teacher. I had a part-time job as a “practice student” in a class where trainee teachers could have practical experience teaching. I was one of the students there for them to practice on… and she was by far one of the best teachers there, so it was an easy choice for a wife! [laughing]
After that, she worked in various other schools but she really felt that she could do something that didn’t currently exist and she could meet the needs of students – to be honest, students like me… people from the West who have specific goals that are different from what most Japanese schools provide. Most schools teach mainly to Asian students because that’s the vast majority of the market, but Western students tend to be a lot more interested in Japan for cultural reasons. The reason that they originally start being interested in learning the language is because of manga, or because of Japanese art, or because of cultural things like tea ceremony and calligraphy. So we wanted a school that would allow them to experience all the Japanese arts, and would also teach them Japanese in a way that grabs their attention towards the cultural side of things. And I think we’ve been quite successful in doing that.
What’s the GenkiJACS concept?
The cultural element is of course important, but the other big thing is that we focus on treating the students as both students and customers. In more traditional Japanese schools, things are usually set up for the convenience of the school and the students are fitted around that, whereas at our school we work around the needs of the students. Whatever that requires us to do – we’ll do it, which is of course a lot more work for us but I guess it works for the students which is why we have people come back to us time and time again. We have some students who have studied with us eight, nine, or ten times! We haven’t even been open for ten years yet, you know…
You mentioned your curriculum includes cultural classes like tea ceremony. Which classes did you start out with?
Well in the very beginning my wife was focused more on running the school than I was, because at that time I still had a full-time job with another company in Japan. So at that time, I believe we started off with the core of Japanese cultural aspects – tea ceremony, Japanese pottery, kimono-wearing, ikebana – things like that.
Now, we have two cultural courses running simultaneously, each of which has three experiences a week – so a total of six cultural experiences a week, but with that we also have a lot of additional things we arrange. We take students on bus tours, we take them to onsens, we show Japanese movies. Usually in a typical week we’ll have maybe 10 or 12 activities that we do with students… we try to keep them very busy. Because most of our students come for the short term they really want to make the most of their time – to use it as effectively as possible – and they don’t have the time to slowly get used to the city so they need us to introduce them to everything that we can while they’re here.
How long do your students stay here, on average?
The average is about seven weeks, but there’s a huge variation within that. We have some students just stay for two weeks, and we have some stay for a year.
Who are your students.. in terms of age, nationality, and goals?
The vast majority of our students are from America and Europe. America is still the biggest. And they tend to be college aged. From 19~25 is the biggest group of students, but again we do have such a variety. Normally we only take students from 14, but I think last month we had a 12-year-old student who came with her mum to study, and we have students in their 70s as well!
It’s great to see people at that age who are still focused on improving themselves and are really into learning new things. It’s a wonderful thing to see. And maybe this shouldn’t surprise me – but they don’t have problems in the classes, they can keep up with the other students just fine.
A lot of them are at the beginner level when they start. They have no or little Japanese ability when they start with us, so our beginner classes are always the best subscribed. In terms of goals, most people are studying Japanese because of their interest in the country, rather than for economic reasons. It’s not because they want to necessarily work here when they finish studying, it’s because they want to understand more about the country. They just love Japan, so it’s a way to increase their ability to get by in Japanese society. So our Japanese classes tend to focus on the communicational Japanese. Of course it includes all four skills – reading, writing, listening, speaking – but it’s in proportions as are needed in everyday life.
So how many staff do you have at GenkiJACS?
We have a lot, and that’s because we run the culture classes which tend to have one teacher who teaches that specific cultural class. So there’s one teacher who just does tea ceremony, there’s one teacher who just does pottery… Of course those are not full-time teachers, but as a result I guess we have about 25 staff. Our full time staff is around seven.
Are you one of the teachers?
No! I don’t think anyone would be satisfied if they came all the way to Japan and their teacher was a Western guy! No, no, they don’t let me inside the classroom anyway. [laughing]
We heard that GenkiJACS will soon open a school in Tokyo?
It’s a very busy time for us! We’ve always been very interested in opening a school in Tokyo. Fukuoka is a wonderful place, and I have lived here for 13 years and I plan to live here for a lot longer, but it isn’t very well known in Western countries. So it’s always been a bit of a struggle for us to educate people about where we are. We can educate them about the school quite easily, but people have no idea… When they hear the name “Fukuoka” they often don’t know whether it’s a city with 1.5 million people or 150 people. What we found through research is that most people who come to Japan are either interested in studying “in Tokyo” or “not in Tokyo”. Those are their two choices. And the people who are not interested in studying in Tokyo research a lot of different schools, and after that they’re happy to come study with us. But as for the people who would only study in Tokyo – there’s no way to meet their needs as students.
So we decided that opening a school in Tokyo wouldn’t take too many students away from our Fukuoka school which is obviously still important – Fukuoka is always going to be our home base, our main school – but it would allow us to provide new services and new experiences for students that we can’t provide now. There are, of course, many things that can only be done in Tokyo (I’m really excited to go and see the Ghibli Museum myself!)
So, we’d been thinking about opening a Tokyo school for a while now, but this year the timing was right. Of course the disaster two years ago in Japan had an effect of student numbers – for a little while people were nervous about coming to Japan, especially younger students. Their parents don’t want to say yes if there’s any chance that their kid might have difficulty in Japan. But we’ve seen those numbers come right back up this year. And at the same time, the Yen is becoming a bit cheaper these days, after a long period of being so high. So we felt the timing was right this year. The other thing is – rents have come down in Tokyo recently, in the last three or four years I think, to the level where it’s not too much more expensive to rent a place in a great location in Tokyo than it would be rent in a great location in Fukuoka.
We plan to open within easy walking distance of Shinjuku Station which is the busiest station in the world. The concentration of people in Tokyo is incredible, and the number of foreigners you see walking the streets is surprising too! In Fukuoka it’s still – not rare, as such – but to the level that if you pass another foreigner on the street in Fukuoka you notice them. Whereas in Tokyo you see Western people in suits all the time. So the market is obviously there in Tokyo. And I think that what we offer as a school is still something that doesn’t exist in Tokyo either. Our school is basically run on a European school model, which is very different from the traditional Japanese model. For example, students can start any Monday of the year, they can stay as many weeks as they want, courses are completely flexible. Basically the ethos of treating them as customers rather than just students is still rare in Tokyo, so we really feel like there was a gap in the market.
Will the new school be similar to the Fukuoka school?
Oh yeah, it will be basically the same thing, just transported to a new location. The only really big change is that we won’t be taking under 18 students in Tokyo. Maybe it’s because I have kids of my own now, but we don’t really feel that Tokyo is a great place for under-18 kids to be by themselves. We’ll only be taking them in Fukuoka.
And along with that, we won’t be offering homestays – at least not at first – homestays are a very difficult part of what we do.
How about staff and teachers for the new school? Anyone going to Tokyo from Fukuoka?
Well we’re very lucky in that one of our core teaching and administrative staff will move to Tokyo to manage the new school. And she’s already had experience with managing a school in the past, so that’s on the teaching side. We have one staff member who had to quit last year to move to near Tokyo to follow her husband when he changed his job. She wanted to continue working with us, and now she has the chance to start up again, so we’ll start with a core team of people who have already worked with us, which is great. There’s also a couple of other former teachers who moved to Tokyo who will be joining us again. So that gives us a lot more courage in starting up the new school. Especially because I won’t be moving to Tokyo myself, I’ll be visiting but…
How much time will you be spending in Tokyo?
I plan to spend one week a month or less – that’s the plan! We also will be hiring one more foreign staff member from May, and that person will be going to Tokyo for the first while to help open the school. There are a lot of things that are just easier if a foreign person handles them – particularly with our students who are all foreigners. A foreign person can usually anticipate their needs more smoothly. Also offering the communication from a native speaker is important.
What’s the most rewarding thing about running a Japanese school?
This might sound a bit cheesy… but we really do feel like we fulfil people’s dreams. And we see that at the end of people’s study. On the last day of study, every Friday, we have a graduation ceremony where students give a speech using the Japanese that they learned when they were with us, and sometimes in those speeches students will tell us things that they have never mentioned before. One that I remember really strongly is, we had a student from Hungary and it was his first time ever to come to Japan. He was an elderly gentleman, but he had saved money for about twenty years to come here, and it had been his dream for those twenty years, and he didn’t tell us this until the very end of his stay (which is good in a way, because we would have felt so much pressure!) Twenty years of hopes riding on the one month he spent in Japan! But he broke down in tears during his graduation speech, and so did most of the staff, because it was such an emotional thing to see how much he had put into his time here. And to see that we had been able to give him what he wanted made all of us very happy to be doing what we do.
Another thing is that we’ve had a few students who have gotten married to people they met here, and that’s always a wonderful thing. We know theoretically that people’s lives are changed by coming to Japan – because everything you do changes your life in some way. Often when someone comes for a month, they just put that experience into their psyche and return to what they were doing, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as when a person comes to study with us for a month, falls in love and then decides to live in Fukuoka for the rest of their life! We can really see that if they hadn’t chosen our school, if they’d gone to Osaka or Tokyo, they would have had a completely different life! So the knowledge that the futures of these people are being affected by the things that we do and the people we introduce them to at school is a wonderful feeling to go through life with.
It seems your school builds great relationships between teachers, students etc. Tell us about some memorable friendships that originated at the school?
We have the ability now to go to any country in the world and there’s always someone we know there. For example last year I went to Switzerland for work, and there were former students who took me into their homes and gave me a place to stay while I was there. Just feeling like a global family in that respect is a wonderful feeling. It really does bring the whole world a lot closer. After the disaster in Japan two years ago, we had a lot of former students contact us to ask us what they could do to help. We had one former student for example who used his connections with the Swiss Red Cross to send funds that we were able to co-ordinate within Japan for him. To be involved in that, to see that for these people who come to Japan once – it’s not over when they go back, they always have that connection with Japan.
How many students would you estimate have attended Genji JACS?
Just under 3,000 total. It’s a good number. Of course it’s hard to compare our school to long term schools because they have students stay for a year or two years whereas a lot of our students go home after two weeks. But in terms of the number of students who come in a year, I think that we have more Western students than anywhere else. We’ve been very lucky in that respect.
What sort of feedback do you get from students – about the school, but also about Fukuoka?
We get very good feedback about the school, I don’t want to toot my own horn too much there, but I think the fact that students come back time and time again to study with us is concrete proof of how much they enjoy the school. And we’ve had, for example, four different members of the same family come back to study with us one at a time. That’s lovely.
Regarding Fukuoka – as I mentioned earlier, people don’t know about it before they come here, but once they’ve come here they realize this is the place that they wanted to go. Lots of people say that they’re so happy they didn’t choose to go to the bigger cities – Osaka or Tokyo – that Fukuoka was the right place for them. And I completely agree, I’m the biggest cheerleader for this place that there is! I don’t think there’s any other city in Japan that has such a good combination of the quality of life, the ease of getting around the city, the ease of getting out of the city to visit other areas. Also, the clean tourist beaches being so close to the city is a wonderful thing, it’s a wonderful reason to come to Fukuoka, especially during the summer months.
How has Fukuoka changed over the thirteen years you’ve lived here?
The biggest change that I personally have felt is a large increase in the number of foreign people. This may just be confirmation bias – that thing where you see what you want to see – but when I first arrived in Fukuoka I remember that people did treat me as a foreigner, much more than I get these days. In small ways, and I wouldn’t say negative ways. I was never on the receiving end of anything that I would call racism. But for example, when I was first here, I remember going to the supermarket and having people always looking in my basket to see what it is that foreigners buy! And these days I don’t really get that feeling anymore. It’s normal for there to be foreigners around, which is a wonderful shift in Japan. And of course it’s ongoing – still compared to most other countries in the world the percentage of foreigners is quite low, but in my son’s class at school for example there are three half-Japanese children out of thirty students. That’s much more than I expected. I was a little worried, before we put him into elementary school, if there was going to be some difficulty there, but in the end it turns out that the half-Japanese kids are the more popular ones because they’re… kinda cool! [laughing]
If you weren’t running GenkiJACS what would you like to be doing?
To be honest, I think running GenkiJACS has “spoilt” me for other work now, because it’s such a wonderful job. Considering the people that I get to work with, the wonderful staff we have here, I’m never grumpy in the morning about coming to work. I’m always really happy to get here. And it’s to do with the students as well – I love being able to see the happy, motivated faces. And of course, there’s the freedom that comes with being the boss! So it’s really hard to imagine going from this back to a regular job now.
Probably though, if I wasn’t running GenkiJACS, my wife and I would be running another business together. We’ve been working together full time for the last six years I think, and that has also been a great experience for me. Not to get too personal about it, but the reason that I married her was because she is the one person that I met whom I thought I can spend everyday with and never feel like I want to be by myself instead. So being able to work with her as well has been like a dream come true to me.
What advice do you have for other foreigners aspiring to start their own business in Japan?
Based on what we’ve been experiencing while arranging to open the Tokyo school, I would say that personal connections are still very, very important in Japan and Japanese business. It is very important to cultivate those connections, to have people who you can ask for a favor when you need something special. Partly because Japanese people in general are wonderful people, and are very friendly and helpful and kind. But once you pass the line from “そと” to ”うち” then you reach a whole new level of that kindness. So, within business relationships as well, everything just goes so much more smoothly when you know people. And we’ve really seen that when we’re making arrangements for the Tokyo school, that the personal connections that we have in Tokyo already have allowed those aspects of the preparation to go quickly, than the parts where we’re forging new relationships.
Anything else to add?
I guess I do want to emphasize how lucky we’ve been to have wonderful people who we work with. To have the great staff that we do have, who have taken care of the students so well – going above and beyond what is required of them on a daily basis. The image of the school wouldn’t be nearly as good, without those staff doing more than we ever asked them.
Originally published in Fukuoka Now Magazine (fn172, Apr. 2013)
