Teaching English is one way of travelling and earning money at the same time. Our Correspondent Angela journeyed to Japan and learnt as much about another culture and running a business as her students learn about the English language.

As eight pairs of eyes stared at me across a stack of books, I wondered what the hell I had got myself into. I had come half-way around the world for the experience of teaching English in Japan and having finally got here, I was having a bad case of stage nerves.

Little did I know then that this group of restaurant owners would turn out to be my favourite class and it was here I would make some of my best friends.

That knowledge might have helped me get through that first evening teaching them some elementary greetings when the most they could say was “hi” and “Coca Cola”. As it was I struggled desperately trying to make myself understood during a two-hour session which seemed to drag on forever. As the months slipped by though, we moved on from greetings to sentences and soon they were chatting away with fine New Zealand accents.

While I had chosen one of the most difficult ways of teaching in Japan, by finding my own classes and not working for a school, making a living there was not difficult.

When a couple of friends decided it was time to return to New Zealand, they left me with an apartment in Nagano, three or four classes and descriptions for how to get to them.

Other friends had chosen the more popular working alternative by joining the JET Scheme in which university graduates aged under 35 are selected from various countries and placed in selected schools around Japan.

This meant their income was reasonably good and guaranteed. It also meant they were introduced into an environment where they met people all the time, which can be a bonus if you’re not proficient at the language.

The other method is to look for a job after arriving in the country. This means having the appropriate visa, a university degree and usually a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) qualification.

Arriving with little Japanese, it was up to me to find my way to my first class which was three changes away on the train from my home in the Japan Alps. Armed with the world’s worst sense of direction and a Japanese dictionary, I ended up standing beside the railway tracks in the falling snow as the train disappeared into the night.

I was an hour late and freezing. To make matter worse I had kept the bank manager standing in his suit shivering to death, desperately trying to summon a smile. Bowing several times in tune with my apologies, he turned and directed me through the empty back streets to the side entrance of Hachi Juni Bank.

In an over-heated room I sat at a small table and poked my legs under the fabric covering to discover a heated hole in the floor and three other pairs of wriggling toes. Nervous giggles started from the women on the opposite side of the table and I smiled wondering what was coming next. “O-cha desu ka?” my host asked. I nodded grinning back to him. Japanese green tea was a new-found passion and their smiling looks of appreciation made me a little more confident.

As it turned out, getting used to holding classes in front of a dozen or so people and speaking on and off for a couple of hours would be the least of my problems. Learning to communicate the logic of the English language to children, housewives, businessmen and students was an art in itself.

With experience though, the classes started rolling in. This, I’m sure, was partly aided by the fact I had dyed my hair blonde — fair-haired women are a rarity in Japan.

When I had almost a dozen classes I thought I was set — that was until my youngest student at three-and-a-half, failed her entrance examination for kindergarten. Suddenly I had lost a class.

A couple of days later a good-looking Canadian arrived in town and one of my largest classes — a dozen housewives — were in love with an off-season ice hockey player.

It took me a few months to pick up some new students and after about six months of teaching I began to recognise the permanent students from the ones which would come and go.

Then, as the sun began to melt away the freezing winter temperatures, I had a surprise gift from a student — a large old house, practically rent-free which would be perfect to teach from. This was an added bonus, not only because I could laze on the old vinyl couch I had dragged out into the biggest private garden I had seen in Japan, but because I could hold classes in one of the downstairs rooms.

After a couple of years Japan was beginning to feel like home, but visa requirements meant it was time to move on. “Thanks mate, you’ve been a great teacher,” one of my students said as he farewelled me at the train station.

I grinned back at him — with a vocabulary like that how could he be wrong?