At least for this year. One of the joys, apparently, of being a government employee here in Japan is the mandatory annual physical exam. Its even less fun for us JETs because we all come from countries that have a high expectation of privacy in health matters. Here your test results are as likely as not to be a matter of conversation for half the town. Another undesirable aspect is that they do chest x-rays for the TB test, and I’d rather not up my rad count any more than necessary after all the upper GI’s I’ve had. Between all that and being poked and prodded by a doctor that I can’t understand, I was really not looking forward to this. But they got me scheduled for my exam on Thursday, even though it meant rescheduling my classes on that day and that I’d have to be driven to the neighboring town by my boss.

Today I found an envelope sitting on my desk, turns out it was the, uh, colon cancer test sample kit. They tried to explain how to use the thing, but as usual the language gap in the culture center office was too great to be sure that the meaning was correctly understood. So they scheduled to have the English teacher from the junior high come by later to explain things. Well, actually there was a bit more than that, there was a whole medical history questionnaire that she needed to go over with me too. Talk about awkward.

Fortunately this was all averted when I explained that I had already had an exam about 5 months ago to get into the program. She explained this to my boss and as a result it my choice whether or not to take it. Needless to say, I’m teaching class Thursday instead…

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