Yesterday and Today

JOY Yesterday and Today

English House JOY became JOY International, Inc. in 1988 when we incorporated. I now am the president of a corporation. It has two buildings: one for children classes and the other for adults plus several branch classrooms. We have about 1,300 students and 25 teachers. As well as offering English classes, we also provide a variety of services: translation and interpretation, seminars, publishing, studying abroad, English-related book sales, etc. For me, who began by handing out advertizing fliers in front of primary and junior high schools, it is quite an achievement.

When I think of the past years, I think I have been very lucky. First, I have met many sympathetic people, who have been both staff and friends. To be honest, I feel as if I have a staff inside and outside of JOY. Sometimes even students act as staff. Second, more challenging jobs came in as we grew. A good example is the interpretation job for curling seminars given by a former curling world champion from Canada. This work came from the Northern Regions Center in Sapporo, and it certainly expanded the range of our work through the people I curled with. If this work had been offered us in JOY's first year of operation I probably could not have done it well. But luckily, as JOY grew bigger and more capable, many more projects came our way.

The third and most important thing is that I have somehow been able to arrive at a working philosophy that goes well beyond the values of my Matsushita days and the monthly sales figures. My work is for the community; to be precise, Tokachi. I have never been interested in any type of work that might force me to leave Tokachi. I believe that the ideal situation is to have deep roots in the soil of this promising land called Tokachi but still have dreams of working for Japan and the world. I have not reached that stage yet, but this philosophy continues to motivate me to bigger and better things.