Thanks for all the advice, everyone! If I seem hesitant to do it, it’s only because I’m worried that it would end up being a lot less useful than going straight into research.
[QUOTE=jovan]
You do not work for an american company. The contract you sign is essentially the same regardless of where you work, but your employer is the school/board of education/etc. where you work. The amount of work you actually do varies greatly.
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Thanks for clarifying that, but it sounds like that main pro still stands: that, as an outsider in most respects, you don’t tend to get roped into putting in all the unpaid overtime and such. (I absolutely refuse to take a job that entails spending my evenings patrolling youth hangouts and yelling at students I find from my school. 
)
[QUOTE=jovan]
Pardon the language, but this is bullshit. Do not ever utter these words in front of a Japanese, it’s highly insulting. A new Japanese graduate might be lucky to make 200,000 yen per month before tax. In JET, you earn 300,000 yen after tax. That is for doing work you hold no qualification for. Hell, I wasn’t even a native speaker! English teachers in Japan are grossly overpaid with regard to their actual skills and qualifications. The locals know that and, rightfully, complain about it. It only adds oil to the fire when said over-paid teachers have the gall to complain about their wages. One of the pros of JET is that you will most likely be making more money than you would anywhere else. It’s not that hard to save up to 1000$ per month.
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In general I find it best to not directly complain about anything once you’ve been hired, so I hope I wouldn’t be daft enough to do so. When I say “crappy,” I meant crappy relative to my other options. Since I have a PhD in experimental phonetics and a lot of experience running a laboratory I’m looking at JET as an alternative to a job that stands to start at 50-70k a year once I factor in my clinical work.
[QUOTE=jovan]
Not deciding where you go is certainly true. I think the decision process involves a map a blindfold and darts. If you think dealing with students all day is hard, may I suggest you not teach in Japan. What a few people tend to forget is that teaching english in Japan involves… teaching… in Japan. It’s shocking how many people either have no real interest in Japan or teaching when they come here. If you don’t like hanging out with students all day, then maybe teaching isn’t for you.
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I absolutely love teaching; the reason I wanted to mention it was to make it clear that I partially knew what I was getting into, to forstall the “You don’t have any idea how difficult teaching is going to be” advice.
for a starting teacher (with no classroom experience, no certification and usually only a bachelor’s degree), the pay is pretty good. Unless they’ve lowered the salary recently, I remember it being 100,000yen/month more than what most private schools pay.
I’ve taught Japanese high schoolers before, so I found it really amusing to watch his observations turn from baffled to jaded as the editorials go on.