are these families compensated for boarding a student?

sorry, but that woman just sounds like a bitch, throwing out a girl in the middle of the night and all.

Yeah even for Japan, that's fucked up. That woman was looking for a paycheck and that's pretty much it. I have also watched a lot of these videos before because they fascinate me and most of the time it sounds like the kids in question didn't really do anything to knowingly piss off their host family, it was just them trying to communicate something (like having an allergic reaction which could be potentially fatal...I can't remember if that is in this video or another but there was a family that could not understand a girl who told them it was happening and when they found out all they did was yell at her).

Out of curiosity, what is the screening process for host families like? I have a friend of a friend who went to live with a host family in Tanzania during the Peace Corps and loved it, and I know of a few people that had a BLAST with their host families in Sweden. All the stories I have heard of Japan are a bit frightening, though.

Culture shock over the small room and having to use limited heating/hot water is totally true. The tiny room is not so unusual in Japan, and I sure had culture shock when my wife asked me to to be more energy efficient (winters are not that cold, but the heating stays off).

getting kicked out.. messed up.

I did a study abroad thing in Costa Rica for a few weeks. My host family was awesome. I stayed in one of the children's rooms and it was small, but I only used it to sleep in. Great food.

Her getting kicked out does raise some red flags about the program administration. I'm at the university level, and we have a great deal more control and oversight than at the high school level, believe it or not, and so stories like this one are exceedingly rare in my world.

There are a ton of fly-by-night exchange programs.
It's kind of a pump and dump scheme.
I had something similar when I went to Prague. They put us in an concrete, crumbling Communist party men's gymnasium/halfway house that smelled like piss.

One of the students was so enraged she went on a lawsuit laden, my daddy is a lawyer rant. It worked as we were moved to a nice, clean student dorm/hotel afterwards.

I stayed at an airbnb in Indonesia that had scratch marks on the wall and a communal center of the room drain for blood.

But we still exchange letters! I love those people! At 13 I thought the A-bomb was all my fault though. It was what I'd imagine being a young exchange student from Afghanistan would feel on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

I'm guessing there's more to the story than that too! Like it was already mentioned, homestays are paid, much like a bed and breakfast, so why risk losing your relatively easy job just because your paycheck came home late? It's pretty much like walking off the job.

I'm not saying that I think she was out boozin til dawn or anything; I actually did know a homestay that did this on a relatively short tour of Australia. Those of us who were 18 (including myself) COULD go the the bar, we just were advised not to, since we were in a philharmonic orchestra. One of the second violins did this twice to his homestay, showing up reeking of booze and cigarettes at 4 in the morning, not only waking up the family but fucking up the performance so he was sent home early after the homestays informed the philharmonic what was going on.

Anyway I dunno, some people ARE just big enough bitches to do this. I lived in a house once where this bitch who owned the house waited until we were all at work or otherwise occupied and changed the fucking locks because she was sick of people bringing significant others over, drug use, boozin, people making food and not doing dishes, I dunno. But nobody was informed ahead of time. Somebody just broke the rules when she found some coke residue on a dinner plate and that was that! Everybody out!

Luckily there are protections against stuff like that. (at least in the great communist state of California)

If your landlord changes the locks on you without going through the eviction process, you can literally have the cops come over and get you back into the house.

It depends. IZ, were you on-the-books as a tenant, and/or were you receiving mail there?

Yeah, everyone was off the books there, but it was her house so there were no on the books. She wasn't part of any landlord association though, just someone who wanted to rent out her house. I won't lie that folks didn't break the rules, but it's still a shitty thing to do, especially before having any sort of house meeting first. Happened to me too not too long ago: I got evicted from an apartment complex after letting several acquaintances, including one guy from LA just sleeping on a couch on a streetcorner in a blanket crash for who knows how long, because under the blanket there was a pit bull. But in my case the landlord could hear the dog, peer through the window if he wanted to.. he knew I was housing people who needed housing.

But I never charged shit! All I said was no hard drugs inside and clean up after yourselves; buy your own food and pitch in if you can! if you run into the landlord just say that I was having a get together from the night before.

But I never kicked anybody out. The one person I sort of did let it disintegrate around him and that's a different story. When I got my eviction notice though, because they were going to demolish the building, my housemate, who also brought in plenty of people, threw out almost all of my belongings while on LSD while I was away because I had a cyst that caused the worst pain I've ever felt. Digging thru a dumpster for your laptop is no fun. So anyway short story long it went to shit, but it was a sort of "this can't last forever" kind of going to shit and not the shit I experienced at that old house, because I had plenty of meetings with him about the shit he was and wasn't doing.

That's why, if you're ever squatting somewhere, you want to get mail sent to you. That way, you've got evidence of residence, and (assuming your laws work the same way our laws do here) the person who owns the house can't just lock you out suddenly. They can still kick you out of their house, but they need to go through a formal eviction process first.

The More You Know!

Jesus Christ you two really are something else

I just get mine sent to my parents' since I never get any important mail. I feel kinda bad using them like a PO Box but I get maybe one junkmail a week! It's also a nice excuse to come and visit them.

"A little Coke on a dinner plate"

That place sounds like it was GROSS

She looks a bit like Boomer the Dog.

I agree, she's being too whiny. The room shouldn't even matter. She shouldn't be spending much time there except for sleeping. She's supposed to be out studying and exploring the country.
Getting kicked out of the house is wrong, but everything else shouldn't be such a big deal.

It's a small room, but I've lived in smaller and made the best of it. That room in Brooklyn would probably be 2K a month.

I don't think it was the smallness of the room so much as the cheap-bed-crammed-in-a-closet vibe that gave her the problem. It doesn't scream, "Welcome! we want you to be comfortable." It doesn't even mumble it. It literally is a storage room never intended to serve as a bedroom. Yes, I've seen tiny apartments, but even the tiniest bedroom is still clearly designed to function as a bedroom. That was not a bedroom.

Since she did mention there were multiple other boarders there, it looks like the host got greedy and decided to shoehorn one more bed in for one more paycheck

Remember, she was going to be living there for nearly half a year. Everything about that room says she is an unwelcome intrusion into her hosts' lives. There is no warmth. There are no personal touches. She was really treated like Harry Potter crammed under the stairs. She chose to go with a host family over student residence because she wanted a more home-like feel and her accommodation didn't even look as homey as a hospital room.

The host probably suffered from the same syndrome that I've seen other people who rent out rooms suffer from. They need the money, but are, for one reason or another, able to take a job outside the home that pays enough, so they decide to rent out spare space. Now they have strangers "invading" their home. They feel even more out-of-control and the multiple strict rules help them feel more in control. They need their guests, but seethe inwardly with resentment for them. The resentment sneaks out and their guests end up suffering.

I considered living in Japan last year (the company tacked on a bunch of stuff last minute like increasing hours without extra pay...up to maybe 20 hours a week and I bailed) but before that I checked out a bunch of videos of teachers living over there. I know what an average Japanese apartment looks like, and I lived in a really small Korean one.

You're completely right. This isn't a cultural thing, this is a host family that just shouldn't be a host family. They don't need to have a mansion. But that doesn't mean they should be running an orphanage from the 19th century.

The closet crammed with stuff was not a good sign. If you don't have the room and can't provide for people that you say you can, AND you are getting paid for that service, you better be able to provide at least adequate living space. It looks like they didn't and blamed her for it.

And how are you?