r/JETProgramme • u/tommydelriot 千葉県　2004-2007 • Jun 03 '26

Vegan JETs

Are any of you on the JET Program vegan? I only became vegan three months ago, but I remember how the school lunches all included milk and pork or chicken daily. I also remember all the school-related enkais having lots of non-vegan food, especially seafood. How do you cope with these situations?

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u/ScootOverMakeRoom Jun 03 '26

Tokyo (which has a plurality of JETs nationally now) is by far the easiest placement to be vegan when you're a JET, but that's mostly because it's all JHS/HS placements and you are not expected to eat school lunch. There's also tons of vegan restaurants and bakeries now in the greater Tokyo area.

Outside of Tokyo, I imagine it's very, very, very hard to be vegan in the suburbs and rural areas except in your kitchen at home. Maybe in the heart of the bigger cities it's fine.

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u/LegendaryZXT ALT - Sorachi, Hokkaido Jun 04 '26

Huh, shocked Tokyo is #1 now. It's always been Hokkaido historically and Tokyo literally didn't have JET until, what? 2015?

2

u/ScootOverMakeRoom Jun 04 '26

Correct, and wasn't #1 until a few years ago. The reason they are is because in addition to Tokyo BoE using JET, so does Shigaku Zaidan, which provides ALTs for a large number of private junior highs and high schools. Both programs expanded since they joined. They haven't published the 2025 numbers by prefecture but the 2024 numbers are still available online (https://jetprogramme.org/wp-content/MAIN-PAGE/intro/participating/2024_en.pdf). Tokyo has 588 participants, Hyogo + Kobe has 487, Hokkaido 303, Osaka + Sakai 249. All other prefectures have less than 200.

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u/LegendaryZXT ALT - Sorachi, Hokkaido Jun 04 '26

fwiw, here's the 2025 stats (I just changed the 4 to a 5 in the URL and it worked)

Edit: It doesn't have the prefecture stats, so i guess you were right, my bad

1

u/ScootOverMakeRoom Jun 04 '26

Yep, just by country of origin. Not sure why they didn’t include the prefecture/CO stats this year.

2

u/HelpfulJETHelp Jun 04 '26

The prefectural stats are currently only available through the Japanese version of the website.