To compound the expectations gap, a number of serious incidentsranging from participants being sexually harassed to driving drunk to committing suicide (see chapter 3)-shook program morale during the early years. In the first year more than 9o percent of foreign participants joined together to press Japanese officials for improvements in program policy, and in virtually every prefecture a group of participants crusaded vocally against their treatment. As corporations attempting joint ventures have often discovered, when people with radically different cognitive frameworks are thrown together in a common enterprise, they may produce little more than the breakdown of trust.
Furthermore, as the program unfolded in its second and third years, there was no shortage of domestic and foreign critics second-guessing the government's intentions. "Teacher Torture," screamed the Tokyo Journal. "Apathy Rampant in JET Program," proclaimed the Japan Times. "Japan Pulls in Welcome Mat with Racial Insensitivity," charged another article, which featured the experiences of an African American JET participant. The San Jose Mercury News warned darkly, "The Japanese government is spending millions to create potential enemies ... which is exactly contrary to what it intended to do."4 Almost overnight the JET Program had become a political football for critics of all stripes.
But ten years later, when the dust had settled and expectations had been adjusted, the JET Program was being touted by Japanese officials and foreign participants alike as one of the most successful policies in the postwar era. By 1999 the JET program had grown to nearly 6,ooo foreign participants each year, and there were more than 20,ooo alumni. The number of participating countries had grown to ten for the assistant language teacher (ALT) position; and thirty-six provided CIRs and filled a newly created category, the sports exchange advisor (SEA). With an annual budget of almost $500 million, the JET Program now stands as a massive investment in resources and effort.
More important, ALTs are now based in nearly a third of the nation's 16,ooo-plus public secondary schools and make regular visits to virtually every one of them. This complex, top-down intervention was accomplished with no formal resistance from the Japan Teacher's Union, which has opposed virtually every other major Ministry of Education initiative in the postwar period. Given the received wisdom in the United States that topdown reforms rarely reach the classroom, the receptivity of the Japanese system to such changes appears nothing short of phenomenal. Meanwhile, CIRs have been placed in every prefectural office in Japan; the new target is to place a foreign participant in every one of Japan's more than 3,000 municipalities (shich(5son).
The satisfaction of foreign participants as well has markedly improved. Nearly 95 percent of JET participants say they would recommend or strongly recommend the program to a friend. The rate of participants who return home prematurely has fallen from a high of 3.1 percent in 1987 to less than i percent a year by 1997, and many more participants now are extending their contracts beyond the initial year.' Moreover, the program's effects are lasting. There is an increasingly active JET Alumni Association with branches in all participating countries, and alumni are flocking to graduate programs and jobs in a variety of Asia-related fields. Emblematic of the high status the program has gained was the presence of a JET table and a JET speaker at a Tokyo luncheon for President Clinton during his Japan summit in April 1996.
In the fall of 1996, government officials coordinated a gala set of events to mark the tenth anniversary of the programs The target number of foreign participants had been officially raised to 6,ooo, and the mood among officials in each of the sponsoring ministries was optimistic. One Ministry of Home Affairs official, likening JET to a "reverse Peace Corps," remarked, "Considering how conservative local governments in Japan are, to get them to open their doors to foreigners was quite a feat. It's probably not an understatement to say that the JET Program is one of the most unusual revolutions in world history."'
WHY STUDY THE JET PROGRAM?
The JET Program is worth examining in detail; apart from its large scale and apparent success, it is a significant test case for top-down internationalization in a historically insular society. To be sure, there is no shortage of studies on the topic of Japan's global integration. Yet much of this writing suffers from what might be called a "yardstick approach." That is, Japan's progress in internationalizing tends to be measured against a set of standards derived from Western sensibilities. The implicit assumption is that Japan must change and that it must follow a comprehensive list of prescriptions along lines dictated by Western countries. Not surprisingly, Japan never seems to make the grade. Rather than set out on the futile quest for some "true" definition, I view "internationalization" as a social and political construct. Much like a historian wishing to examine different meanings of "democracy" in different societies, I assume that the term is multivocal, with different associations and meanings for the Japanese hosts than it has for the foreign participants.
Moreover, those studying Japan's global integration almost always focus on the analysis of discourse among intellectuals, politicians, media specialists, and social elites. Few studies have attempted to show how internationalization is defined through the implementation of a policy, thereby acquiring a form that is independent of the perspectives of any one group of people. The JET Program transforms a buzzword into a reality, for the myriad decisions regarding program structure and policy, the ways Japanese define and handle problem cases, their efforts to integrate the foreign participants into schools and communities-all these make concrete (even if in unintended ways) the concept of internationalization.
The JET Program comes at a time of tremendous change and uncertainty for Japan. With the end of the cold war, and spurred by dissatisfaction over Japan's role in the Gulf War, foreign allies are questioning whether Japan can fulfill the high expectations for leadership that have come with her new global role. At home, the death of the Showa emperor, domestic political shakeups, and the prolonged recession have fueled calls for a new era of openness and a new generation of leaders.' At the same time, the bureaucracy is increasingly under fire from all quarters for its staunch conservatism, its insularity, and its refusal to challenge the status quo. For some, Ronald Dore's 1979 observation, that "the Japanese elite is full of people whose main reaction to the outside world is to wish it would go away," still rings true.9 We are told that while bureaucratic guidance was instrumental in engineering Japan's modernization effort, these strategies are now outmoded. Incapable of inspiring human creativity, bureaucrats become paralyzed in new situations in which the goals are unclear and the means of implementation ambiguous-in short, when there is no model to follow.
Because the JET Program is a top-down initiative that spans the entire range of administrative levels in Japan, it is ideally situated as a window for assessing the power and limitations of the state to foster change. On the one hand, the centralization of policymaking-the ruling triumvirate of Liberal Democratic Party leaders, senior bureaucrats, and senior managers of Japan's major enterprises-has long been taken for granted.10 The defining feature of Japan's political economy is held to be a close relationship between government and business, an image epitomized in "Japan, Inc." In education as well, while the political significance of the so-called reverse course (the systematic dismantling of many Allied Occupation reforms) is hotly debated, the reality of recentralization, whether welcomed or not, is rarely questioned. But, on the other hand, some scholars have recently begun to criticize what they call the "myth of centralization." John Haley argues that the power of the bureaucrats has been vastly overestimated; their negotiations may influence the outcome of a policy, but they neither command nor control it. Steven Reed has discovered a relatively high degree of local discretion and autonomy in high school education policy, and Leonard Schoppa paints a complex picture of interaction among Ministry of Education officials and external actors-including the ruling and opposition party leaders, businesses, universities, local educational administrators, and the teacher's union-in the formulation o
f educational policy." Thus government does not, as a monolithic entity, simply impose its will; every policy follows a unique course and grows out of specific conditions. Most of this chapter describes the historical and cultural context in which the JET Program began, as well as the approach used here to study it.
A case study of this program enables us to assess the tensions, inconsistencies, and gaps (or lack thereof) in the implementation process. Drawing on Thomas Rohlen's framework for analyzing postwar educational politics, I view each administrative level as a distinct sociocultural subsystem with its own set of priorities and its own manner of participating in a top-down intervention.12 Each institutional level differs along such dimensions as the relevance of ideological concerns or outside pressure, the nature of internal partisan politics, the distribution of formal authority, and institutional worldview. Like playing a game of three-dimensional tic-tac-toe, implementing the JET Program involves both horizontal and vertical tensions and cleavages.13
At the national level, lateral tensions were virtually ensured by the administrative arrangement in which three government ministries with different goals and methods-Home Affairs, Education, and Foreign Affairs-were charged with oversight. The story of the start-up of the JET Program is thus replete with examples of backroom negotiations and turf battles between the internally focused and externally oriented ministries that were implementing it. Chapters 2 and 3 explore these dimensions of the JET Program. I conclude that it is in achieving the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' goal-the idea of JET as a cultural exchange program designed to enhance foreign understanding of Japanese society-that the program has enjoyed such surprising success (see chapter 6). The structure and form of the JET Program make the most sense when viewed as a vehicle for creating sympathy for Japan among young people in select Western countries.
As the concept of internationalization moves from the corridors of the sponsoring ministries through prefectural offices to local schools and classrooms across the nation, it is reinterpreted; the program takes a form determined by the expectations and objectives-the particular social environment-operating at each level. The pressure to succeed is most intense at the national level. Prefectures and municipalities, by contrast, walk a fine line between wanting to appear receptive to a major government initiative and having to respond to school-level demands as well. The reactions of prefectural administrators to the JET Program are examined in detail in chapter 4.
It is in the schools themselves that the fit between internationalization and local priorities becomes most problematic. The most important functions of Japanese secondary schools are to prepare for high school and college entrance examinations and to maintain social order. The stress is on propriety and organizational maintenance, and judged by these standards, the foreign participants often behave quite poorly. Chapter 5 examines the diverse reactions of Japanese school-based personnel to the JET participants-how assistant language teachers are placed in schools and integrated (or not integrated) into daily social routines; how Japanese teachers respond when the ALT upsets the accustomed routine, either intentionally or unintentionally; and the creative ways in which teachers reconcile the desire to be "good citizens" and support the mandate for internationalization with the equally strong desire to protect local interests.
The final level to be considered (also in chapter 5) is that of the classroom, where classes are conducted together by the JET participants and the Japanese foreign language faculty. Unlike most educational top-down interventions, this one is almost impossible for teachers to ignore: it walks, talks, and even talks back. Precisely because the instruction provided by the JET participants represents a potential threat to accepted norms and standard methodologies, team-teaching has become one of the most controversial aspects of the JET Program. Yet many Japanese teachers have worked hard, with mixed results, to incorporate the ALTs into their overall teaching plan.
By paying attention to the historical, political, and administrative dimensions of program policy and to how the program has changed over time, my analysis provides an important counter to the myth of Japanese homogeneity. During the course of my fieldwork I met Japanese teachers and administrators who viewed the foreign participants as much-needed medicine for an outdated system as well as those who viewed them more like a virus whose potentially deleterious effects had to be controlled at all costs. Perhaps less surprisingly, the JET participants as well were an extremely varied group. In addition, the learning curve for Japanese hosts and JET participants alike was very steep; the program today differs in some important ways from its incarnation in the late ig8os. Chapter 6 assesses the current state of the program, now past its tenth year, and chapter 7 briefly speculates on its future.
An account of Japan's struggles to come to grips with diversity ultimately forces those of us in other countries to confront our own debates over multiculturalism. In the epilogue I examine the form of the debate over integration versus pluralism in the United States when viewed in the mirror offered by Japan. What are the similarities and differences between Japanese approaches to internationalization and American responses to cultural and linguistic pluralism? How does individualism, and the corresponding emphasis on choice and informality, shape the ideology and practice of multiculturalism in the United States? It is my hope that through juxtaposing the Japanese experience with at least one other case, we can gain insight into some of these questions.
THE WEIGHT OF HISTORY
At first glance the JET Program appears to be a noteworthy example of the government going against the grain of a long history of tightly regulating the flow of personnel across its borders. Centuries of self-imposed isolation appear suddenly to end as nearly a half billion dollars in public tax money is spent on importing thousands of foreigners. Yet closer inspection of Japan's history reveals a broad mixture of cosmopolitan influences that belie the stereotype of the isolated island nation. Indeed, Japan has been in the business of "internationalizing" for the better part of its history. The JET Program even has a remarkable historical precedent. In the early Meiji period roughly 3,000 "hired foreigners" (oyatoi gaikokujin) were brought over to assist in Japan's modernization efforts, sometimes with salaries ten times greater than those of their Japanese counterparts.
Where else but in Japan can we imagine a government going to such extraordinary lengths to invite foreigners to come and internationalize the entire country as a matter of national policy? Over the past decade, we have become accustomed to hearing about the profound difficulties of de ploying public policy to integrate diverse populations. In countries throughout Africa and Asia, where colonial rulers formed nation-states with little regard for preexisting ethnic boundaries, public schooling has become a flash point for conflict over language and culture policy. Closer to home, the debate over bilingualism in Quebec has threatened to literally tear Canada apart, and the United States is embroiled in ongoing controversies over affirmative action and bilingual education. When the process of integration is largely driven by politics, it is usually marked by divisive and bitter public debate: social attachments based on language, race, religion, and custom come into direct conflict with government policies aimed at creating a unified state and a national identity.
In a few places, however, the boundaries of the modern state more or less coincide with boundaries defined by language, race, and ethnicity. In such "folk nations," where the population has a relatively high degree of homogeneity, the more problematic issue is global integration, which is largely driven by economics. The teaching of English in Scandinavian countries, for instance, has been crucial for the integration of their citizens into the world economic community. The case of Japan belongs in this latter category.
Pendulum Swings
The image of Japan as a historically exclusivist society does not hold up on closer examination. Analyses of blood types suggest that populations from the Asian continent were involved in forming the Japanese people as recently as early historic times; the tropica
l nature of Japan's early architecture points to southeast Asian influence. Moreover, the process of deliberately importing foreign ideas and objects has been going on for quite some time. Alternating with periods of contraction and isolation have been times, most notably in the eighth and nineteenth centuries, when Japanese have rushed to embrace foreign influences. The pattern of Japan's interaction with the outside world is perhaps best characterized as a series of pendulum swings, with each era of openness followed by conservative reaction. Underlying this dynamic is a profound sense of ambivalence and insecurity about Japan's status in the world.
Japan's cultural debt to China is huge: in the span of several hundred years Japan acquired the foundations for its political institutions, its literary system, the Confucian code of ethics, literature, architecture, and Buddhism. Between 607 and 839 there were seventeen full-scale Japanese missions to China, each comprising crews of 200 to 6oo persons, including painters, scribes, musicians, priests, doctors, and military personnel.14 It was during this period that the term ryugakusei (overseas student) was coined, with the initial meaning "bearer of enlightenment from the lands beyond the sea.""
So ornate and colorful did imported Chinese culture appear that for a while it made everything about the indigenous culture seem drab and inconsequential. Even today, visitors to the Buddhist temples of Nara and the Shinto shrine at Ise grasp this contrast immediately. The Chinese method of inspiring awe was to clear out a broad open space and erect spectacular temples, complete with giant gilded buddhas and ornate pagodas. But at Ise the most sacred place is precisely the least obvious in location and the simplest in structure. For a while, native Shinto cosmology appeared completely overmatched by the color and flair of Chinese imports. What could possibly be awe inspiring about a rock in running water? Even indigenous food seemed boring next to Chinese dishes.
Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program Page 2