Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program
Page 15
According to this logic, although the entry of JET participants into Japan had already been negotiated, a continued stay must be renegotiated from scratch. It is worth noting, however, that with the help of a legitimate Japanese sponsor, JET participants do not find it too difficult to subvert the general principle and keep working in Japan. In fact, there are numerous JET alumni currently living and working throughout Japan, and neither tightening the visa process nor imposing a three-year limit (discussed below) was enough to thwart their determined efforts to stay on.
Cautions to Renewers and the Three-Year Limit
Realizing that several serious incidents involved renewers who presumably had become complacent and whose reasons for staying were not jobrelated, in 1989 CLAIR sent out a list of the pros and cons of renewing to discourage ALTs and CIRs from extending their contracts for the "wrong" reasons.4' CLAIR also encouraged local governments to exercise their option of rejecting applications for renewal from "problem JETs." To that end, the wording on application forms was strengthened: "Contracts are for one year[,] ... renewable in certain circumstances by mutual consent between the host institution and the JET participant." In reality, prefectures are loathe to refuse a request for renewal. One prefectural official confessed to me, "This year there was one person we didn't want to renew, but because CLAIR didn't give us the forty we had requested (only thirty-three) we had to renew him. If they gave us all we wanted, there would have been room to refuse renewers." The cultural aversion to face-to-face confrontation was also a factor. Their fears were not unfounded. Chiba Prefecture refused to allow an American woman to renew, pointing out that she did not have good relations with her schools and that she had been ill for some months without a clear diagnosis; she became incensed, contacting CLAIR as well as the American embassy to demand their intervention. When they did not act, she contacted lawyers to see about legal recourse. Ultimately, she left the program, but the possibility of this kind of reaction makes local governments reluctant to take a tough stance.
Because renewals are so common, an incoming prefectural teacher's consultant, with limited English skills and little knowledge of the JET Program, may find him- or herself dealing with JET participants who have three or more years of experience working in the program. These veterans both know internal precedents and, as a result of visiting a number of schools in the prefecture, they are often more in touch with teachers and school-level realities than the teacher's consultant is. Though most longterm ALTs and CIRs are dedicated to their jobs, others manage to minimize their exertions while cultivating other interests or even augmenting their already-generous income by offering lucrative classes in private conversation on the side. In other words, they have learned how to milk the system to great advantage.
To remedy this problem, a handful of local government officials approached CLAIR and asked for a new national policy stipulating that JET participants renew no more than two times. This would make it easier for local officials, who jokingly referred to themselves as "the Japanese who can't say 'no,"' to get rid of problematic ALTs and CIRs: they could say that the three-year limit was set by higher authorities and therefore out of their hands. For a while, CLAIR wavered on this issue and even conducted a survey of local governments, which showed mixed sentiments. But the suicides and serious accidents led to a reconsideration; beginning in 1991-92, those serving in or beyond their third year were not allowed to renew.4' Not coincidentally, this policy was vigorously supported by Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials. They thought the renewal rate, which had averaged 44 percent for the first four years of the program, was too high for a cultural exchange program and limited the number of new partici- pants.49
Indeed, the official explanation for the three-year limit was that since JET is a youth program, it is important to let as many youth as possible participate. This did not satisfy long-term JET wanna-bes, and voices were raised in protest, as this excerpt from the minutes of the first evaluation meeting for the 1989-9o JET Program reveals:
Putting limitations on the application criteria is acceptable, but once a JET has been on the Program demonstrating his/her ability, how can the host institution disregard the efforts made and say, "Go back to your home country?" Could it be that Japan doesn't want foreigners to stay so long that they learn/understand too much? Gaining too much insight into the system represents a threat? For JETs who have done their best and contributed a lot, it is a slap in the face to suddenly be told that they are no longer wanted. Very distressing. It is a very arbitrary decision reflecting very badly on CLAIR.50
To be sure, some incompetent JET participants have stayed on primarily to collect their salaries, and CLAIR's wish to deter them is quite understandable. CLAIR officials even noted that should a JET participant really become indispensable to a host institution, local authorities could hire that person directly for the fourth year and beyond. There is no question, however, that by setting the three-year limit, Japanese officials were explicitly acknowledging that the ALT and CIR slots would forever be positions for temporary outsiders.
WHEN TRUST BREAKS DOWN: BETWEEN PROGRAM COORDINATORS AND CLAIR OFFICIALS
The first few years of the program suggest that a bureaucracy known the world over for its organizational efficiency had suddenly run aground. Many participants themselves, disillusioned by the gap between rhetoric and reality, adopted conspiracy theories. In addition, ministry infighting proved to be as strong as ever. The Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Home Affairs berated Education and the conservative public school system for sapping the enthusiasm of the JET participants. The Ministry of Education responded that Home Affairs officials were interested only in "symbolic internationalization." Both the Ministries of Education and Home Affairs criticized Foreign Affairs for lack of rigor in the selection process and for putting Japan's diplomatic priorities above internal needs. In retrospect, we can see that in addressing one set of concerns at the national level-the trade crisis and Japan's image in the world-JET created a whole host of new problems, which continued to snowball.
In the face of this administrative confusion, the striking contrast between the informal evaluations offered by the program coordinators and those offered by Japanese ministry officials is particularly significant. On the whole, the program coordinators in CLAIR were severe in their assessments of the Japanese policy response during the early years of the program. Philip described the first year as a "disaster" but pointed to steady, if incremental, improvement after that. Tellingly, though, he attributed successes largely to the efforts of the program coordinators in overcoming the barriers erected by the Japanese ministries:
The program coordinators were certainly closer to the JET participants and most of us felt that the bureaucracy made it very difficult to provide the kind of care and support the JET participants deserved. But I don't think the lack of personal touch on the Japanese side really undermined the program because we had a lot of dedicated program coordinators. And of course the result was that the program coordinators were very stressed out most of the time. We received no overtime compensation and yet we had emergency phone calls at all times of the night and on the weekends. But we felt it was our job, so we did it. It was a very awkward position to be part of the Japanese administration and at the same time having to represent the interests of the foreign participants on the program.
Meredith had much harsher words for the CLAIR staff:
As program coordinators, our primary job is to push. Most of the time I'm sure we're looked at as difficult. As international as they say CLAIR is, they're treating the program as an internal Japanese group would. People should walk in here and feel it's different. To be perfectly honest, they're clueless. This is an office of mediocrity. They allow themselves to be mediocre, to cut corners, to be less than honest, to out-and-out deceive. When you have integrity become a nonentity in international affairs, it's scary. The staff here are good people, but they're not willing to push and the few that are get shoved out.
"Uncaring," "clueless," and "prone to deception": the reasons for these strong negative appraisals are worth exploring in some detail because they reveal a set of evaluative criteria sharply diverging from those used by the Japanese hosts. First, the program coordinators tended to judge the success of the program, and of CLAIR in particular, both by its transformative outcomes and by the decisiveness with which Japanese officials anticipated, confronted, and resolved problems. Their basic assumptions were that Japanese culture was in need of "development"; that the desired changes entailed moving toward a Western model, variously defined; and that the JET Program was the vehicle by which theory and practice were to be joined. By these standards, the responses of Japanese ministry officials simply did not measure up. They did not anticipate problems well, they reacted too slowly when problems did arise, and they seemed to lack the gumption to tackle the really tough issues. It wasn't long before the phrase "it's glacial," referring to the cautious reaction that seemed inevitable when any specific change was proposed, had entered the vocabulary of program coordinators as a running joke.
In short, the program coordinators felt that Japanese officials were not treating CLAIR as different from any of the other hundreds of bureaucratic offices in Tokyo, arguing that several policies at CLAIR illustrated an attitude of business-as-usual instead of a commitment to substantive change. They lent credence to William Horsley's caution that "Japanese officials who run the scheme should guard against the power of their country's culture to transform outside influences into another version of Japan's own value system."51
Personnel Procedures
The program coordinators' first complaint, concerning personnel policies, cut three ways. First, the program coordinators saw the high turnover rate among secretaries-general as evidence of a lack of concern for continuity in program policy. Meredith noted: "The Japanese staff is transient. We worked so hard to get the embassy liaison meetings to involve some real give-and-take and then [the new secretary-general] came in and went right back to the formal style of meetings." "Institutional memory" tended to be fairly poor and worked to the disadvantage of long-term change, according to Philip. Caroline agreed: "CLAIR has been through four directors in just over two years, and if you know anything about Japanese organizations, that says a lot."
It is certainly true that at times the brief tenures of CLAIR's directors have suggested a game of musical chairs, but the meaning of this rotation may not be obvious. It is widely known that jinji ido (personnel rotation) is a common practice among the ministries to offset the powerful tendency toward sectionalism. But critics are less likely to note that in the Ministry of Home Affairs such rotation is particularly common, because of its close relations with local governments. In fact, CLAIR and ministry officials see nothing significant in the frequency of shifts. "There's nothing special about CLAIR. We're always shifting personnel on the spot to make room for people coming and going to local governments," said one ministry official.
Second, program coordinators were deeply skeptical of the criteria used by the Ministry of Home Affairs in choosing the secretary-general. If the government were really serious about reforming Japanese society and education, their reasoning went, then it logically should choose the most "international" person to head up that effort. Yet the Japanese staff at CLAIR proved to vary considerably in their command of English and their willingness to support the program coordinators' requests. This variability led program coordinators to cast the Japanese staff starkly as heroes and villains. Those who supported their causes were good people, and those who played by the rules of Japanese bureaucracies were either obstructionists or cowards.
For instance, in the second year of the program, the reins of secretarygeneral were handed over to Nakamura Hajime, a generous man, warm by almost any standards. He genuinely enjoyed dialogues with the program coordinators. He would stay up late at night memorizing his speeches in English and was very responsive to the concerns of program coordinators. Reaching out to AJET members as well, he worked with them to further program objectives. His reassignment after one year was widely regarded by the program coordinators as retaliation for the reputation he had achieved as a "gaijin lover. 1112 Nakamura's successor, by contrast, promptly moved his desk to the far end of the room, where he was much less accessible; suspended regular meetings with the program coordinators, claiming that he was "too busy"; and thus quickly acquired the label of obstructionist.
The third and final personnel complaint concerned the issue of overlap. Meredith explained: "They have every single program coordinator quitting in August and the secretary-general is oblivious. He had never thought of the fact that we needed to overlap." Here again, however, different cultural models seem to be operating. Under the personnel rotation system, it is considered extremely rude for the outgoing person to offer unsolicited advice to the newcomer. The basic philosophy is to start with a new spirit, not influenced by the jaded perceptions of the incumbent. This nondidactic approach to learning on the job, which requires of the newcomer an acute sensitivity to job expectations, can be seen in numerous other contexts as well. G. Victor Soogen Hori, for example, has labeled this approach "teaching without teaching" in his description of the training of Zen monks.53
Us-Them Mentality
The second major factor underlying the disillusionment of program coordinators was their perception that they were not treated as equals and were "excluded" in various ways by the Japanese staff at CLAIR. On the one hand, this involved being shut out from the little things that are a crucial sign of group membership in Japan. According to Meredith,
We're still outsiders and they're insiders. We're foreign and treated differently. We're not told things that concern us. Even if we work late, they forget to ask us if we want an obento (box dinner). They forget to say otsnkaresamadeshita or osaki ni (see you tomorrow) to us when they leave the office.... One time someone came over and wanted to ask where [A-san] was. I was the only one there at the time so he went back to his seat and waited till a Japanese came back. They treat us the same as them when it's convenient for them and when it's not, they don't.
On the other hand, program coordinators also felt they were gradually closed out of the decision-making process. Initially, the program coordinators had been consulted about virtually every aspect of program policy; they held primary responsibility for publishing all guidebooks, writing the CLAIR Newsletter and JET Journal, handling all counseling calls from JET participants, planning conferences, and interacting face-to-face with the JET participants at the orientation and midyear conferences. As a result, they quickly came to feel that the success of the program rested largely on their shoulders. Over time, however, as program policies and procedures became more routinized, the program coordinators began to feel excluded. Meredith noted, "We often feel we're not a part of CLAIR and have to fight for a place. Caroline's in charge of Tokyo orientation, and she wasn't even invited to a meeting yesterday with Kinki Tourist to organize the airport greeting." Sarah pointed out that "Whenever money is involved, we're not consulted." Even Philip, widely respected as the "most Japanese" of the program coordinators because of his thoughtful and restrained demeanor, spoke somewhat bitterly about CLAIR's refusal to draw on his experience during his third year:
For me personally, being in CLAIR the longest, it became extremely difficult because I had been there longer than any of the Japanese. And maybe I was just so stressed that I was imagining more than there actually was. I felt a sense of, not so much animosity, but almost a sense of fear that there was a non-Japanese in this go
vernment-affiliated office who knew more about what the office had done up until now than any of the Japanese there. So there was, for me, what seemed an active effort on the Japanese part to keep me in place. "You may have been involved in the administration up till now, but it's not necessary any more. We know how to run the program." Certainly those of us who were there from the beginning felt that our opinions were welcomed and valued and in many cases heeded and put into practice, but once CLAIR had successfully run the program a year or two, well, the amount of innovation and modification became less. So I think CLAIR probably felt that "if we have to, we can do without the program coordinators."
Contributing to strained relations between the program coordinators and the Japanese staff was a sudden change in how new program coordinators were hired. For the first few years the program coordinators had more or less handpicked their successors. The Japanese staff had asked the departing program coordinator to recommend someone and then had interviewed that person. But in 19go, the program coordinators were informed that they would not have an official voice in the selection process. Meredith recalled the soap opera-like events that followed:
Meredith: But we wouldn't let them.... They had extended my contract, but there were seven points I had added to my contract before I would extend it, and one of those stipulations was being able to choose my successor. I already had the person picked out, so for that one slot anyway, it was already guaranteed that I could select it. Then we got wind of some of the other people they were considering. It was such a secret thing. They kept lists away from us, and my manager wouldn't let me look at them. We actually stayed late one night so we could go through his drawer because we knew he had the list of people they were considering. And they were holding the interviews on days where they wouldn't even tell us these people were coming in, and they told the candidates they couldn't contact us. We felt like we were working at the CIA or something, it was so ridiculous. And it was all very much the way [the secretary-general] operated. It was all coming down from him, and he said he didn't want us involved in that kind of thing. So it really caused a lot of hurt feelings, hard feelings. There were at least three people on that list that we were appalled they were even considering.