Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program

by David L. McConnell

  Finally, two other tendencies are worth noting. Urban high schools were more likely to be chosen as base schools than were isolated high schools in remote areas, largely as a result of the strong preference of most ALTs for living in or near a large city. Tanabe-san commented, "If an ALT asks to be placed in a rural area, it's automatic for us because there are so few who want to go there." Vocational schools were also unlikely to serve as base schools unless they had a special course of study with an international dimension; schools for students interested in fisheries or agriculture, for instance, tended to be underrepresented. Prefecture officials generally felt that students in these schools would have little interest in an "academic" subject such as English. Yet such schools also offered some striking success stories: if discipline problems were not too serious, the ALT often had more flexibility in teaching conversational English since university entrance exam pressures were not so pervasive.

  Given these various types of school-level constraints, Sato-sensei and Tanabe-san were extraordinarily successful in placing ALTs in base schools. Though some district boards of education in the prefecture still allow schools control over requesting a foreign teacher, the rapid increase in numbers of JET participants has meant that in most cases ALTs are placed in schools where the large majority of Japanese teachers of English are quite ambivalent about their presence. One ETC's comments captured the prevailing sentiment about the evolution of the school visitation system: "If we said,'Do you want to have (Okurimashoka) an ALT?' very few schools would sign up. So we tell them, 'Here we come!' The whole program is forced down (oshitsukete iru) from the top to a considerable degree." Still, both Sato-sensei and Tanabe-san had a very clear notion of where polite but persistent prodding crossed over to become aggressive pushing. By the fourth year of the JET Program, Sato-sensei noted: "After we get up to thirty-four, we're not going to be able to accommodate many more ALTs at the high school level. It would be pushing it too much. We'll have to expand at the junior high level if we want to increase the numbers." In fact, this is precisely what has happened. In the eight-year period (1991-99) following Sato-sensei and Tanabe-san's tenure, their successors increased the number of prefectural ALTs only slightly; the rest of the growth occurred as municipalities began to hire ALTs independently of the prefectural office, usually placing them in junior high schools.

  Hierarchies of Foreigners: ETCs as Matchmakers

  After the application forms of ALTs assigned to their prefecture are received from CLAIR, individual applicants must be matched with specific schools or boards of education. Each year, Sato-sensei and Tanabe-san spent a marathon weekend session in the board of education, laying out all the applications and attempting to make suitable pairings. When I asked Sato-sensei what it was like to play matchmaker, he replied: "It's really difficult to tell from an application what a person will be like. We do our best to match each person with an appropriate school but it rarely works out as we planned. Three (out of twenty-seven) this year are doing well, but all the rest have had trouble of one kind or another."

  Although the two men did not tell me the precise criteria used to match ALTs with particular schools, over the course of fieldwork period they made a number of revealing informal comments:

  We really made a mistake by putting Aki in the education center. We thought that because he was Japanese American, he would be disappointed by the reaction of teachers and students if we sent him out to schools on a regular basis. We thought he would do better in a setting where he could organize seminars for teachers. But now that we know how outgoing he is, we realize we should've sent him out.

  Sending Jennifer and Rick to [the international high school] was definitely our best move. Rick had a master's degree in English and teaching experience before coming to Japan so we wanted to make sure that he was in a challenging situation, and those are our best English teachers out there. And Jennifer gets along fabulously with the students. She has them writing diaries and even spends her own time writing replies on the weekends.

  Remember how we agonized over whether to send Patrick [age thirty-five] to the rural area or not? He was quite a bit older than the other ALTs so we really worried about how he would adjust and how the teachers would react to him. But it's worked out quite well.

  I thought Ueda-sensei would want a British woman because he's the serious type. But I think the English teachers will have a hard time at first until they adjust to British English.

  I found that skin color, sex, nationality, age, English accent, teaching experience, educational level, and major field of study were all taken into account at various times in the placement process, and informal hierarchies clearly existed. ALTs with lighter skin color were more desirable than those with darker skin color because their motivational effect on teachers and students was perceived to be higher; younger ALTs were more desirable than older ones because they were seen as more flexible and therefore less threatening to Japanese teachers; males were more desirable than females because they were thought to be better able to withstand the hardships of life in another culture.

  The hierarchy of foreigners was particularly rigid with respect to accent. Participants who spoke American and Canadian English were seen as more desirable than those who spoke other versions, as one Australian ALT noted: "In my experience, foreigners in Japan are constantly assumed to be American. At first meetings, there is a very good chance that one will be asked, 'Are you American?' or'Where do you come from in America?' It seems that the word 'Australia' simply does not register in the minds of some Japanese. Many times I have been asked what language is spoken in Australia. Many times too I have heard, 'Please say something in Aus- tralian,"You speak English quite well,' or'You speak English with a British accent."''' One Australian ALT in the prefecture even reported having been told by Japanese teachers not to use his Australian accent while teaching, and to use only American English." Perhaps most telling was that in this prefecture only American ALTs were selected to tape-record listening exercises in English; Sato-sensei was responsible for clandestinely producing these "practice exams" (mogi shiken) for prefectural high schools.

  A final criterion used by Sato-sensei and Tanabe-san in the placement process was personal appearance, judged by a photograph of the ALT. Photos required for visa purposes were widely used in the selection and placement process at the prefectural level. Sato-sensei noted, "It's hard to tell good ALTs from the application so in this sense the picture is important." Various messages were read from the photo. Obviously, the picture allowed ALTs to be placed into social categories-such as white (hakujin) or black (kokujin), Japanese descent (nikkeijin), and so on-that were useful in determining school placement. Also apparent was whether a female ALT fell into the category of bijin, or "beautiful girl," particularly one with stereotypical blond hair and blue eyes. More generally, neatness in appearance could be judged from the photo. In one instance I observed Tanabe-san apologize to teachers from a base school for the informal picture of the ALT, who was shown in a T-shirt. "This is not an accurate reflection of what this ALT is like," he said. Here prefectural pfficials were working on a welldocumented cultural assumption that outward appearance and comportment mirror one's inward state. Many ALTs, however, found this concern with appearance offensive, preferring instead to subscribe to the theory that looking like one's passport picture is the worst possible indicator of one's fitness to travel-and says even less about one's character.

  This preoccupation with the photo as an indicator of social type was not limited to prefectural administrators. In the first year of the program, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs required photos of all applicants to the JET Program; though no evidence of misuse of the photos ever surfaced, there were protests, even from selection committee members, that this practice raised the possibility of discrimination based on skin color or other physical features. As a result, photos are now required only of those applicants who make it to the interview stage. At the opposite end of the process, I discovered tha
t pictures of ALTs were often circulated throughout the teacher's room and were even shown to students on occasion, providing fodder for much speculation and good-natured teasing. Having grown up in a society in which such use and exchange of photos is ubiquitous, most Japanese administrators and teachers did not think twice about their actions.

  ALTs were rarely privy to this backstage deployment of photographs, but when it did come to their attention, they reacted warily. Their cautious reaction seemed to rest on a discomfort at being turned into an object at which Japanese looked, and on a corresponding suspicion that it was precisely their foreignness that simultaneously defined them as noteworthy and kept them distant. The concerns of these ALTs mirrored Michel Foucault's analysis of the relation between photography and power; he argues that the "normalizing gaze" of the photo is in fact a kind of surveillance that establishes a visibility through which people are differentiated and judged.'9

  In sum, matching individual ALTs with schools was a far cry from rocket science; it was conducted in a haphazard manner described by one program coordinator as "akin to throwing bones on the ground to divine the future." Though the matchmaking almost never turned out as Satosensei hoped it would, the method used clearly left open the possibility of favoritism. ETCs could reward certain teachers and schools with certain kinds of ALTs. Sato-sensei commented to me on a colleague in a district board of education, "Ehara-sensei has had some rough years with his ALTS, so this year I really want to give him someone good." In rare cases it was even possible for teachers to use their personal relationships with the principal or the ETC to influence placement decisions. Consider the story of this head English teacher, age thirty-five, at an Osaka City junior high school:

  I decided I wanted to have an ALT for one semester, but when I asked the other three English teachers at my school, they said, "Fine, but it's none of our business. You have to handle everything." Before the ALT came, though, the board of education asked our school to host a teamteaching demonstration class and seminar for the whole city. This would take months of preparation, and it would be necessary for all four of us to work with the ALT. The problem was I knew that Ishida- sensei didn't want to work with ALTs any more. That's why we needed to have Marian. She had taught here for a short while the year before and she was so in tune with Japanese culture. You know, I have to respect the older teachers-Ishida-sensei is fifty-seven-and I knew the only way the seminar could be successful is if we got Marian. So I called the ETC and requested Marian, but he refused, saying that all schools must have the same opportunity. Then I asked the viceprincipal to contact him, but he refused. So finally I went to the principal and explained the situation. The principal, who happens to be the ETC's superior, called the board of education with the request. The very next day I was called to the teacher's room and the ETC was waiting there for me. He bowed his head and apologized to me in person for his behavior. It was unbelievable. So we got Marian after all.

  Tanabe-san also recounted several instances of principals stopping by his desk on their way out of the board of education to request an ALT of a certain nationality (usually American) or sex. Such requests, he noted, were especially difficult to ignore because the principals were senior to both him and Sato-sensei; fortunately, they did not occur very often.

  HEADACHES IN THE PREFECTURAL BOARD OF EDUCATION: THE ALTS ARRIVE

  When the preparations were finally complete, the time came to travel to Tokyo to meet the new ALTs and escort them back to the prefecture. I accompanied Sato-sensei and Tanabe-san on this trip in 1989, and after we arrived Sato-sensei confessed that while on his first trip to Tokyo in 1988 he was filled with eager anticipation, his heart was heavy this time. Through the grapevine, he knew this was true for other ETCs as well. An ETC in the neighboring prefecture, he said, had been shocked by the loud and boisterous behavior of the ALTs she was escorting on the bullet train back to her prefecture. "She said it was just like traveling with a group of elementary school students; it gave her a terrible headache." Nevertheless, I was struck by the amount of time Sato-sensei had spent trying to memorize faces and names beforehand. He was clearly intent on making a good impression on the ALTs, and during the first few days of interaction, feelings of goodwill and mutual enthusiasm were high enough to offset any potential misunderstandings.

  After returning to the prefecture, all ALTs participated in a contractsigning ceremony. Following the ceremony, a daylong orientation was held to give the ALTs a much more specific idea of the terms of their contract and the state of team teaching in their prefecture. The last order of business was the rendezvous between the ALTs and their host teacher or supervisor, who escorted them to their apartment, assisted them in the process of moving in, and introduced them to neighbors and colleagues at school. In the first few weeks, then, the ALTs were exposed to a whirlwind of information and people; many of them described their first month in Japan as a blur.

  The demands of extensive periods of English conversation at the Tokyo orientation and in the prefecture took their toll on Sato-sensei and Tanabesan as well. Both sighed with relief when the ALTs were taken away by school and district representatives. Their work for the remainder of the year would be twofold: promoting team teaching and internationalization in the prefecture and dealing with the myriad requests, demands, and ultimatums levied by the ALTs. The ETCs are often directly confronted by ALTs or asked to defuse conflicts between ALTs and school personnel; as the number of ALTs grows, the probability of problems skyrockets. These conflicts between ALTs and the board of education can be generally divided into two types: irritating disagreements that heighten mutual suspicion but do not lead to a serious breach and confrontations that lead to a permanent rupture, resulting either in an emotional divorce or a physical separation. We will consider typical smaller conflicts first.

  Prefectural versus Municipal ALTs

  Alison, twenty-two, a graduate of a small liberal arts college in the midwestern part of the United States, was one of the first ALTs in the prefecture to be hired by a municipality, a small town that had become quite wealthy because of its local steel company. Having had a very positive experience at the Tokyo orientation and having already made friends with several other ALTs in her prefecture, she was eager to go through the prefectural orientation. Though Sato-sensei had told her that she was employed by a city rather than the prefecture, her unfamiliarity with the structure of local government in Japan prevented her from appreciating the full import of his remarks.

  The morning of the contract-signing ceremony, however, Alison was pulled aside by Sato-sensei and introduced to the man who had come to pick her up. Since Alison would be signing her contract with the town, Sato-sensei said, she would not be participating in the prefectural orientation for other ALTs. This differential treatment confused and angered her because she felt she had lost a chance to gain much useful information about team teaching. Moreover, she had been looking forward to cementing friendships with other ALTs before they met their liaisons and were officially dispersed. From her point of view, she was working in the prefecture just like everyone else, and it did not make sense to exclude her from prefectural activities. Alison was so annoyed that she complained to her boss at the board of education immediately on arriving in her host town; on the next day Sato-sensei received a call from an irate superintendent of education demanding to know why Alison had been excluded from the orientation.

  Alison's was not an isolated case. As late as 1990, the minutes of a meeting between AJET representatives and CLAIR officials contained the following complaint from an unnamed ALT: "The segregation of 'prefectural' and 'other' JETS began at the airport. City, town and village JETS were grabbed and taken away while prefectural JETS had an orientation. The division bothers JETS very much; forming relationships/friendships is very important at the early stages of arrival .1120 Understanding what happened requires a quick review of the complicated horizontal and vertical linkages that constitute the JET Program's administrative chain of comm
and.

  Below the national level, the most important distinction for Japanese officials is whether the JET participant is employed by one of the 47 prefectures (kenhaichi), by one of 12 "designated cities" (shitei toshi haichi), or by one of the 3,245 municipalities (shichoson haichi) further divided into cities, towns, and villages. Although jurisdictions overlap to some degree, all of these are administratively distinct entities with independent hiring and firing powers. The problem is further compounded because the Ministry of Home Affairs (through CLAIR) and the Ministry of Education have separate administrative windows (madoguchi) at each of these levels. Ironically, even though over go percent of JET participants are assigned to boards of education and schools, the official administrative window for the JET Program at the prefectural level is not the board of education at all but rather the international relations division (kokusai koryuka). All information about the overall operation of the program from CLAIR goes first to the contact person in the prefectural international relations office, who in theory relays the information to the board of education. At the same time, however, all information and advice about the team-teaching component of the program travels directly from the Ministry of Education to the prefectural boards of education, and the ministry calls the prefectural ETCs to Tokyo at least once a year to instruct them in educational and counseling matters relevant to the JET participants (CLAIR relies on a similar series of regional meetings to impart guidelines to representatives of international relations offices in local governments). It is the duty of prefectural boards of education to forward relevant information to district boards of education, who in turn send it to municipal boards of education. While district boards of education are relatively fixed within the prefectural orbit, the municipal boards of education are more difficult to control.