Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program

by David L. McConnell

  In effect, then, two vertical chains of command exist side by side. Mirroring the uneasy relationship between the two ministries at the national level, no love is lost at the prefectural level between the international relations division and the board of education. Instead, competition and compartmentalization flourish, and skirmishes over money and educational policy occur with great regularity. Concern for the damage that such strained relationships might cause the JET Program even led one progressive governor in Kumamoto Prefecture to appoint a JET liaison between the two offices.

  In Alison's case, her municipality had sent its request for an ALT directly to the international relations division of the prefectural office. While this was the proper official channel, Sato-sensei was somewhat upset; he felt that the request had been approved simply because it came from a powerful mayor, not because it had any educational merit. In fact, he argued that since there was only one junior high school in the entire village, Alison would not have enough to do: to him this was proof that the mayor had absolutely no plan for employing the ALT effectively. His exclusion of Alison from the orientation was thus a function of the logic of bureaucratic compartmentalization, according to which the personal responsibility taken for an action is inversely related to the degree to which one is consulted beforehand. Because Alison "belonged" to a different administrative unit, and because Sato-sensei had not been consulted about her placement or her job responsibilities, his response was to keep his hands off. Put positively, he was respecting the jurisdiction of Alison's municipality. Put negatively, administrative rivalry lead him to refrain from offering to include Alison in the orientation. Either way, the result was a practice that made no absolutely no sense to JET participants.

  The interplay between municipality and prefectural control has had two other unfortunate outcomes. First, there is disagreement over the extent to which ALTs can be asked or required to participate in community-based and informal educational activities (shakai kyoiku). To the mayor and citizens of a small municipality, it seems a terrible waste to have the ALT spend all his or her hours in one or two secondary schools. As a result, ALTs appointed to small towns or villages frequently are asked to teach elementary school or kindergarten classes, to hold seminars for adults in the community, and to participate in a variety of festivals and other activities. Yet at a meeting for municipal and school representatives Sato-sensei forcefully echoed the Ministry of Education position:

  The main focus of the program should be on junior and senior high schools. I think since we hired them for English teaching, we should just use them for that purpose (eigo kyoiku ni senmen shitai kimochi desu). On the other hand, the difficult point is in the connection between municipalities and schools. We can't say that you should absolutely refrain from using them in community events. You have to use your own judgment based on your experience with the ALT. If it's only a few times it's probably all right, and we're not going to place a limit on the number of times you can use an ALT in community activities, but our thinking and the Ministry of Education's thinking is that classroom teaching is their job and anything else is not desirable.

  Nevertheless, many ALTs report becoming involved in all manner of community projects that have little to do with conversational English in a narrow sense.

  Second, jealousy and resentment sometimes arise between prefecturebased and municipality-based ALTs concerning "preferential treatment" in living and working conditions. On the one hand, some prefectural ALTs claimed that municipalities generally provided better living conditions than did prefectures. Since municipalities hired only a small number of ALTs (usually one or two), it was argued, they were more apt to provide allowances of various kinds. On the other hand, some municipal ALTs claimed that prefectural ALTs were more likely to be given extra vacation time during August instead of being expected to report to work every day like a civil servant. My own informal assessment of living and working conditions revealed a substantial lack of uniformity at the local levels (discussed below), but I found the variation within the pool of participating municipalities to be at least as great as the variation between municipalities and prefectures.

  Local Variation in Living Conditions

  Though taxes and insurance proved to be the biggest administrative problems at the national level, disputes over housing arrangements caused major headaches for Sato-sensei and Tanabe-san. The stereotype of Japan as a homogeneous society with a centralized system of government led many JET participants to expect that conditions of employment at the local level would be roughly the same for everyone. Insofar as JET was advertised as a "Japanese government program," there was no information offered to prospective participants during the first years of recruiting to suggest that local discrepancies might exist.

  Yet JET participants arrived to find considerable differences in their conditions of employment. Apart from monthly salary, the five-day workweek, and required participation in orientation and midyear conferences, virtually every aspect seemed to be up to the discretion of individual prefectures or municipalities. For instance, a 1989 "living conditions survey" conducted by CLAIR showed great variation in how much JET participants paid for rent each month; i2 percent paid less than $50 per month, 17 percent paid between $5o and $100, 30 percent paid between $10o and $300, 29 percent paid between $30o and $500, 7 percent paid between $5oo and $700, and 5 percent paid over $700 per month. All told, 63 percent of JET participants had their rent partially subsidized. In addition, while 67 percent of JET participants did not have to pay the "key money" (equal to one to two months' rent) required to rent an apartment in Japan, the remainder were responsible for covering part (ii percent) or all (20 percent) of the costs (2 percent "didn't know" if they had paid key money or not). In addition, a few prefectures and municipalities set aside a study allowance to assist ALTs in their travels to various parts of Japan.

  During the first few years of the program the living conditions of ALTS placed in Tokyo drew the most attention. Unlike many prefectures, the Tokyo Metropolitan government refused to subsidize rent for JET participants; as a result, rent for Tokyo-based ALTs was two to three times higher than that of other ALTs, consuming nearly a third of their salary. In addition, Tokyo-based ALTs were required to pay the deposit and key money out of their own salaries. In late August x987, the seventeen JET partici pants working in Tokyo's public high schools sent a letter of complaint to the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education. Ministry of Home Affairs officials found themselves caught in the middle. As their ministry was in charge of preserving and encouraging local autonomy, they did not want to appear heavy-handed; neither, however, did they want the Tokyo rent problem to continue and possibly undermine the program. CLAIR officials visited the Tokyo city office to ask local government officials to work on a solution. But the Tokyo government showed little interest in changing their policy, even though the mayor was the symbolic chair of CLAIR at the time. The CLAIR official who visited the Tokyo Metropolitan Office explained: "In small municipalities the mayor can click his fingers and bureaucrats will jump to do whatever he says. Not so in large, compartmentalized seats of government. The bureaucrats are extremely smart and powerful. They know the detailed rules and regulations and whether something is violating the law or not." Several years later the ALTs in Tokyo even threatened to leave the program unless conditions improved. But CLAIR's hands were tied; and as the ALTs in Tokyo numbered only a few dozen (many of Tokyo's wards hire foreign teaching assistants through other means), they were never able to mount a programwide campaign. In subsequent years, CLAIR simply made greater efforts to inform those ALTs placed in Tokyo of the rent situation in the hopes that they would adjust their expectations accordingly.

  The conditions of employment in Sato-sensei's prefecture were average in many respects. No study allowance was offered, but key money was covered by the prefecture and apartment rental ran in the $300-$500 range. The prefecture also provided five crucial appliances for all ALTS' apartments: refrigerator, washing
machine, gas range, telephone, and tele- vision.21 The average size of the apartment was small compared to what most ALTs were accustomed to back home-it usually consisted of two six-mat tatami rooms plus a small kitchen, bath, and toilet-but this was true of housing throughout Japan. And though one ALT in a small village near the Japan Sea complained publicly about being forced to live in a house with a pit toilet (much to the embarrassment of the host institution, who saw it as an indictment of "backwardness"), that was the exception rather than the rule.

  Each year a handful of ALTs were not satisfied with their accommodations and requested new ones. The motivations ranged from proximity to the workplace to the cost of rent to fears for safety, but rarely were they compelling from the perspective of Japanese officials. Kim, a twenty-threeyear-old Australian ALT, asked her district board of education if she could move because she had noticed men following her home on two occasions, but her boss told her to consider three options: carrying a beeper, having someone from school walk home with her, and being home by 9:oo P.M. "Can you believe it?" she asked me in exasperation: "It's just like Big Brother. They want to treat me like a child, like I'm not even a human being. Finally, I told them I'm going to move even if I have to pay the extra money, and they said,Wait, give us a week.' And just like that they worked it out. I think it was partly the key money and partly because they were afraid it would set a precedent." In another case Laura, a twenty-two-yearold American ALT, was posted to a district board of education in a rural part of the prefecture. Though her apartment was close to the board of education and was well-furnished, it was nearly an hour's commute by train and bus from most of the schools she visited. After several months, Laura decided it was too inconvenient. She spoke with her supervisor; but when he refused to budge, she took the initiative (with the help of a friend) to find a cheaper apartment, one closer to her schools. Laura's supervisor, Haruo Nishimoto, reacted this way: "We were very angry when she decided to move. She just did it on her own, even though we'd spent all that time buying furniture, refrigerator, dishes, everything. It's true that it was about a forty- to fifty-minute commute from that apartment to most of her schools, so we can understand her reasoning, but from our point of view she has a responsibility (giri ga aru) to stay in the place we arranged."

  This feeling that ALTs who moved were somehow lacking in their sense of obligation and their willpower to hang tough in the face of slight inconveniences was widespread among Japanese officials. As one twenty-eightyear-old JTL explained,

  Many schools have trouble finding housing because they must get a guarantor, so we had an agreement to rent an apartment for five years and had paid the key money and deposit. Then the ALT wanted to move. They just don't understand. At first the school said, "OK, if you do that, you'll have to pay with your own money." But eventually they backed down. I told the vice-principal and principal, "Why don't you make a contract?" but they said, "It's not a good way to treat the ALT," and so they helped her out. I think some ALTs are spoiled and make unreasonable and immature demands.

  While there is no question that some ALTs took advantage of their "foreign" status to press unreasonable demands, in many cases they felt justified precisely because prefectural variations in employment seemed so unfair. As one AJET vice-chair put it, "all people hired for the same job should get the same duties and terms!" Adding to the injustice was that JET par ticipants had little say over where they ended up. Whether one paid $500 per month in rent or had one's rent subsidized, for example, pretty much depended on the luck of the draw. Ironically, JET participants were pushing for more standardization in a country that has long been taken to task by some Western countries for its top-heavy regulatory system.

  The disparities raise another issue as well. Because funding for the program is based on the local allocation tax (see chapter 2), each host institution receives approximately 5.5 million yen per participant to pay for salary, airfare, conferences, and other related expenses. That some host institutions pay less for housing and other allowances means that these institutions pocket more of the money allocated to them by the government than do others. 22

  Sudden Departures

  Much more serious than apartment switching, however, was vacating the apartment for good. While every prefecture in Japan had a handful of early departures during the first years of the program, Sato-sensei and Tanabesan were hit particularly hard. The first case occurred less than two months into the program when an American woman became depressed over the strain of a long-distance relationship and decided to return home suddenly. Anxious to avoid embarrassment to the school, Sato-sensei negotiated with CLAIR officials to have an alternate fill the spot. But when Satosensei went to Tokyo to meet the new ALT at the airport, he was informed that the alternate had changed his mind at the last minute and had not boarded the plane in Chicago!

  At Christmas yet another sudden resignation occurred. In this case, a British ALT had returned home for a brief vacation over the holidays. Satosensei and Tanabe-san never spoke with him again. He called CLAIR in early January to say that because a friend had been killed in a plane crash, he had developed a fear of flying and would not be coming back to Japan. Both officials were clearly baffled by this story, which they said was "inconceivable from the Japanese point of view" (nihonjin no kankaku de arienai koto), but they had no way to verify the account. In both cases, the departures left an apartment to be cleaned, unpaid bills, and numerous other loose ends that took days to wrap up.

  The Sexual Harassment "Accident"

  Later in the spring a more serious incident occurred, one that changed one ALT's "Japan experience" irrevocably and left a profound impression on Sato-sensei and Tanabe-san as well. The incident itself lasted less than ten seconds. Lisa, a California native posted to a base high school in a major city in the prefecture, came out of the bath in her first-floor apartment one evening to find a man standing inside her living room, pants open, hand at his fly. Before she could even scream, he turned and was gone, as quietly as he had entered. Shaken and in tears, she immediately notified the board of education and called her parents.

  Sato-sensei was not available at the time, but the section chief, Ikuo Tsurukawa, went immediately to Lisa's apartment, bringing along an Australian ALT, Clara, to translate. They found themselves dealing not only with a distraught young woman but also with her extremely irate parents on the phone. Panicked at the thought of an assault attempt on their daughter thousands of miles across the ocean, they demanded to know why no one had warned their daughter of the danger of rape. From everything they had heard, Japan was a peaceful society with admirably low crime rates. How could the prefecture have let this happen? At the very least, the prefecture should compensate them for round-trip airfare to travel to Japan to be with their daughter. Clara tried to interpret the logic of their request as best as she could, and at first Tsurukawa hesitated at what he clearly considered to be an overreaction. But it soon became clear that Lisa's parents would not be easily appeased. Were round-trip airfare not forthcoming, they would take the case directly to the American embassy in Japan. In the heat of the moment, and under the considerable weight of this foreign pressure, against his better judgment he verbally acquiesced. At the very least, he thought, this gesture of goodwill would be enough to convince Lisa to stay in Japan for the remainder of her contract.

  But Tsurukawa had miscalculated, and his offer to fly Lisa's parents to Japan to see their daughter raised a storm of protest within the prefectural government. The budget section and the general affairs section chiefs balked openly at the request, arguing that Tsurukawa had overstepped the boundaries of his authority. Apologetic, he offered to pay for the trip out of his private bank account, but this was rejected as inappropriate, and a meeting between representatives of the board of education, the budget office, and the general affairs division was called to weigh the pros and cons of the matter. Tanabe-san, who participated in the subsequent negotiations, recalled:

  That meeting lasted for
three hours! Most of us felt the response of Lisa and her parents was out of proportion to the magnitude of the incident and that Mr. Tsurukawa had erred in making the offer. But we also felt that since it had already been extended, the prefecture proba bly ought to go through with it. Frankly, we were afraid that this could turn into an international incident if we mishandled it, particularly since Lisa's parents were doctors. We simply couldn't risk the chance that our handling of it would backfire. But the thing was, the general affairs section chief (somu bucho), who had been sent here from the Ministry of Home Affairs, was dead set against paying. Finally, he phoned a colleague in Home Affairs' Tokyo office to get some advice. I happened to be right there in his office during the whole conversation. He kept yelling, "Why do we have to pay? Why do we have to pay?" It was quite a scene!

  Much to the section chief's dismay, the ministry advised him to authorize payment for the flight. Ultimately he relented, and Lisa's parents were reimbursed for their airfare.

  In the meantime, the circumstances surrounding the incident, and the starkly contrasting interpretations of them, had become clearer. The intrusion had occurred shortly after Lisa had returned from jogging alone in shorts and a tank top, something she did on a regular basis and usually along the same course. Moreover, she had not locked her front door while she was in the bath. These two facts alone were enough to convince Satosensei, who visited her apartment the following morning, that Lisa was largely responsible for what had happened: "It was her mistake. She was quite attractive, you know, and had a propensity for jogging in shorts and sleeveless shirts; and for some reason she didn't lock her door. Someone probably followed her home that night, and being curious and most probably drunk, entered her house. I doubt he intended to harm Lisa."