Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program

by David L. McConnell

  Included in this group were those rare souls who practically rejected their own culture in the rush to embrace Japanese language and society. They would complain if their apartment was too close to those of other foreigners, and they avoided most ALT social gatherings. Ironically, they ran the risk of becoming too acculturated, opening themselves to criticism from Japanese that they had become a henna gaijin (literally, "strange for- eigner")-someone who, in a sense, knew too much about Japan and behaved in a manner inconsistent with his or her upbringing.

  These groupings roughly describe the range of JET participants. Darin Price, an ALT in Okinawa from 1 990 to 1993, composed a remarkable set of drawings during his time in Japan that begins to capture some of the diversity of ALTs' reactions to Japanese culture and education in a humorous way; they have been scattered through this section.

  The Loser (Homo sapiens failure). Distinctive call: "The only really bad thing about this job is the three-year limit."

  INTERNATIONAL FESTIVALS

  In the fall of 1989 I was invited to an "international cultural exchange festival" hosted by Higashiyama High School. Its objective, as stated in the program, was "to promote a true sense of international understanding among the young people who will be our leaders in the Twenty-first Century by inviting members of the foreign community ... to exchange ideas concerning our different cultures and to promote friendship."

  The fundamental plan was simple: to invite as many foreigners from as many different countries as the organizers could manage. Toward this end the chief organizer, a middle-aged teacher of Japanese language, both obtained permission from the board of education for JET Program participants in the area to attend and used the network of her husband (a university professor) to identify foreign students at local universities who might participate. The two ALTs based at this school were excluded from much of the planning process, though their names, pictures, and essays were displayed prominently on information disseminated about the event.

  The Predecessor (Homo sapiens saintly). Distinctive call (about him or her): "X sensei was not as [pick one] fat/short/skinny/loud/sloppy/quiet/hard to understand/lazy as you are."

  On the afternoon of the festival, most of the foreign guests were met at the train station by pairs of students, who accompanied them on the short walk to the school. Many of these students said that they had stayed up late the night before rehearsing short conversational phrases that might come in handy. On arriving at the school, all the guests were ushered into the guest room, where forty-five foreigners were briefed on the agenda of the afternoon. Though I had asked to sit in the background as an observer, it soon became clear that this would not do at all. The only place for foreigners here was on the stage or in designated seats-including the two AFS students at the school, in spite of their protests that they didn't want to be singled out from their classmates.

  At the appropriate time all of the foreigners, myself included, were given flags of our respective countries and, with the flags displayed conspicuously in front of us, we were ushered into the gymnasium. There, in front of video cameras and to a standing ovation from the students, we marched down a carpeted aisle to the front of the gym, where some took seats under an impressive display of flags, banners, and ribbons hanging on the stage, while others sat in chairs set apart in the audience. On the stage, vases of flowers adorned tables with white cloths; the names and countries of origin of those seated behind them were displayed prominently on large cards.

  The program had been meticulously planned down to the last minute, and a full rehearsal had taken place the day before. A young JTL with good conversational ability served as moderator. First, the principal gave an introduction in Japanese and in English, reading phonetically. (The speech had been written and translated by a JTL, and the principal had received coaching, I was told.) Then greetings were heard from a representative of the foreigners and from the student body president, who gave his short remarks in Japanese, English, French, and German. Next, the chief organizer of the event welcomed everyone and pointed out that there were over forty people representing twenty-three countries, making this the biggest such festival yet. As she went on to introduce everyone by name, students brought leis made of folded origami cranes, which they placed over each individual's neck. The moderator then noted that since there was not enough time to hear from all the foreigners, they would hear from just a few representatives. During the next twenty minutes, the students heard brief greetings and introductions about their countries from a Tanzanian, a Canadian, an Austrian, and a Korean. By my rough estimate, about a third of the students were dozing during this portion, another third were talking quietly among themselves, and the final third were quite attentive.

  The next portion of the ceremony was titled "Question and Answer Session," and the moderator announced that the students would take charge of the program from here on out. The students designated as "question askers," all seated together, rose one by one and asked a question in English of someone on the stage. I was told later that deciding on what kinds of questions to ask was very difficult for the students, and that the organizer had told them to keep to noncontroversial subjects that would contribute to a light atmosphere. Indeed, the nine questions addressed topics such as fjords in Norway, clothing styles in Sweden, vacation time in Britain, foods in Singapore, seasons in New Zealand, festivals in Brazil, and so on. Immediately after this, two students grabbed the microphone and walked down the row of foreigners; all were asked their country's name and to say "konnichiwa" (hello) in their native language. Then the student body president did the same for the foreigners seated on the stage, but he made everyone laugh by telling the audience "Repeat after me!" after the words in languages such as Swahili that were not familiar. The final event had the two AFS students at the school come up and show their version of "rock, scissors, paper" (a popular way of making decisions among Japanese schoolchildren) in which the loser had to do whatever the winner asked. First, the boy lost and the girl asked him to do ten push-ups on the stage; then the girl lost and the boy asked her to kiss him on the cheek, which she did, pretending to be embarrassed. Everyone in the audience gasped. The two told me afterward that they had decided to do this at the last minute to "stir things up a little."

  At this point, the ceremony was declared over and, to applause, the foreigners paraded out. Their departure marked the end of the required portion of the event for ninth graders, who were then dismissed to study for exams. Volunteers from the seventh and eighth grades were responsible for small "discussion forums" held in various classrooms. Most of this time was spent playing a language game and sharing snacks and tea. Depending on the mixture of students and the personalities of the foreigners, the atmosphere ranged from quite lively and fun to somewhat uncomfortable. At the end, the principal and the chief organizer suddenly burst into each room with a photographer, who snapped several poses of all of us (these pictures were later sent to all the foreign guests). The foreigners were then ushered back to the guest room, where we were given pottery bowls as a gift and bade farewell until the following year.

  Less than a month after attending the high school festival I was invited to an "international understanding period" at a junior high school that the city board of education had designated a special school for returnee children. Each year this school conducted a schoolwide international event. According to a memo prepared by the planning committee,

  Last year, under the title "interacting with exchange students" (ryugakusei to no fureai no kai) we tried to improve students' interest and understanding of intercultural differences by hearing from foreigners currently living in Japan. This year we have planned a program according to grade level under the general theme "the capacity for cross-cultural understanding" (ibunka rikai noryoku). We want to impress on students that there are many people in the world who live and behave in ways that differ from their own lifestyles, and we want them to learn to respect these various moral frameworks. We also hope to encourage
them to think about the question of how Japanese should conduct themselves in order to get along with people around the world.

  As in the high school festival, there was an emphasis on form and careful attention to detail. A specific activity had been designed for each grade: seventh graders were to "learn about differences between Japan and foreign countries" by listening to three foreigners briefly describe life in their countries. The eighth graders were to participate in a symposium on "Japanese patterns of behavior." The ninth graders were to listen to two Japanese overseas volunteers tell of their experiences, the theme being "Japanese actively participating in the world community."

  I attended the symposium, which involved a panel discussion with one foreign guest, one Japanese teacher, one moderator (also a teacher), and seven students (one representative from each homeroom), all of whom sat on the stage in the gymnasium. The remaining three hundred students sat in straight lines on the floor of the gym while the physical education teacher and several homeroom teachers roamed about, keeping strict order. The questions chosen for discussion were most revealing. There were twenty of them, all based on the pattern "Why do Japanese do such-andsuch?" (naze nihonjin wa ... na no ka?). These questions had been compiled by a social studies teacher in collaboration with a few of the returnee children at the school. For nearly forty-five minutes the panel discussed such questions as, Why are parking violations so frequent in Japan? Why don't Japanese buy groceries all at one time? Why has Japanese science not advanced relative to other countries? Why do so many Japanese wear glasses? Why do Japanese work too hard? The student representatives had all prepared written responses, and the moderator moved back and forth between the students, the foreign guest, and the Japanese teacher, calling for comments at random. Toward the end of the hour the moderator tried to elicit responses from some of the students in the audience, with limited success, by asking their opinions about a neighboring city's decision to require students to cut their hair a certain length.

  These two festivals offer many insights into the cultural form and meaning of internationalization in Japan. We might observe first that the main event was compulsory for all students. In effect, the decision that it is important to be international was made for the students. One major consequence was that the entire event was standardized and ritualized. The Japanese attention to form, detail, and protocol in implementing this festival clashed with the sensibilities of many of the foreign participants, as the improvisation by the AFS students revealed. As Takie Lebra has pointed out, face is most vulnerable in unpredictable situations, and ritual-"the rigid, meticulous control of interaction behavior in a predetermined way so as to prevent embarrassing surprises"-is the most common means of preserving it.19 Ritualization can thus be seen as a way to control foreigners, incorporating them while forestalling any challenge to local meanings.

  At both events the distinctions between Japanese and non-Japanese were assumed and reinforced. The students who participated in "internationalization" by watching forty-five foreigners paraded in front of them learned firsthand that foreigners were to be treated differently from themselves. The second event is a bit more complicated to analyze, for my discussions with teachers afterward made clear that the entire affair was intended as an internal critique of Japanese behavior. Yet the critique itself began from a presupposition of Japan's cultural uniqueness, which was assumed to pervade even such things as how Japanese do their shopping. The potential for effective criticism was further weakened by the assumption that all Japanese are alike (are there no Japanese who do not work hard?), behaving in ways juxtaposed to an implied and equally monolithic set of "foreign" cultures.

  THE CULTURE AND POLITICS OF TEAM TEACHING

  Even more useful than school-based international festivals as a lens on the dynamics of intercultural encounters in the JET Program were the teamtaught classes conducted daily by ALTs and JTLs. My first introduction to the controversy over team teaching came when I attended a fall 1988 meeting of a local chapter of Nihon Eigo Gakkai (the Japan English Association), a national organization for Japanese teachers of English. According to its chair, the main purpose of the meeting was to help JTLs who were having trouble (kuro) with team teaching, and three speakers talked at length about their personal experiences with ALTs. While the Ministry of Education's main speaker at the JET Program orientation had glowingly reported that 75 percent of JTLs were very positive about team teaching, this session painted a much bleaker picture. Even the moderator's introductory remarks about the JET Program were decidedly negative. Noting that the program began as a reaction to foreign pressure, he went on to argue that it had no clear educational rationale, that as a whole it was not going very well, and that numerous problems remained. Since most of the foreign youth were not licensed teachers, he concluded, the acronym ALT was itself a misnomer and should be replaced by ETA (English teaching assistant). This skepticism among JTLs was confirmed over the next few weeks at other conferences I attended. I even overheard one JTL refer to the "ALT problem" while talking with a local board of education official.

  In my own observations of team-taught classes, I was repeatedly struck by how the Japanese teachers' strategies clustered around the two extremes. Either the entire class is turned over to the foreign teacher, or the foreign teacher becomes part of the furniture of the regular classes as a kind of human tape recorder. Often a single class was divided into conversation-oriented activities (which the ALT leads) and exam-related study (in which the ALT assumes a peripheral role). In both cases, the possibility of spontaneous interaction in the classroom is minimized. My observations were confirmed by a national survey conducted by the Institute for Research in Language Teaching in 1988. When asked how labor is divided in team-taught classrooms, 30 percent of senior high teachers reported that they let the foreign teacher take charge of the class, 25 percent responded that they themselves remained at the center of class instruction, and 36 percent said that they shared teaching responsibilities. As to whether Japanese teachers of English were satisfied with team teaching, half of the junior high school teachers and close to two-thirds of the senior high school teachers said they had reservations about the approach.20

  The Teaching of English as a Foreign Language

  Why was team teaching so threatening to JTLs? Certainly, deficiency in English conversational ability led many to fear loss of face in the classroom and in the teachers' room. While JTLs often claimed that they were too busy with other school affairs to spend time in preparing and evaluating team-taught classes, in fact language skills were the biggest roadblock. Truly cooperating on a lesson plan and its implementation requires a willingness to engage in the give-and-take of mutual criticism, and most JTLs found it difficult to convey what they really thought about the ALTS' ideas under these circumstances-particularly in light of the widespread tendency to refrain from criticizing foreigners.

  The JTLs also resisted because team teaching required that they partially surrender their autonomy in the classroom. Reformers have been relatively unsuccessful in making team teaching integral to American public education for precisely this reason. And in Japan, the interaction was even more complex: each member of the "team" brought a different cultural model of what constitutes a "successful" classroom to the joint enterprise. The traditional method of teaching English in Japan fits with a cultural theory of learning and motivation that draws heavily on Confucian values. While recent studies of preschool and elementary classrooms in Japan have found, somewhat surprisingly, that play is central and students' contributions drive classroom learning, by junior high school a very different pedagogical model is in effect, one that is much more teacher-centered. According to Thomas Rohlen and Gerald LeTendre, "Secondary-level teaching employs a pedagogy almost entirely dependent on teacher-centered lectures to large classes of students engaged in note-taking for the purposes of passing exams. The use of small groups for instructional purposes is extremely rare, and student presentations are limited. Classroom proce
edings center on the teacher, who elaborates at length on a fixed lesson."" The important elements in this approach are the idea of learning as a serious enterprise requiring hard work and sacrifice, the importance of repetition and memorization of a model, and the fixed roles of the major actors: the teacher as imparter of knowledge and the student as attentive but unquestioning learner. All of these features coincide nicely with accounts of Japanese patterns of learning outside the school, such as the apprenticeship model John Singleton describes in becoming a potter.22 Academic study at the secondary school level in Japan is a sober business.

  In observing English classes with the ALT absent, I found that they were taught primarily in Japanese, with English being used only when reading passages from the text or introducing new words. Third-year students often spent much time reviewing past exam questions and perfecting testtaking strategies. There was little variation in teaching methodology: teachers rarely strayed from the front of the room and students answered questions only when called on. An examination of students' English notebooks and homework also proved revealing. Many students spent a considerable amount of time studying English, but their time was spent on four primary tasks: copying the model dialogue into their notebooks word for word, translating this dialogue into English, memorizing and orally reciting the dialogue, and answering grammatical problems. Yoshie Aiga confirms that English classes today are still largely spent on reading, translation, and explanations of new words and grammar points in Japanese.23

  The assumptions underlying the English as a foreign language (EFL) methodologies in which the foreign teachers are "trained" at the Tokyo and prefectural orientations run directly counter to those of the above model in many ways: they see as ideal the student as active learner; the teacher as facilitator; focus on content of language, not form; curriculum that is interesting and relevant to students; and classes that are marked by liveliness and spontaneity. ALTs generally believed that English classes in Japan are in need of livening up, and they therefore often tried to use games and other "fun" activities in their team teaching. From playing the guitar to turning the class into a dramatic scene to playing hangman and twenty questions, the ALTs seemed willing to try anything to energize the class, use "living English," and produce evidence, in the form of critical thinking and self-expression, that "real" learning was taking place.