Furthermore, common sense tells us that achieving physical diversity may be only the first step in a much longer process. An official in Shiga- ken's International Affairs Division wrote in an essay of three phases in the development of the JET Program-the era of astonishment, the era of acclimation, and the era of understanding. In the first stage, "The schools and towns hosting ALTs found themselves bewildered. They took it upon themselves to do vast remodeling work on their apartments, installing showers and even bilingual televisions, which were still a rarity at the time. To the people of the town, it seemed as if the aliens had landed. Amidst all the commotion, countless troubles occurred due to cultural differences." With the passing of a few years, however, came acclimation, and previously apprehensive schools and towns began to show interest. JET participants were requested all over the prefecture, and their numbers soared. "Even in towns with a population of less than ten thousand, one can find a JET participant riding his or her bicycle around town or shopping in the local supermarket in everyday life. Becoming accustomed to seeing foreign people has surely caused great strides in the internationalization of the eyes of the local people." But the real challenge remains: "Even with this internationalization of the eyes of the people, lack of mutual understanding of each other's cultures still poses the same problems that it did ten years ago.... It is our goal to move on from the stage of internationalization of the eyes to internationalization of the mind, true mutual understanding."11 The reaction to newcomers anywhere, especially those perceived as tokens, often follows a similar pattern: only after the initial excitement dies down, and a different kind of relationship is negotiated, do the possibilities for some lasting impact emerge. At the very least, a longitudinal view of the JET Program suggests that claims for the unchanging nature of Japanese national character are untenable.
Yet those possibilities should not be overstated. For a Japanese secondary school student, exposure to a JET participant for a number of class periods is not likely to lead to the kind of personal change often triggered by a long-term sojourn, or even a short-term homestay, abroad. Nor should we confuse a decrease in overt preferential treatment with a willingness to accept foreigners as equal members of the group. Becoming acclimated to foreigners does not necessarily imply giving up Japanese identity, nor does it mean that the pressure in Japan to conform to a cultural center, along with the corresponding search for deviants, will end. One Ministry of Education official put it bluntly: "If we lose our identity, who are we? We must guard our identity while at the same time preparing to live in an international society."
In many ways, the friction surrounding the JET Program is not unlike that accompanying the opening up of Japan to foreign companies. In both cases considerable foreign pressure was brought against Japan's insularity. Both the teaching program and trade liberalization have the government's official blessing but run into trouble when foreigners are brought into fixed social patterns. The entrenched attitudes and behavioral habits that form invisible barriers to change prove difficult to overcome. Yet in neither case have Japanese officials given up. Japan is inextricably linked to the global economy and has a very public goal of becoming more cosmopolitan. While the process of opening Japan's markets may be slow, it is nonetheless steady: in this regard, the difference between the 199os and the 196os is astonishing. The challenges of managing diversity in schools and offices across the country may be formidable, but Japan's extraordinary capacity for learning justifies our optimism that the JET Program may follow a similar course.
What insights does Japan's struggle to cope with diversity hold for understanding the discourse and practice of multicultural education in American society? It might seem at first that we can learn little from a country that still ranks as one of the most ethnically homogeneous nations in the contemporary world, where an ideology of blood still holds considerable sway. It is tempting to repeat the familiar refrain that Japan is twenty or thirty years "behind" the United States in coming to terms with diversity. After all, unlike Japan, Americans have considerable experience living in a pluralistic society, and some form of multicultural education has been integrated into the curriculum of most elementary schools. Academia is awash in multiculturalism; even at the corporate level, calls for "diversity training" are becoming more pronounced. Thus, when we hear that it was not until May -1997 that the Japanese government finally recognized the Ainu as a distinct ethnic group, it is all too tempting to shake our heads in disbelief at the level of overt racial intolerance.
Such a view is dangerous, not only because it ignores the persistent gap in the United States between the rhetoric of equality and social justice and the reality of racism and intolerance but also because it profoundly fails to recognize that our own discourse and practice of multiculturalism are every bit as embedded in a cultural and symbolic order as are the form and meaning of "internationalization" in Japan. Thus, the American ALTs in the JET Program find it easy to protest against the injustice of patterns of group affiliation based on racial and ethnic criteria in Japan without realizing that their own ideology of individualism carries with it an intolerance of a different kind.
The popularity of the "salad bowl," the "quilt," and other metaphors stressing persistent differences notwithstanding, multiculturalism in U.S. society in fact exists within a homogenizing framework of meaning. Francine Ruskin and Herve Varenne elaborate:
We cannot ignore the possibility that America is indeed an overarching structure that organizes the most powerful events in the United States, be they political or educational. To ignore the possibility is to condemn oneself to blindness and a particularly insidious form of righteous false consciousness that insists on the need for certain kinds of awareness (e.g., awareness of cultural differences) without giving itself the means of framing this awareness.... The melting pot has worked. There is an American culture. It is necessary to learn the means of recognizing its presence, particularly in those settings where it hides itself. And then, when necessary, one must examine one's own productions so as to escape its overwhelming power.'
It is precisely in mirroring this set of unexamined assumptions about selfhood, ethnicity, and change, which Michael Olneck terms multiculturalism's "symbolic order," that the Japanese case can be instructive.
To make such a claim is not to say that everyone sees multiculturalism the same way. Conservative positions that view all but the most benign forms of multiculturalism as undermining national unity and leading to social and political fragmentation clearly differ from radical critiques that charge multicultural education with failing to confront established cultural categories or power relations. But just as the variation in Japanese responses to "internationalization" can be located within an overarching symbolic system, so too do American discourse and practice vis-a-vis diversity rest on a set of fundamental assumptions about self and social relations.
The reactions of American JET participants to Japanese culture and education suggest that believers in individualism have great difficulty accepting the legitimacy of cultural differences; thus, multicultural movements may not be as tolerant of group identities as they claim to be. There is often a considerable discrepancy between their professed respect for cultural differences and their actual behavior. Most strikingly, they generally expect and demand that Japanese approaches to language teaching and internationalization conform to their own. In various ways, most of them construe Japanese culture and education as a "problem" and as in need, at some level, of "development." Wherever Japanese practice diverges from the American ideal, it is seen to fall short of being progressive or international. Though there are some apologists for Japanese culture among the JET participants, they are clearly a minority.
In addition, the American JETs treat ethnicity as a personal religion: that is, each person is cast as defining him- or herself by using available ethnic labels. One can be zo percent Cherokee, or 20 percent Chinese-or, as the media never tire of reminding us in Tiger Woods's case, several different t
hings all at once-but in every case the focus is an individual's ownership of ethnicity. Although it appears that a person belongs to one or more ethnic groups, for the most part these are groups on paper, or groups in name only. They are a far stretch from the Japanese groups in action, which demand constant loyalty and in return provide a sense of belonging. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the United States is an atomized society playing games with ethnic labels.' To be sure, the labels have meaning for the individuals concerned; but they rarely are accompanied by a whole set of obligations and expectations for behavior of the kind attached to ethnic affiliation in Japan.
The voluntary and associational character of contemporary group life in the United States thus carries important implications for the kind of pluralism being nurtured. Affiliating within ethnic groups now is not primarily a matter of ascribed, inclusive identity. Instead, as Michael Olneck argues, "Multiculturalists render ethnicity consistent with the core American norms of individual choice and individual expression ... by representing ethnic identity as an option or voluntary choice.... By affirming and centering the autonomous individual whose cultural identity is a matter of relatively unrestrained choice, multicultural education locates ethnicity well within the established symbolic order through which Americans perceive and interpret society."3 This helps explain why American JET participants so strongly resent being singled out as gaijin: to confer and deny ethnic identity on the basis of blood is anathema in the American ideology, which tends to define "Americanness" as a matter of having the right attitudes. Our own version of multiculturalism thus reflects a radical individualism that fails to take seriously the identities and claims of groups as groups.
That American JET participants insist on the necessity of increasing cultural awareness among Japanese teachers and students also suggests that multicultural discourse tends to frame the educational task largely in terms of affecting the individual. James Banks, for instance, stresses the importance of moving from a "contributions" stage, in which the distinct achievements of minority individuals are recognized by the larger society, to a level of social action/empowerment,4 taking for granted the idea that change must occur at the level of individual attitudes. As one critic has pointed out, because of that assumption such stage theories run "the risk of masking political and socioeconomic conditions that contribute to real inequality in contemporary plural societies."5
The challenges facing Japan and the United States in coping with diversity are in many ways opposites. Yet for those working within each country, the superiority of their own system's logic is taken for granted. In Japan the challenge is to internationalize in a way that requires citizens to open up their language and culture to foreigners, perhaps even teaching them the subtle complexities of what it takes to be a loyal group member. In a more robust version of kokusaika, JET participants should learn to adapt to Japan; but foreigners often are the first to recognize this, because the Japanese are so concerned with the outer form and with hospitality. One CLAIR official put it this way: "The hardest part is to get rid of the way of thinking that says, 'Now it's time to do internationalization' (ka- maete, kokusaika no jikan)." In the United States the challenge is to internationalize in a way that recognizes that other nations' approaches have value and avoids reducing cultural differences to matters of individual choice and attitude. JET participants need to take seriously the task of learning Japanese culture and language and integrating themselves into social routines. Too often they simply criticize Japan rather than admit that they must accept some of the consequences of the Japanese model of social relations.
The history of the JET Program ultimately offers insights into what is fundamental to ethnicity and what is not, and it suggests that concepts such as "internationalization" and "multiculturalism" are rarely employed critically. The idea that simply speaking English, having a foreign pen pal or a sister city, or inviting a foreigner to a local school constitutes internationalization is very widespread in Japan. And a similarly reductionist mind-set can be found in the United States, where the presence of one individual with an ethnic name or a darker skin color is seen as proof of diversity. At one level, the JET Program seems little different from the food, folkways, and holidays approach to multicultural education in American schools or from the reliance on multicultural studies programs and expanded college reading lists to add "ethnic content."
But the seeds of cross-cultural learning must be planted somewhere, and perhaps taking up the cause of internationalization is a necessary first step. Moreover, we cannot assume that intercultural education programs only reflect prior cultural values, as if their meaning could be read from a preordained script. People are not only slaves of ritual, symbols, and culture but molders of them as well.' The coming together of diverse peoples, despite their mutual reluctance to change, may lead to the creation of something new; we can learn from others without sharing their commitment to a way of life. Clifford Geertz reminds us: "We must learn to grasp what we cannot embrace. The difficulty in this is enormous, as it has always been. Comprehending that which is, in some manner of form, alien to us and likely to remain so, without either smoothing it over with vacant murmurs of common humanity, disarming it with each-to-his-own indifference, or dismissing it as charming, lovely even, but inconsequent, is a skill we have arduously to learn, and having learnt it, always very imperfectly, to work continuously to keep alive."' In the final analysis, the beauty of the JET Program and other programs like it is that they open up a public space for dialogue that is grounded in real-life encounters with diversity. The conversations that evolve are shaped by unseen historical, cultural, and political forces, but they retain a creative dynamism of their own. The best of these conversations remind us of the possibility of achieving intercultural understandings that lie somewhere between facile affirmations of human universals and righteous claims of absolute difference.
PREFACE
1. Advertising brochure, The Japan Exchange and Teaching Program(me) (Tokyo: Council of Local Authorities for International Relations, 1991), n.p.
CHAPTER 1. JAPAN'S IMAGE PROBLEM: CULTURE, HISTORY, AND GLOBAL INTEGRATION
i. Advertising brochure, The Japan Exchange and Teaching Program(me) (Tokyo: Council of Local Authorities for International Relations, 1991), n.p.
2. With the addition of France and Germany as participating countries in -1989, the more inclusive acronym ALT, or assistant language teacher, was coined to refer to the first category of participants, and the acronyms AFT (assistant French teacher) and AGT (assistant German teacher) also came into use. In practice, however, the acronym AET was long used to refer all participants, much to the chagrin of ALTs who did not teach English.
3. Of these 848 participants, 592, or fully 70 percent of the total, were from the United States; 15o were chosen from Britain, 83 from Australia, and 23 from New Zealand. The following year Canada and Ireland were added to the list of participating countries, and France and Germany joined in 1989.
4. Teresa Watanabe, "Importing English: Teacher Exchange Offers Tough Lesson," San Jose Mercury News, 15 August 1988; "Apathy Rampant in JET Program," Japan Times, 11 October 1988; "Teacher Torture," Tokyo Journal, March 1989; Karen Hill Anton, "Japan Pulls in Welcome Mat with Racial Insensitivity," Japan Times, 13 April 1989.
5. The JET Program(me): Five Years and Beyond (Tokyo: Council of Local Authorities for International Relations, 1992), 8o, 166.
6. Anniversary events included a two-day symposium on 7-8 October 1996 on the role of the JET Program in promoting internationalization, the announcement of "Meritorious Service Awards" by each of the sponsoring ministries, and publication of a tenth anniversary booklet chronicling and assessing the JET Program's first decade.
7. Nose Kuniyuki, interview with author, Tokyo, 4 June -1993.
8. See, for example, Frank Gibney, "Time to Lay Ieyasu's Ghost to Rest," Japan Times Weekly International Edition, io-i6 June 1996, p. 9.
9. Ronald Dore, "The Internationalisa
tion of Japan," Pacific Affairs 52 (1979): 6oi.
to. See Haruhiro Fukui, "State in Policymaking: A Review of the Literature," in Policymaking in Contemporary Japan, ed. T.-J. Pempel (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 22-59.
11. John O. Haley, "Governance by Negotiation: A Reappraisal of Bureaucratic Power in Japan," Journal of Japanese Studies 13 (1987): 343-57; Steven R. Reed, Japanese Prefectures and Policymaking (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985); Leonard J. Schoppa, Education Reform in Japan: A Case of Immobilist Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991).
12. Thomas P. Rohlen, "Conflict in Institutional Environments: Politics in Education," in Conflict in Japan, ed. Ellis Kraus, Thomas P. Rohlen, and Patricia G. Steinhoff (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1983),136-73.
13. During the past two decades, research on policy implementation has increasingly recognized the importance of taking into account the perspectives of those who are actually charged with implementing policy innovations. Systems management and bureaucratic process models have fallen into disfavor as more attention is focused on the issue of whether or not the goals and resources of policymakers fit the needs and perspectives of those actually affected by top-down policies. In this vein, Lee Sproull offers a framework that focuses not on the properties of programs but rather on the processes by which organizational attention is captured, external stimuli are interpreted, response repertoires are invoked, and behavioral directives are communicated; see "Response to Regulation: An Organizational Process Framework," Administration and Society 124 (1981): 447-70. Karl Weick, pointing out the lack of structure and determinacy and the dispersion of resources and responsibilities, argues that commonality of purpose in educational organizations cannot be assumed; "Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems," Administrative Science Quarterly 21 (1976): 1-19.
Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program Page 37