Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program

by David L. McConnell

  31. See Masao Miyoshi, Off Center: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 86-87.

  32. Under the MEF and BET programs, some local Japanese supervisors had circumvented Ministry of Education guidelines by telling the foreign participants to take "secret holidays"-for example, on a Monday.

  33• Nose, interview, 4 June 1995.

  34. Other embassies did employ those with some knowledge of Japan but rarely with firsthand experience teaching in Japanese schools.

  35. CLAIR Newsletter, October 1988, p. 2.

  36. Fumiko Harada, chair, Ohio-Saitama English Teaching (OSET) Program, personal correspondence with author, 17 July 1995•

  37• This figure varies somewhat from consulate to consulate depending on the number of applicants in a given year in a particular region. In 1992, for example, Soo applicants requested a Boston interview, and 218 interviews were granted (206 for ALTs and 12 for CIRs). Out of this pool, 89 ALTs and 6 CIRs were selected.

  38. There were also a few interesting cross-cultural moments. A Japanese member of our group gave a particularly low score to an interviewee who furrowed her brow as she spoke, arguing that this mannerism would be viewed negatively in Japan. In another case, a woman was rejected because of a very noticeable facial scar that Japanese members of the consulate found problematic.

  39. Cliff Clarke, interview with author, Palo Alto, Calif., 13 May 1988. Interestingly, however, the CIEE committee initially rejected (and only later recalled) the application of Robert Juppe, Jr., who went on to become the first foreigner ever hired by the Ministry of Education. It is worth noting as well that the frustration voiced by CIEE representatives with the start-up of the JET Program no doubt stemmed in part from losing a very lucrative contract.

  40. A paucity of Japanese language programs also accounts for the virtual absence of applicants from Britain for the CIR position, which requires knowledge of the Japanese language.

  41. The results of the 1995 JET Program questionnaire reveal that the Japanese language competence of new participants has improved, but only slightly, since the early years of the program. By 1995, 52.7 percent of JET participants rated their conversational ability in Japanese prior to coming on the program as nonexistent; 22.4 percent called themselves beginners; 16.8 percent placed themselves in the intermediate stage; 6.6 percent viewed themselves as advanced; and 1.4 percent characterized themselves as fluent. These figures, however, include CIRs, who are required to have some Japanese language competence.

  42. A major drawback to this method of assessment was that 165 participants had not submitted photographs. This directory, incidentally, was originally compiled by AJET and called the "AJET Lookbook," but the publication was soon appropriated by CLAIR.

  43. There was also a miscellaneous group (5 percent) who came to Japan for other reasons, including quite by accident.

  44. Nakasone is quoted in Inoguchi, "Legacy," 365.

  45. The sense of resignation is apparent in the orientation manual sent to local governments in 1988, which explained the rationale for the program as follows:

  As a result of the increasingly high status of our country in the international community, the manner in which we relate to other countries is in the process of changing drastically. While internationalization up until now has primarily involved diplomacy and trade at the national level, at the present time the manner in which citizens at each stratum of society are engaging in internationalization has come to be questioned. In light of this fact, from this point on, the responses of local governments to internationalization will become an important topic that, like the aging of our population or the emerging information age, cannot be avoided. Gaikoku Seinen Shochi ligyo Ukeiredantai yo Manyuaru (JET Program host organization's orientation manual) (Tokyo: Council of Local Authorities for International Relations, -1988), 112-13.

  46. See John D. Montgomery, "Beyond Good Policies," in Great Policies: Strategic Innovations in Asia and the Pacific Basin, edited by John D. Montgomery and Dennis Rondinelli (London: Praeger, 1995), 1-13.

  47. Wada, interview, 18 January 1989.

  CHAPTER 3. THE START-UP YEARS: THE "CRASH PROGRAM" NEARLY CRASHES

  1. The explanation I was given for this policy was that it prevented any problems regarding JET participants' ability to carry the luggage necessary for their stay in Japan.

  2. The foreign minister spoke first, followed by the education minister; the home affairs minister was last. In subsequent years, a lesser official from each ministry was sent to pass on greetings.

  3. John Creighton Campbell, "Policy Conflict and Its Resolution within the Governmental System," in Conflict in Japan, ed. Ellis Kraus, Thomas P. Rohlen, and Patricia G. Steinhoff (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984), 295-334.

  4. Robert Juppe, "For the Jets, by the Jets," AJET Magazine, 1 August 1988, p. 1.

  5. The renewers' conference itself was initially an AJET event; CLAIR decided in 1988 to adopt it as an official conference for all renewing participants.

  6. The following accounts of the Australian tax problem and the controversy over health insurance and pensions were pieced together through interviews with CLAIR officials, prefectural administrators, and JET participants and from reports on the issues in the AJET Journal. A similar problem erupted in 1989 over the tax status of Canadian participants.

  7. Gregory V. G. O'Dowd, "Australia-Don't Miss the JET!" Japanese Studies: Bulletin of the Japanese Studies Association of Australia 12, no. 1 (1992):38.

  8. John Moran, "Insurance Blues," JET Journal, autumn 1989, p. 72.

  9. In 1989 France and Germany had 2 CIRs each; by 1991, the figures were 12 and 13, respectively; and by 1995 they each had 20 CIRs. The numbers of assistant French teachers and assistant German teachers remained in single digits throughout this period.

  io. Shunsuke Wakabayashi, "Amateurs Doing Their Best," Japan Times Weekly International Edition, 12 September 1987, p. 8.

  11. Letters to the editor in the Japan Times: Kimberly Kennedy, "Professional Teachers Not Needed Yet," 9 September 1987; Michelle Long, "Sorry English Education," 6 September 1987; Andrew Barnes, "Re-evaluating JET Program," 9 September 1987.

  12. lizuka Shigehiko, "We Welcome JET Teachers," Japan Times, 11 January 1988.

  13. Minoru Soma, "The JET Program," Japan Times, Readers in Council, 27 March 1988.

  14. Daniel Lester, "A Proposal to Improve English Teaching," Japan Times, Readers in Council, 18 April 1988.

  15. Indeed, at the 1987 Tokyo Mid-Year Block Seminar, two months after Wakabayashi's letter appeared, a senior Japanese official on the stage loudly addressed the JET participants as "boys and girls," setting a disastrous tone at the conference's outset. I also encountered this assumption at the JET Program Renewers' Conference in 1993. The speaker, a Ministry of Home Affairs official, ended his talk by exhorting the hundreds of JET participants in the audience with the slogan, "Be Ambitious, Boys and Girls." There was awkward silence, then scattered laughter, as he sat down. The next CLAIR speaker, apparently realizing the danger, hastily pointed out that the slogan "boys be ambitious" had been made famous by Dr. William Clark in Hokkaido and every Japanese student knows it-"it doesn't mean that you are boys and girls-you're much older than that."

  16. Merry White, The Material Child: Coming of Age in Japan and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 10-i1.

  17. In recent years, CLAIR has adopted a more flexible policy on the age limit, and several applicants over the age of thirty-five have been accepted as JET participants. CLAIR officials scratched their heads, however, when they received an application from an eighty-four-year-old woman!

  18. Morita Kiyoshi, "Beijin kyoshi ni bogen, taigaku sawagi: Eigo kyoikukan no sa ga haike ni" (Verbal abuse of American teacher leads to student expulsion, controversy: Behind incident lies gap in views of English education), Yomiuri Shimbun, 5 November 1988.

  19. Kathleen Brown. "A Not
e from'B-san,"' AJET Magazine, no. 4 (December 1988-January 1989): 12.

  20. Ibid., 13-

  21. "Mie Incident," CLAIR Newsletter, October 1988, p. 1.

  22. "Teacher Torture," Tokyo Journal, March 1989.

  23. Patricia Smith, "Jet Brag," Tokyo Journal, June 1989.

  24. Karen Hill Anton, "Japan Pulls in Welcome Mat with Racial Insensitivity," Japan Times, 13 April 1989.

  25. The Minority Support Group was not officially sanctioned by CLAIR or the Ministry of Education but rather was formed and sponsored by AJET. That two program coordinators and the head of the Counseling Division of CLAIR attended this meeting indicates the concern over this issue. - - -- - - -- - - -- - -

  26. A prefectural official in Osaka offered this recollection: "I remember in the early years of the program receiving a call asking me if I would'undertake the burden' (hikiukete kurenaika) of hosting an African American participant. I thought that their phrasing of the request was really odd, so I told them, 'Of course, we welcome African American participants. Send us as many as you want."'

  27. See especially magazines published by quasi-governmental agencies and "Japan Welcomes More JETers," Japan Pictorial 12, no. 1 (1989).

  28. Mary Canz, "Foreign Teachers Find Fame," San Francisco Examiner, 18 December 1988; Keiko Kanbara, "How to Make English More Fun for Japanese High School Students," Christian Science Monitor, 28 December 1988.

  29. See Gerald K. LeTendre's three-part series in the Daily Yomiuri: "AETs, Schools Find Working Together Brings Benefits to Fukui," 30 June 1988; "AET's Must Vary Activities to Succeed," 7 July 1988; "Students Learn to Switch Cultures," 14 July 1988. Ironically, however, when LeTendre submitted a condensed version of these articles to CLAIR for publication in the JET Journal, he received a rejection notice stating that because he was based full-time in an "international high school," his experiences would not be relevant to the majority of assistant English teachers. Apparently, CLAIR did not want to risk further raising the ire of the many AETs who were being shuffled around to numerous schools under the "one-shot" school visitation system.

  30. John Flanagan, "English Teaching Project Feeling Growing Pains," Japan Times, 2 August 1988; John Flanagan, "English-Teaching Program a Success After Overcoming First-Year Trouble," Japan Times, 3 June 1989.

  31. Edith Terry, "Just Replacing Tape Recordings, Canadian Teachers in Japan Find: Teaching in Japan Can Be Frustrating Experience," Toronto Globe and Mail, 12 January 1989•

  32. Teresa Watanabe, "Importing English: Teacher Exchange Offers Tough Lesson," San Jose Mercury News, 15 August 1988.

  33. Satoko Nozawa, "Apathy Prevails in English Classrooms," Daily Yomiuri, 18 May 1989.

  34. "School English Teaching Program Faltering: Union," Mainichi Daily News, 27 October 1988.

  35. Morita, "Beijin kyoshi ni bogen, taigaku sawagi."

  36. "'Honmono eigo' juken ni fuyo? Seito hanno mo toboshiku, shitsui no tochu kikoku mo," Kyoto Shim bun, 26 October 1988.

  37. The December 1988 issue of the CLAIR Newsletter contained this note under the heading "Media" on page 1:

  It has not gone unnoticed that the JET Program has been receiving some unfavorable press recently. Many JETs have voiced complaints at being misquoted in local newspapers or having had the meaning of what they've said distorted. Time and again newspaper reporters focus on the negative aspects of the Program or conveniently present half-truths which tend to emphasize grievances rather than show the program in an accurate light[:] ... as a word of advice, be wary of giving frank opinions not only to newspaper reporters, but also to people with whom you are unfamiliar. Criticism in Japan is not easily forgiven and it only takes one throw-away remark to destroy months of hard-earned trust and respect.

  38. The JET Program(me): Five Years and Beyond (Tokyo: Council of Local Authorities for International Relations, 1992), 78.

  39. "Under the Influence," CLAIR Newsletter, no. 7 (December 1989): 1.

  40. The Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme General Information Handbook (Tokyo: Council of Local Authorities for International Relations, 1995),17-18-_

  41. Matsuda Hisako, "Totsuzen no shi: Shigoto, scito wo ai shi ... naze?" Kyoto Shimbun, 26 January 1990.

  42. Nancy Sato has argued that the term "relations oriented" rather than "group oriented" best captures the dynamic between the individual and the group in Japanese society. See "Honoring the Individual," in Teaching and Learning in Japan, ed. Thomas Rohlen and Gerald LeTendre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 119-53. Robert Smith observes that "much of the definition of a 'good person' involves restraint in the expression of personal desires and opinions, empathy for the feelings of others, and the practice of civility"; Japanese Society: Tradition, Self, and the Social Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 44-45.

  43. Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Japanese Patterns of Behavior (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1976), 209.

  44. William Horsley, "An Outsider's View of CLAIR's Activities," Jichitai Kokusaika Foramu (Forum on Internationalization for Local Governments), no. 11 (November 1989): 21.

  45. Caroline Yang, interview with author, Tokyo, 23 March 1989.

  46. Jackson Bailey, "Student Exchanges and the Use of Technology," in Between Understanding and Misunderstanding: Problems and Prospects for International Cultural Exchange, ed. Yasushi Sugiyama (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 96.

  47. The "wrong" reasons included (1) you like Japan but not the JET Program (look for other employment), (2) you don't like the JET Program but the money is good and there's lots of free time (if money is your main consideration there are more lucrative means of employment), (3) you think the problems you had this year will probably not occur next year (problems have a habit of not going away), and (4) you want to renew to postpone making a difficult career decision (procrastination should not be a reason for renewing). CLAIR Newsletter, no. 7 (December 1989), P. 2.

  48. Since 1992, CLAIR has allowed a few individuals to renew for a fourth year, so the policy is not ironclad; but such a request usually requires extenuating circumstances and strong support from local officials, program coordinators, or both.

  49. The renewal rate was 44.3 percent in 1988, 45.1 percent in 1989, 41.4 percent in 1990, and 45.2 percent in 1991 (JET Program(me), 162).

  50. Minutes of First Evaluation Meeting, 1989-9o JET Program (given to me by a program coordinator).

  51. Horsley, "An Outsider's View," 21.

  52. Given the secrecy of personnel decisions in Japanese bureaucracies, this story about his reassignment was impossible to verify. I did speak with Nakamura after he had been transferred, and he confirmed that he had wanted to stay on at CLAIR longer. Indeed, he confessed that he had really wanted to join the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but was afraid he would be posted to some remote part of the world and so had joined the Ministry of Home Affairs instead. Now he regretted the decision. The following year he resigned from the ministry to practice law.

  53. G. Victor Soogen Hori, "Teaching and Learning in the Rinzai Zen Monastery," in Rohlen and LeTendre, Teaching and Learning in Japan, 20-4.9-

  54• Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989),12-13.

  55. H. J. Jones, Live Machines: Hired Foreigners in Meiji Japan (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, i98o), 30-40, 116-26.

  56. Gaimusho, Bunka Koryubu, Bunka Dainika (The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Second Cultural Affairs Division), "An Interim Evaluation of the JET Program" (in Japanese), Shiryo, no. 87-4 (5 February 1988).

  57. See, for example, the special issue of the Ministry of Home Affair's magazine devoted entirely to celebrating the inauguration of the JET Program: Kurea: Jichitai no tame no kokusai ka johoshi (CLAIR: A Journal Promoting the Internationalization of Local Governments), 1o November 1987.

  58. The profile of resigners over this five-year period closely matched the overall profile of JET participants in terms of nationality, sex,
and type of position; JET Program(me), 8o.

  59• For an extended and insightful discussion of the cultural foundation of learning in Japan, see the essays collected in Rohlen and LeTendre, Teaching and Learning in Japan.

  CHAPTER 4. MANAGING DIVERSITY: THE VIEW FROM A PREFECTURAL BOARD OF EDUCATION

  1. To acquire a sense of the "typicality" of arrangements in this prefecture, I visited boards of education or international relations divisions in government offices in ten others: Fukuoka, Hyogo, Iwate, Kanagawa, Kumamoto, Osaka, Saitama, Shiga, Kyoto, and Toyama. I also interviewed officials in two designated cities, Kyoto City and Osaka City.

  2. Tanabe-san later confessed that his boss had told him to handle everything, and thus he had spent his first two hours at work that morning frantically looking up English words in his dictionary.

  3. I eventually learned that my mentor at the university had played a very important role in publicly supporting the prefecture's position on a major educational reform issue, and as a result prefectural officials were very much indebted to him. That he had been willing to spend some of this built-up goodwill on a naive graduate student from abroad was a humbling thought. In any event, over the course of the next eighteen months I met every two months with Tanabe-san and Sato-sensei over coffee and attended numerous seminars, orientations, and informational meetings for JET participants, Japanese teachers of English, and local Japanese administrators.

  4. Thomas P. Rohlen, "Conflict in Institutional Environments: Politics in Education," in Conflict in Japan, ed. Ellis Krauss, Thomas P. Rohlen, and Patricia G. Steinhoff (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984), 159.

  5. Jackson Bailey, "Student Exchanges and the Use of Technology," in Between Understanding and Misunderstanding: Problems and Prospects for International Cultural Exchange, ed. Yasushi Sugiyama (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 9-7-

  6. The road to widespread use of foreign teaching assistants had not been smooth. In 1976 only six prefectures expressed an interest in having a foreigner come, even though fourteen had been recommended to the Fulbright Commission. After the Ministry of Education took over the program, it placed foreigners in prefectures with which it had close ties and sought to gradually expand the program over the years by using these "veteran" prefectures as models. In a few cases, some major scandal involving a foreign teacher prompted a backlash, and the prefecture made no requests for several years. Nagasaki, for instance, refused to participate for ten years following a marijuana-smoking incident.