Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program (20 page)

Things "came to a head" because of the increasing dissatisfaction on the
part of gay JET participants with having to stay completely closeted, even
at conferences. In the question box at one renewers' conference, for instance, a gay participant had scribbled, "Why is CLAIR ignoring the
gays?" Garth recalls: "My job was to collect all the questions and write official answers. Well, that meeting with the Japanese staff went on for
about three hours. There was one program coordinator who was getting
very vocal and emotional about human rights issues, but the Japanese
staff basically responded, 'What gay issue?' For the secretary-general it
was the first time he'd heard about it, institutional memory being what it
is. The official response we settled on was 'CLAIR is open to discussion on
this."'

Unable to press their concerns for fear of being outed, eventually the
support group settled on a name that would tell other gays and lesbians
people exactly what they were about but that, according to Garth, "was sufficiently vague to keep the Japanese off the secret." For his part, Garth
became involved in numerous other JET Program projects, some of which
were quite successful; he nevertheless left CLAIR feeling quite bitter at
what he termed "the rampant whitewashing and blatant disregard for
truth endemic to Japanese bureaucracy."

DRUNK DRIVING, DRUGS, AND SUICIDES

The first wave of JET participants represented nearly a 400 percent increase
over the MEF and BET programs. This dramatic escalation in numbers only
magnified the cultural gulf between JET participants and their hosts and encouraged numerous misunderstandings and incidents that required nationallevel intervention. Indeed, during the first year of the program, CLAIR
alone counseled -164 JET participants encountering various difficulties in adjusting to their life in Japan. In the overwhelming majority of these cases,
the JET participants approached one of the program coordinators directly.
CLAIR officials broke the problems down into four categories: relationship
with host institution, including disputes over housing, vacation time, and
other work regulations (64 cases); daily life in Japan, including taxes, privacy, and medical care (43 cases); secondary employment and returning
early to the participant's home country (33 cases); and other causes, such as
sexual harassment (24 cases).31 Since local officials were often at the center
of these complaints, typical cases are described in depth in chapter 4.

In the third year of the program, however, events unfolded that would
shake the foundations of the program and highlight cultural contrasts in
approaches to morality and counseling. In the fall of 1989, JET participants
were involved in two well-publicized incidents of drunk driving. First, in
early October a JET's accident led to serious property damage, embarrassment, and ultimately his resignation from the program. Complicating the
situation was this JET participant's extreme popularity in the small town in
which he was working; indeed, town officials lobbied for him to stay. But to
drink and drive is a serious moral transgression in Japan, especially for
teachers: CLAIR made the difficult decision that for the sake of the program as a whole and to atone for his poor judgment, he should be terminated from the program.

In December, a much more serious accident occurred. While driving
under the influence, a male JET ran a red light and was hit by a 4-ton truck.
He was not alone-a Japanese friend was in the car. It took about a half
hour to extract them: both unconscious, they were rushed by ambulance to
the hospital. The JET arrived at the hospital in very serious condition with
chest injuries and cerebral hemorrhaging. After surgery and several months' rehabilitation, he recovered. His Japanese friend, although initially not expected to live, came out of a coma after about a week and began
her slow recovery.

These incidents brought JET participants under the authority of a law
enforcement system that treats alcohol-related offenses much more
strictly than do most of their home countries. Because the JET participant
was drunk, Japanese insurance did not cover the accident: he was ordered to
work in Japan until he repaid the debt in full. The CLAIR Newsletter published a strongly worded cautionary note after the incident:

We cannot emphasize enough the far-reaching effects of such actions.
... Insurance will not cover alcohol-related accidents, and there is the
probability that criminal charges and fines will be brought against you.
And, according to Japanese law, friends that drink with you prior to an
alcohol-related incident may be held responsible as well.

Please remember: in Japan, the moral standards for teachers are
strict. Teachers are held in especially high regard. This extends to ALTs
as well.... Don't abuse that respect. What you do has the potential to
affect not only your reputation, but may also damage the respectability
of future JETs in your area.39

Unfortunately, drunk driving was not the only serious problem confronting CLAIR officials. Many of the JET participants travel to other
Asian countries during their summer or winter break, and the temptation
to bring back illegal substances into Japan can be great. When two JET participants were arrested in the mid-i99os for possession of minute amounts
of marijuana, the incident proved traumatic for all parties concerned. The
host schools and students were shocked, and the prefectural board of education called an emergency meeting of all JET participants. As the arrest
was widely reported in both English and Japanese media, nationally and locally, it caused extreme embarrassment to the governor, who had supported the JET Program's growth.

After the incident had run its course, CLAIR persuaded one of the convicted participants to write an open letter to all future JET participants
warning them of the consequences of using drugs in Japan. This is now
published in the general information handbook provided to all JET participants each year:

It's not just I who was affected by all of this. My neighbors had their
flowers trampled as the camera crews came to peep through the windows of my mansion [i.e., Japanese apartment]. My fiancee's mother
(68 years old) had to pedal her bicycle about four miles to the police
station to be interrogated. People I've worked with or knew, including
[program participants], were subject to the same treatment or worse. The hardest thing about this all is that there is no way to be forgiven,
to repay the respect and kindness I once received... .

From arrest to indictment took in my case 22 days. During this period you stay at a police station. When not in your cell you are handcuffed and led around the station like a dog on a rope. I was questioned
an average of nine hours a day (one hour for lunch in my cell) for the
first 17 days ... I spent my first five days in custody in a six-mat room
with a glass-enclosed toilet, no way to wash your hands or get a drink. I
shared it with a yakaiza [gang] member and an old man fresh from a
garbage can with some skin disease. Constantly scratching, we slept six
inches apart. Eventually, I was put in isolation. And all the time, 24hour daylight conditions with guards moving in the shadows....

Besides the emotional suffering and breakdown (imagine seeing
your fiancee's eyes when you are handcuffed to a chair, thinking you'll
never be able to marry her let alone see her again-and she knows
nothing about dope!!), the financial loss for me is mind-boggling.40

The writer then itemizes the roughly $21,000 in expenses he incurred. In
the interest of deterrence, the handbook does exaggerate the potential fallout from such an infraction ("It is quite fortunate for everyone that the
Diet-the Japanese national assembly-was preoccupied with other, more
pressing issues at the time"), but this section on illegal substances is by far
the most toughly worded part of the orientation manual.

Perhaps most traumatic were the three suicides that occurred within
eighteen months of each other. On 9 September 1989, at 12:43 in the afternoon, a Canadian woman, Sherill Anderson, was struck by an express
Odakyu train passing through Tamagawa Gakuenmae station: according to
the driver and two other eyewitnesses, she jumped. Local newspapers drew
on the negative publicity that had surrounded the first two years of the JET
Program as they began speculating that she was unhappy with her situation in Kanagawa Prefecture. But an investigation revealed no problems
relating to her living and working conditions. It appeared that she had arrived in Kanagawa a month earlier with unrelated personal issues. In an
open letter sent to all JET participants, the secretary-general gave a brief
factual account of the suicide and then noted: "Although the reason may
never be made clear, rumors have a tendency to develop when clearcut answers cannot be given. Therefore, without making assumptions as to the
root cause of the incident, it is CLAIR's opinion, contrary to some newspaper reports, that her working and living conditions were both of a very satisfactory standard. In addition, she did not, to our knowledge, discuss her
intentions with anyone connected with the Program." The greatest fallout
from this incident came from irate and thoroughly embarrassed Kanagawa prefectural officials who held CLAIR and Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials responsible for the inadequate screening of applicants.

Less than four months later a second suicide occurred-this time an
American in her second year in the program. An immensely likable, engaging woman, Jamin had been placed in Kyoto Prefecture's premier "international school." Her outgoing personality made her extremely popular
among the students, and she was one of the favorites of prefectural administrators as well. Yet on a rainy New Year's Eve in Nara, Jamin, too, stepped
in front of an express train and ended her life. Immediately following her
death, the press descended on the prefectural board of education and the
speculation began. Had her base school been remiss in failing to notice the
warning signs? Should the prefecture have made certain that she had plans
during the holidays instead of leaving her alone? Since her parents were in
the process of getting a divorce, were there personal factors involved? In
Japan, one who commits suicide traditionally leaves a note that includes a
statement of self-accusation and an apology for causing trouble; here, the
lack of any note made her actions even harder for the Japanese to understand. The Kyoto Shimbun ran an article with an apt title: "A Sudden
Death: She Loved Her Work and Her Students ... Why ?1141

In the end, no clear-cut motives emerged, but there is no question that
this second suicide in four months came as a tremendous shock to CLAIR
officials. Two representatives were immediately dispatched to Kyoto to assess the situation. This time, before Japanese officials at CLAIR sent out a
letter notifying JET participants, they asked the program coordinators to
rewrite the first draft because it sounded too cold.

The third suicide came on z8 February i99i when Lisa Isobe, a
Hawaiian-born JET participant, jumped in front of a train in Kyoto. Lisa
spoke Japanese quite well, as she had been an ALT for two years before
switching to become a CIR in her third year. She was well-liked and
seemed on the verge of a promising career, having been accepted at Harvard. As with Jamin's death, it proved difficult to make sense of a motive;
Lisa too left no note.

THE PROFESSIONAL COUNSELING DEBATE

The back-to-back-to-back suicides highlighted a long-standing demand by
the program coordinators and embassy representatives for a carefully
thought-out system of crisis management. Arguing that the Japanese approach was reactive rather than proactive, they pointed to the complete absence of any kind of professional counseling services for JET participants. To be sure, on paper the counseling system looked impressive; a "Special
Committee on Counseling and Training" included representatives from
the three sponsoring ministries and the embassies of the participants'
home countries. But the name was misleading: the committee's main function was to report program developments to representatives from the foreign embassies and get their feedback. Minutes of its meetings reveal that
they tended to be quite formal, with few questions and little discussion of
the details of particular cases.

As the JET liaisons in the respective embassies began to be contacted directly by JET participants with various concerns, embassy officials began to
press CLAIR for a more responsive system. Indeed, the program coordinators and one American embassy liaison conspired to raise this question at
meetings of the committee on counseling and training. Caroline told me:

The American embassy representative especially, every meeting, really
brought up the fact that there should be a psychologist connected to the
program. I'd say he brought it up at four different meetings. Actually,
he was really good because we could feed him information, because the
Japanese of course took the embassies' requests very seriously, as opposed to ours [laughter]. We learned that lesson very quickly. Anyway,
[the JET liaison in the American embassy], because he was an American, I was an American, he let us feed him information and if he agreed,
he'd bring it up at the meeting. And as a result of that the secretarygeneral actually agreed to have somebody on call if there was a serious
problem. We had someone to call when we felt like it was over our
heads and also to give program coordinators training, serious counseling training.

In addition to hiring a professional counselor, CLAIR also instructed prefectures to set up a counseling system for JET participants. Ironically,
though, it was not initially stipulated that these "advisors" had to be fluent
English speakers, and some prefectural offices of education chose older Japanese educators who had had some overseas experience but were certainly
not prepared to be the confidants of foreign youth.

Still, a rudimentary system of crisis management was not implemented
until nearly three years after the program had begun, and only after a number of unfortunate incidents. Such slowness to perceive a need for this service and then to provide it may seem surprising, but the ministry officials
tended to believe that JET participants' need for serious counseling lay in
personal dysfunction or family problems. One Ministry of Education official
put it this way: "We can't mix up personality and culture. Traffic accidents
and suicide are personal acts and shouldn't be confused with culture. If it was
because of the system (ukeire seido), that would be a serious matter."