Read Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program Online
Authors: David L. McConnell
Prefectural versus Municipal ALTs
Alison, twenty-two, a graduate of a small liberal arts college in the midwestern part of the United States, was one of the first ALTs in the prefecture to be hired by a municipality, a small town that had become quite wealthy because of its local steel company. Having had a very positive experience at the Tokyo orientation and having already made friends with
several other ALTs in her prefecture, she was eager to go through the prefectural orientation. Though Sato-sensei had told her that she was employed by a city rather than the prefecture, her unfamiliarity with the
structure of local government in Japan prevented her from appreciating the
full import of his remarks.
The morning of the contract-signing ceremony, however, Alison was
pulled aside by Sato-sensei and introduced to the man who had come to
pick her up. Since Alison would be signing her contract with the town,
Sato-sensei said, she would not be participating in the prefectural orientation for other ALTs. This differential treatment confused and angered her
because she felt she had lost a chance to gain much useful information
about team teaching. Moreover, she had been looking forward to cementing friendships with other ALTs before they met their liaisons and were officially dispersed. From her point of view, she was working in the prefecture just like everyone else, and it did not make sense to exclude her from
prefectural activities. Alison was so annoyed that she complained to her
boss at the board of education immediately on arriving in her host town;
on the next day Sato-sensei received a call from an irate superintendent of
education demanding to know why Alison had been excluded from the orientation.
Alison's was not an isolated case. As late as 1990, the minutes of a meeting between AJET representatives and CLAIR officials contained the following complaint from an unnamed ALT: "The segregation of 'prefectural'
and 'other' JETS began at the airport. City, town and village JETS were
grabbed and taken away while prefectural JETS had an orientation. The division bothers JETS very much; forming relationships/friendships is very
important at the early stages of arrival .1120 Understanding what happened
requires a quick review of the complicated horizontal and vertical linkages
that constitute the JET Program's administrative chain of command.
Below the national level, the most important distinction for Japanese officials is whether the JET participant is employed by one of the 47 prefectures (kenhaichi), by one of 12 "designated cities" (shitei toshi haichi), or
by one of the 3,245 municipalities (shichoson haichi) further divided into
cities, towns, and villages. Although jurisdictions overlap to some degree,
all of these are administratively distinct entities with independent hiring
and firing powers. The problem is further compounded because the Ministry of Home Affairs (through CLAIR) and the Ministry of Education
have separate administrative windows (madoguchi) at each of these levels. Ironically, even though over go percent of JET participants are assigned to
boards of education and schools, the official administrative window for the
JET Program at the prefectural level is not the board of education at all but
rather the international relations division (kokusai koryuka). All information about the overall operation of the program from CLAIR goes first to
the contact person in the prefectural international relations office, who in
theory relays the information to the board of education. At the same time,
however, all information and advice about the team-teaching component of
the program travels directly from the Ministry of Education to the prefectural boards of education, and the ministry calls the prefectural ETCs to
Tokyo at least once a year to instruct them in educational and counseling
matters relevant to the JET participants (CLAIR relies on a similar series of
regional meetings to impart guidelines to representatives of international
relations offices in local governments). It is the duty of prefectural boards
of education to forward relevant information to district boards of education, who in turn send it to municipal boards of education. While district
boards of education are relatively fixed within the prefectural orbit, the
municipal boards of education are more difficult to control.
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."