Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program (32 page)

More Problems

Over the next few months, there was no letup in problems. First, an Irish
ALT, Pete, was arrested for drunkenly kicking a police car on the main
thoroughfare of the prefecture's capital city, and it was up to Sato-sensei
and Tanaka-san to vouch for his character, apologize to school personnel,
and ultimately bail him out after a two-day stint in jail. Tanabe-san explained that Pete had antagonistic feelings toward police in general as a result of growing up in Northern Ireland.

Some months later, Wendy appeared at the board of education with her
letter of resignation. She had been placed at Subame High School-the
oldest, most traditional, and most academic high school in the prefectureand from the start it had been a bad match. She did not get along with most
of her teachers, and there was very little room in the curriculum for conversational English. With little training in Japanese language and culture
and little patience for difference, she had quickly soured on Japanese education and society. Recently, she had become pregnant and her husband had
found a job elsewhere, so she had decided to call it quits. But she had two financial demands. First, according to the contract, if she quit in midmonth
she would have to pay back some of that month's salary, which she had already received. This infuriated her, and Sato-sensei generously offered a
compromise, realizing the futility of trying to recover money already disbursed. Second, Wendy insisted that the prefecture pay her airfare home
even though her contract stated clearly that she would forfeit it if she left
early. She argued that she knew of cases in other prefectures in which the
rules had been bent. On this point, however, Sato-sensei held his ground.

Shortly after Wendy's departure, Brent, an ALT who had been based in
the prefectural education center for two years, was notified by the board of
education that he was to travel by bus once a week to teach in Wendy's
place. He replied that he was not interested in doing that, as it was not part
of his job description. In no mood to bargain, the head of the compulsory
education section told him that he was not asking for an opinion but telling
Brent to do it. Reluctantly, Brent agreed. The next morning, however, his
boss at the education center secretly went to the bus station and hid
nearby, reading a newspaper, to see whether Brent actually showed up.
When he did not arrive, his boss called the board of education; after the
confrontation that ensued, Brent quit. Then, having sent home thousands
of dollars in savings, he told Sato-sensei and Tanabe-san he did not have
enough money to cover his financial obligations (outstanding bills for rent,
phone, utilities, etc.) before leaving. These two cases only confirmed for
Tanabe-san and Sato-sensei what they had already surmised: some ALTs
could be downright cheap. A Japanese person, they said, even if he only
made a third of the ALTs' salary, would never consider lodging such complaints and demands. After recounting the stories later, Tanabe-san fumed,
"Sometimes I think money is all the ALTs worry about! "Zs

BUREAUCRATIC INFORMALITY AND RESPONSES TO CONFLICT

Moments of crisis often expose taken-for-granted assumptions embedded
in structures of power, and the prefecture's handling of the incidents described is quite revealing. Most notably, Sato-sensei and Tanabe-san would
go to extremes to prevent ALTs from leaving prematurely. Their sensitivity to outsiders' perceptions and desire to shield signs of conflict from the
public eye were typical of prefectural responses more generally.

Yet their readiness to appease by no means suggests that they saw the
ALTs' demands as justified. Both Sato-sensei and Tanabe-san tended to
blame their misfortunes on the selection of "bad" (shitsu ga yokunai) foreigners by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Tanabe-san, for instance, in formed me shortly after my arrival that there were basically three kinds of
ALTs: those who came to teach, those who came to vacation and sightsee,
and those who came to further their business careers. The latter two types,
he explained, generally approached their work in schools with a less-thanserious demeanor and therefore were unacceptable to the board of education. Noting that the quality of ALTs seemed to be declining with each year
of the program, he added: "The main thing we try to avoid is ALTs leaving
early. So far we haven't been very successful at that, but our colleagues understand that it's because of problems with the foreign assistants, not us. If
someone left because of conditions at his school, that would really be an
embarrassment for us." This separation of (structural) conditions of employment and personal responses of ALTs into mutually exclusive categories has little explanatory value, for it ignores the complex interaction
between the two that occurs in international exchanges; it does, however,
usefully shift fault away from the prefectural school system.

One way to improve the quality of their participants was to game the
selection process to their advantage. After the second year of the program,
Sato-sensei and Tanabe-san decided that since they had had considerable
trouble with Americans and Australians, they would request only British
and Canadian participants the following year. When that made no difference, they then requested only men, on the grounds that women had a
harder time adjusting to Japanese society. This second request was not
granted by CLAIR, yet the sentiment behind it-the belief that women
were more likely to suffer from adjustment problems-was one I encountered frequently among educational administrators. Data only slightly
support this notion; as of 1991, women accounted for 57 percent of all JET
participants and 65 percent of those who resigned prematurely.z9

Hiring a Human Shield

At the same time that they were trying to tweak the selection process to
their advantage, Sato-sensei and Tanabe-san were taking several other decisive steps to ward off future problems and to reduce the chances of more
face-to-face conflict in a foreign language. The most dramatic of these
measures was the decision to hire a veteran ALT to work as liaison in the
prefectural board of education itself. In the summer of 1989 Kevin, a cleancut, likable American with a master's degree in English literature, was reassigned from the commercial high school to full-time duty in the board of
education. Sato-sensei had become acquainted with Kevin in a very unorthodox manner: Kevin's Japanese girlfriend had become pregnant, and the two had hastily decided to get married. In spite of the awkwardness of
their encounter, Sato-sensei was impressed with Kevin's sense of responsibility and his sensitivity to Japanese cultural nuances. He also had two
other traits that were indispensable for the job: he enjoyed after-hours
drinking, and he had a very effective and charismatic classroom presence.

Bringing Kevin into the prefectural office had several benefits. First, he
could act as a human shield. Not only was Kevin expected to help mediate
crises, but he was also asked to work proactively, calling all ALTs soon after
the school year began to learn how they were adjusting and to offer advice
when possible. Eventually, he was dispatched to every single base school
hosting an ALT to consult with each about team teaching and how to improve relations with the school.30 In addition, Kevin provided important
administrative help. Only months earlier Tanabe-san had requested that
the prefectural office establish a new position to help coordinate the ALT
project, but the budget office had denied his request. Assigning an ALT to
work in the prefectural board of education was an alternative strategy for
gaining assistance at minimal extra cost to the prefecture.

A final benefit to hiring Kevin was the role he could play in deflecting
AJET's demands. Sato-sensei was adamantly against AJET, and he felt that
CLAIR had gone overboard in acceding to the group's wishes. For example,
when CLAIR asked prefectural boards of education to classify the meetings
of AJET prefectural representatives as an "official business trip" (shucchoatsukai), thus allowing them to miss their school classes without taking
vacation time or losing pay, Sato-sensei complained, "We really ought not
to allow them to do that." He continued:

Sometimes at [Tokyo] orientation when I hear AJET people criticize the
textbooks, I feel like telling them, "If you don't like them, go home!"
Today at the Ministry of Education meetings for ETCs, Mr. Wada said
that ideally they would just follow the ministry's plan for orientation,
but that we have to let AJET play a role or they won't cooperate with
us. In some ways I think they're just like the teachers' union because
the AJET representatives spend so much time working on their own
projects that they don't spend time trying to improve relations with
Japanese teachers at their school. So we don't want our prefectural
ALTs to get involved with AJET.

So eager was Sato-sensei not to have to deal separately with AJET's prefectural representative that when Kevin went to the renewers' conference
in the spring, he urged him to run for the position of prefectural representative. But Kevin lost, and the following year saw much tension between the board of education and AJET's prefectural representative, who felt that
Sato-sensei's tendency to consult with Kevin about ALT policy left him out
of the loop. "It would be so much easier," lamented Sato-sensei, "if the
board of education could choose the AJET representative."

Apparently, Sato-sensei and Tanabe-san were not alone in recognizing
that some buffer was needed in the board of education. In 1991 CLAIR
formally instituted a position of "prefectural liaison" in response to the decline in AJET membership and to the growing realization that AJET prefectural representatives did not always share the views of the majority of
ALTs in their prefecture. By 1995 roughly 70 percent of prefectures and
designated cities employed a veteran ALT in the board of education for at
least a day or two a week.;' While ALTs in this position had limited influence over decisions made by the board of education, their mere presence in
these offices forced prefectural administrators to come to grips with diversity on a daily basis.

When Trust Breaks Down: The Role of Employment Contracts

Yet another strategy devised by Sato-sensei and Tanabe-san for dealing
with their numerous problems was to create an increasingly detailed and
airtight employment contract. Each year, they would revise the contracts,
adding new articles or rewording old ones, in light of the previous year's
events. By 199o the contract had become a small booklet that elaborated in
excruciating detail every conceivable expectation and contingency. Its
twenty-eight "articles" covered resignation, dismissal, reduction of salary,
traveling expenses, holidays, paid leave, special holidays, special holidays
for female ALTs, absence, prosecution leave, prohibition from outside
work, procedure for taking sick leave, supervisors' orders, diligence, conduct restrictions, confidentiality, restrictions against involvement in profitmaking enterprises, religious activities and related matters, restrictions on
operating motor vehicles, disciplinary action, and more.

The use of detailed employment contracts runs contrary to Japanese
custom. Typically, contracts are short, symbolic documents used to signify
the cementing of a long-term relationship of trust and mutual cooperation.
Tacit understanding and an implied sense of trust are preferred to a formal,
written delineation of job responsibilities, rules, and regulations. It is assumed that unforeseen problems will be worked out through mutual goodwill and cooperation, and the entire system takes for granted that individual and institutional goals are not by definition in conflict. In contrast, the
legal formulations of employment in the JET participants' home countries grow out of a very different notion of justice, as Frank Upham has pointed
out: "If society is built on individualism and competition and the only acknowledged common ground is enlightened self-interest, social life becomes a desperate contest and community nothing more than a temporary
equilibrium among fundamentally unconnected and potentially antagonistic actors. Because mutual trust and personal relationships are contingent and make unreliable guides for resolving conflict, the rules of the contest and the mode of their application become all important."32 This
legal-rational model emphasizes explicit, context-free standardization of
rules and procedures and the importance of public contracts that delineate,
item by item, specific rules and responsibilities.

In most Japanese organizations, however, expressive exchange relationships of a general, long-term nature coexist with more instrumental and
contractual ones. Within the formal bureaucratic structure, we find one-toone relationships between superiors and subordinates that are based on
mutual trust, confidence, and loyalty and that involve a variety of expressive exchanges even outside the workplace. In effect, there are two social
orders operating in Japanese bureaucracy. One is the formal level of universal principle, which in Japan is referred to as tatemae. The other is the
informal level, or honne, influenced by the realities of particular situations
and relationships.33

During the MEF Program only a two-page contract was used, but Japanese officials quickly realized that adherence to this custom would prove
disastrous as the numbers of participants who were unfamiliar with Japanese cultural expectations increased exponentially. For prefectural administrators, the crucial problem was how to control and manage ALTs given
that informal mechanisms of social control did not seem to work. They
could not count on the ALTs' having internalized Japanese norms of proper
behavior, valuing the nonverbal conveyance of information, or striving to
understand what was expected of them without being told.

Rather than attempting to socialize ALTs to the expectations of Japanese
work groups, Japanese administrators took the opposite approach and tried
to meet the JET participants on their own terms. This tendency was encouraged at the national level. In 1987 CLAIR sent a model contract to all
prefectures, with instructions that it could be modified in accordance with
local expectations, and included in its orientation manual for local governments a strongly worded directive: