Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program (4 page)

James Abegglen, cross-cultural consultant,
in "Japan's Ultimate Vulnerability" (1988)

The greatest single problem the Japanese face today is their
relationship with other peoples.... Japan naturally is much
admired but it is not widely liked or trusted.

The late Edwin 0. Reischauer, former U.S. ambassador
to Japan, in The Japanese Today (1988)

Over the past decade a fascinating social experiment has been quietly unfolding in schools, communities, and local government offices throughout
Japan. Conceived during the height of the U.S.-Japan trade war in the mid-
ig8os, the proposal for the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program
was first presented as a "gift" to the American delegation at the "RonYasu" summit in 1986 between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Japanese
Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone. At considerable expense, the Japanese
government would invite young people from the United States and several
other English-speaking countries "to foster international perspectives by
promoting international exchange at local levels as well as intensifying
foreign language education."' After a weeklong orientation in Tokyo, participants would be sent to local schools and government offices throughout
the country. At a time when conflict about economic policy seemed neverending, the JET Program would provide tangible evidence of good faith efforts being taken to open up the Japanese system at local levels and to rectify the imbalance in the flow of goods and personnel.

Three ministries-Jichisho, Mombusho, and Gaimusho-were charged
with administering the program jointly. The Ministry of Home Affairs (Jichisho) gained overall control of the program, including the budget, and
quickly formed an administrative agency to oversee implementation. The
Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture (Mombusho) was charged
with providing guidance to offices of education and local schools regarding
the team-teaching portion of the program. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs
(Gaimusho) would recruit participants through its consulates overseas. Job
types for participants were divided into two major categories. The first, assistant English teachers (AETs) based in public secondary schools or offices
of education, would make up more than go percent of all participants; their
primary duties would involve team-teaching communicative language
classes with a Japanese teacher of English.' Those in the second category of
participants, coordinators of international relations (CIRs), were to be
placed in prefectural or municipal offices, where they would assist in a variety of international activities in their area.

On i August 1987, less than a year after the initial press release, the first
group of 848 college graduates from the United States, Britain, Australia,
and New Zealand arrived at Narita Airport outside Tokyo; they were
greeted with an extraordinary degree of media hype and with red-carpet
treatment.; These "foreign ambassadors," as they were called, were wined
and dined at a five-star Tokyo hotel during a weeklong orientation. Their
arrival was covered by all the major newspapers and television networks in
Japan. The governor of Tokyo and cabinet ministers from the sponsoring
ministries attended the opening ceremony. Speech after speech by top government officials stressed the select nature of the foreigners chosen to
come to Japan and exhorted them to shoulder an important part of the responsibility for Japan's internationalization. As one American participant
recalled, "We were treated like stars and really felt special."

But the concept of internationalization, so easy to agree on when kept
abstract, began to break down as soon as the reform-minded college graduates were dispatched to public secondary schools and local government
offices throughout Japan. Accustomed to being in the racial majority in
their own cultures, many were surprised at being thrust into a fish bowl
where they were subject to stares and much scrutiny. Others were shocked
when prefectural offices began sending them on a one-shot basis to dozens
of schools, where they were wheeled out like living globes in classroom
after classroom. The realities of entrance exams and the poor conversational abilities of many Japanese teachers of English left most feeling underutilized at best and intentionally misled at worst. By the third year of
the program, burnout and cynicism had become rampant, and the informal grapevine among foreign participants was abuzz with the dark view that
the government was using JET participants as mere window dressing.

On the Japanese side, prefectural administrators complained bitterly, if
privately, about the extra work and indigestion created by daily interactions with unpredictable foreigners. Seminars on "how to team-teach"
spread like wildfire around the country; virtually overnight, publication of
step-by-step guidebooks on how to host an ALT became a cottage industry.

To compound the expectations gap, a number of serious incidentsranging from participants being sexually harassed to driving drunk to
committing suicide (see chapter 3)-shook program morale during the
early years. In the first year more than 9o percent of foreign participants
joined together to press Japanese officials for improvements in program
policy, and in virtually every prefecture a group of participants crusaded
vocally against their treatment. As corporations attempting joint ventures
have often discovered, when people with radically different cognitive
frameworks are thrown together in a common enterprise, they may produce little more than the breakdown of trust.

Furthermore, as the program unfolded in its second and third years,
there was no shortage of domestic and foreign critics second-guessing the
government's intentions. "Teacher Torture," screamed the Tokyo Journal.
"Apathy Rampant in JET Program," proclaimed the Japan Times. "Japan
Pulls in Welcome Mat with Racial Insensitivity," charged another article,
which featured the experiences of an African American JET participant.
The San Jose Mercury News warned darkly, "The Japanese government is
spending millions to create potential enemies ... which is exactly contrary
to what it intended to do."4 Almost overnight the JET Program had become
a political football for critics of all stripes.

But ten years later, when the dust had settled and expectations had been
adjusted, the JET Program was being touted by Japanese officials and foreign participants alike as one of the most successful policies in the postwar
era. By 1999 the JET program had grown to nearly 6,ooo foreign participants each year, and there were more than 20,ooo alumni. The number of
participating countries had grown to ten for the assistant language teacher
(ALT) position; and thirty-six provided CIRs and filled a newly created category, the sports exchange advisor (SEA). With an annual budget of almost
$500 million, the JET Program now stands as a massive investment in resources and effort.

More important, ALTs are now based in nearly a third of the nation's
16,ooo-plus public secondary schools and make regular visits to virtually every one of them. This complex, top-down intervention was accomplished
with no formal resistance from the Japan Teacher's Union, which has opposed virtually every other major Ministry of Education initiative in the
postwar period. Given the received wisdom in the United States that topdown reforms rarely reach the classroom, the receptivity of the Japanese
system to such changes appears nothing short of phenomenal. Meanwhile,
CIRs have been placed in every prefectural office in Japan; the new target
is to place a foreign participant in every one of Japan's more than 3,000
municipalities (shich(5son).

The satisfaction of foreign participants as well has markedly improved.
Nearly 95 percent of JET participants say they would recommend or
strongly recommend the program to a friend. The rate of participants who
return home prematurely has fallen from a high of 3.1 percent in 1987 to
less than i percent a year by 1997, and many more participants now are extending their contracts beyond the initial year.' Moreover, the program's
effects are lasting. There is an increasingly active JET Alumni Association
with branches in all participating countries, and alumni are flocking to
graduate programs and jobs in a variety of Asia-related fields. Emblematic
of the high status the program has gained was the presence of a JET table
and a JET speaker at a Tokyo luncheon for President Clinton during his
Japan summit in April 1996.

In the fall of 1996, government officials coordinated a gala set of events
to mark the tenth anniversary of the programs The target number of foreign participants had been officially raised to 6,ooo, and the mood among
officials in each of the sponsoring ministries was optimistic. One Ministry
of Home Affairs official, likening JET to a "reverse Peace Corps," remarked,
"Considering how conservative local governments in Japan are, to get
them to open their doors to foreigners was quite a feat. It's probably not an
understatement to say that the JET Program is one of the most unusual
revolutions in world history."'

WHY STUDY THE JET PROGRAM?

The JET Program is worth examining in detail; apart from its large scale
and apparent success, it is a significant test case for top-down internationalization in a historically insular society. To be sure, there is no shortage of
studies on the topic of Japan's global integration. Yet much of this writing
suffers from what might be called a "yardstick approach." That is, Japan's
progress in internationalizing tends to be measured against a set of standards derived from Western sensibilities. The implicit assumption is that Japan must change and that it must follow a comprehensive list of prescriptions along lines dictated by Western countries. Not surprisingly,
Japan never seems to make the grade. Rather than set out on the futile
quest for some "true" definition, I view "internationalization" as a social
and political construct. Much like a historian wishing to examine different
meanings of "democracy" in different societies, I assume that the term is
multivocal, with different associations and meanings for the Japanese hosts
than it has for the foreign participants.

Moreover, those studying Japan's global integration almost always
focus on the analysis of discourse among intellectuals, politicians, media
specialists, and social elites. Few studies have attempted to show how internationalization is defined through the implementation of a policy,
thereby acquiring a form that is independent of the perspectives of any
one group of people. The JET Program transforms a buzzword into a reality, for the myriad decisions regarding program structure and policy,
the ways Japanese define and handle problem cases, their efforts to integrate the foreign participants into schools and communities-all these
make concrete (even if in unintended ways) the concept of internationalization.

The JET Program comes at a time of tremendous change and uncertainty for Japan. With the end of the cold war, and spurred by dissatisfaction over Japan's role in the Gulf War, foreign allies are questioning
whether Japan can fulfill the high expectations for leadership that have
come with her new global role. At home, the death of the Showa emperor,
domestic political shakeups, and the prolonged recession have fueled calls
for a new era of openness and a new generation of leaders.' At the same
time, the bureaucracy is increasingly under fire from all quarters for its
staunch conservatism, its insularity, and its refusal to challenge the status
quo. For some, Ronald Dore's 1979 observation, that "the Japanese elite is
full of people whose main reaction to the outside world is to wish it would
go away," still rings true.9 We are told that while bureaucratic guidance was
instrumental in engineering Japan's modernization effort, these strategies
are now outmoded. Incapable of inspiring human creativity, bureaucrats
become paralyzed in new situations in which the goals are unclear and the
means of implementation ambiguous-in short, when there is no model to
follow.

Because the JET Program is a top-down initiative that spans the entire
range of administrative levels in Japan, it is ideally situated as a window for
assessing the power and limitations of the state to foster change. On the
one hand, the centralization of policymaking-the ruling triumvirate of Liberal Democratic Party leaders, senior bureaucrats, and senior managers
of Japan's major enterprises-has long been taken for granted.10 The defining feature of Japan's political economy is held to be a close relationship between government and business, an image epitomized in "Japan, Inc." In
education as well, while the political significance of the so-called reverse
course (the systematic dismantling of many Allied Occupation reforms) is
hotly debated, the reality of recentralization, whether welcomed or not, is
rarely questioned. But, on the other hand, some scholars have recently
begun to criticize what they call the "myth of centralization." John Haley
argues that the power of the bureaucrats has been vastly overestimated;
their negotiations may influence the outcome of a policy, but they neither
command nor control it. Steven Reed has discovered a relatively high degree of local discretion and autonomy in high school education policy, and
Leonard Schoppa paints a complex picture of interaction among Ministry
of Education officials and external actors-including the ruling and opposition party leaders, businesses, universities, local educational administrators, and the teacher's union-in the formulation of educational policy."
Thus government does not, as a monolithic entity, simply impose its will;
every policy follows a unique course and grows out of specific conditions.
Most of this chapter describes the historical and cultural context in which
the JET Program began, as well as the approach used here to study it.

A case study of this program enables us to assess the tensions, inconsistencies, and gaps (or lack thereof) in the implementation process. Drawing
on Thomas Rohlen's framework for analyzing postwar educational politics,
I view each administrative level as a distinct sociocultural subsystem with
its own set of priorities and its own manner of participating in a top-down
intervention.12 Each institutional level differs along such dimensions as the
relevance of ideological concerns or outside pressure, the nature of internal
partisan politics, the distribution of formal authority, and institutional
worldview. Like playing a game of three-dimensional tic-tac-toe, implementing the JET Program involves both horizontal and vertical tensions
and cleavages.13