Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program (51 page)

Despite its shaky start, the JET Program seems to have generated a
tremendous amount of goodwill among college faculty in Japan-related fields
in the participating countries. At those times when job prospects for graduating seniors in many of the participating countries are not promising, JET offers students an attractive option-both for those interested in pursuing
Japan-related careers and for those interested in a cross-cultural learning experience before entering graduate school or tackling the job market at home.
Two graduate institutions in the United States have even instituted scholarships specifically for JET alumni: the Monterey Institute of International
Studies offers a JET Alumni Scholarship for its TESOL (teaching of English
to speakers of other languages) program, and the Japan-American Institute
of Management Science at the University of Hawaii offers scholarships for
its Japan-focused management programs. Indeed, the benefits of the program
on the individual level, in cultivating international goodwill and establishing
cross-cultural ties, may far exceed those on the national scale, gained in pursuit of the ambitious goals of reforming Japanese society and education.

The Japanese enthusiasm for the JET Alumni Association makes perfect
sense, for in Japan enduring ties of group membership have an important
cultural function. Japanese regularly meet for school reunions, even of
their elementary school graduating class. Japan's Fulbright alumni network is renowned for its level of activity and its dedication to fund-raising,
going so far as to sponsor additional Fulbright scholars abroad. Members
act, in large part, from a genuine concern for reciprocity and a desire to return something to those who made their experience possible. But culture
can also be mobilized for political ends, and we can also see a strong component of national self-interest in the promotion of JETAA. Ideally, each
chapter provides a solid constituency of pro-Japan youth in each of the participating countries.

A wide range of program policies support this goal. For example, most
of the overseas advertisements for the JET Program stress that it promotes "international exchange" and provides the opportunity to learn about
Japan; teaching in the schools is mentioned almost as an afterthought. The
three-year limit on participation, the age limit of thirty-five, and the tendency of the Japanese side to appease the foreign participants and to judge
program success in terms of their "level of happiness" also make the most
sense if viewed in light of this goal of enhancing foreign understanding of
Japan. When the possibility of eliminating the age limit and extending the
period of stay from three to four years was brought up at one symposium
at the tenth anniversary celebration, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs representative responded: "From the standpoint of having these people as assets
to Japan's foreign relations, extending the length of service from three to
four years means more or less slowing down increase in the number of
such people through decrease in the number of invitees. Also, with regard
to the age limit of thirty-five, it is possible that it was considered better to
invite younger people than older ones from the viewpoint of building up
diplomatic assets for the future."41 CLAIR and ministry officials have even
begun to complain that the renewer rate is too high, as veterans are taking
up spaces that could be filled by new applicants. This is striking admission
of their focus on the foreign relations goals of the JET Program, even to the
detriment of educational ends.

Japanese Language Policy

The evolution of Japanese language policy nicely illustrates the cultural
drift in program implementation. One of the striking silences in JET Program policy during its fledgling years was the sparse encouragement for
learning the Japanese language. As one ALT pointed out in an evaluation
meeting at CLAIR in 199o, "Nothing in the JET Program suggests that
anyone in Mombusho views Japanese language acquisition as an important
thing." Although CLAIR sent audiotapes on beginning Japanese to all participants before they came to Japan, there was no follow-up. Indeed, all
three ministries have resisted the idea of including workshops on the Japanese language at the Tokyo orientation or at other conferences. Wada Minoru explained to me the Ministry of Education's position: since the official job of the ALTs is to teach their native language, Japanese language
study should be undertaken privately by each participant.42

Many ALTs, however, saw the study of Japanese language and culture as
one of the primary goals of their stay in the country. Few are certified
teachers or have experience teaching English as a second language. Given
that Japanese officials repeatedly exhort them to respect Japanese culture and schools, they have argued that, at the very least, there should be official encouragement to study Japanese as a means to accomplish this. Frustrated by the perceived lack of support from the Ministry of Education for
one of their main aims, JET participants requested a special AJETsponsored session on learning Japanese at the 1989 Tokyo Orientation.
Nearly two hundred people attended, even though it was held at 7:0o A.M.

After years of protests, CLAIR finally began to move on the issue; in
1990 it produced a text and tape called Japanese for CIRs, which was an extremely useful introduction to conversational Japanese needed in the
workplace. But the majority of JET participants still had no formal support.
It wasn't until 1992, five years into the program, that CLAIR and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs began to plan a series of three Japanese language
learning opportunities that would be open to ALTS during their stay in
Japan. But the outcome was not at all what JET participants had expected.
Instead of producing courses that would assist JET participants in conversational Japanese, all three initiatives were ultimately tied to producing
qualified teachers of Japanese abroad.

The first course, CLAIR's Correspondence Course in Japanese, was an attempt to provide language learning opportunities for JET participants without removing them from their job sites. Once the proposal was funded by
the Japan Lottery Association, the secretary-general at CLAIR asked Bonjinsha, a reputable publisher of Japanese language materials, to publish and
administer the course. A professor of linguistics at Osaka University was
chosen to oversee its design, and several other experts in Japanese linguistics contracted to write chapters for the course. After much of this legwork
had been done, Peter Evans, a program coordinator, was brought on board to
assist in the final editorial work. His main complaint when he began working at CLAIR had been the JET participants' lack of interest in learning Japanese (over 6o percent report that they study Japanese less than three hours
a week or not at all), which he saw as a cultural failing on their part.

When the draft of the course finally arrived at CLAIR, though, it was a
far cry from what the program coordinators had sought. Evans recalled,
"Basically, it was a graduate level course in linguistic analysis of Japanese. It
was all wa and ga and the use of particles. There was no Japanese script at
all." In addition, the material was poorly edited, as Bonjinsha had published
little in English prior to this project. But CLAIR's agreement was that the
program coordinators would review the draft only for spelling errors.

To make matters worse, CLAIR had miscalculated how strenuously prefectures would resist paying for language study by JET participants. Cost
for the course had been set at 6o,ooo yen (approximately $500) per person, to be split between the individual and the host institution, but over 8o percent of host institutions initially refused to fund their share. With deadlines looming, CLAIR officials were forced to resort to strong-arm tactics.
Evans remembered:

There was a lot of arm-twisting. We had a chart of which prefectures
were giving us trouble and bucho [the division chief] would get on the
phone and engage in the most overt type of persuasion I witnessed during my time at CLAIR. It completely changed my view of what CLAIR
can and can't do. They can force prefectures if they want to, and they
were very creative with their offers for how prefectures could pay.
CLAIR offered to wait for payment until next year's budget kicked in
or to reduce monthly allocation tax payment by the 30,000 yen cost of
the course. A few holdouts were offered the possibility of paying but
then having their lump sum increased a bit.

By the end of the phone campaign, every prefecture had verbally committed to the project.

But that commitment hardly guaranteed success. For JET participants,
the first year of the correspondence course was a disaster. It offered nothing at all of practical value, such as how to order from a menu or answer
phone calls in the office. In addition, the homework had little relevance to
the text, and JET participants were never told how it was graded. After the
first marking period, 85 percent of participants had received As and 15 percent Bs-a direct result of the overseer advising Bonjinsha to be lenient so
that students would not become discouraged. Evans told me, "It was the
worst grading situation you could imagine. They were giving letter grades
to each question, but students would get final grades that didn't reflect
grades on individual questions." And they were not shy about making
their opinions known: "In September alone I had too phone calls of complaints on this issue. People were angry and were saying things like, 'I'm
gonna tell everybody I know not to do this.' We did a survey during that
first year and found that just under 4 percent were satisfied, 5 percent had
no opinion, and the other 91 percent were dissatisfied. There were 3
months when I did too hours of overtime. The whole process just shows
how inefficient CLAIR was. I always hold this case up as the worst example of politico-bureaucratic decision making." Not surprisingly, applications for the second year of the course dropped precipitously.

In response to these problems, CLAIR held an evaluation meeting at
which, in the words of one participant, "the whole course was ripped
apart." The authors were all qualified specialists in their field, but CLAIR
and Bonjinsha officials clearly had misinterpreted what JET participants wanted. The secretary-general at the time was generally supportive of
these critiques, and he agreed to allow CLAIR to produce the text at their
own office. Evans reflected,

That gave us control over production schedule and some on content,
though mostly it was window dressing. I became the prime mover of
the project and completely bypassed the chain of command so that I
could work directly with the secretary-general. He was sympathetic but
only in the language of "there are improvements that can be made." I
even learned phrases like "labial dental" and "fricative" in Japanese. I
tried to wed pragmatic and linguistic approaches, and we asked authors
to rewrite their sections. It improved somewhat but it never became the
functional introduction to Japanese we had hoped for.

That the approach taken diverged so sharply from what most JET participants had expected suggests that more than the need to prepare for
"exam hell" influences Japanese methods of language instruction. Although the correspondence course had a very different purpose, the usual
Japanese emphasis on learning through focusing on form and repetition of
discrete grammatical items found its way into the curriculum. The project
thus replicated the major problems plaguing the teaching of foreign languages in Japanese schools, and to JET participants it seemed to demonstrate that CLAIR was simply paying lip service to communicationoriented language teaching.

But the course's design also reflected CLAIR officials' perception of its
ultimate utility, which was in training those who enrolled to teach the Japanese language abroad. This idea, in keeping with JET's purpose as a foreign relations strategy, had initially been raised by officials within the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the JET participants appeared to be a readymade pool of potential language teachers, easily tapped. In addition to the
correspondence course the ministry thus initiated the second course, a
two-month program of Japanese language study in Tokyo for selected JET
participants who desired to teach Japanese on their return home. Attendees
received scholarships that covered the entire cost of the program, but they
were required first to have completed not only CLAIR's correspondence
course but also the third course: a short-term intensive program in Japanese language at the Ministry of Home Affair's state-of-the-art intercultural training facility on the shores of Lake Biwa in Shiga Prefecture.

Without question JET participants are offered more options for learning
Japanese today than they were during the program's start-up period, and
Japanese officials can honestly claim to have responded to the complaints about inadequate language training and support. Yet while fulfilling the
letter of the JET participants' demands, they ensured that the solution better suited Japanese conceptions of internationalization. Ironically, by targeting these language courses at the minority of JET participants who
might want to teach Japanese after returning home, CLAIR and Ministry
of Foreign Affairs officials have ignored the ALTs' much larger need: the
skills to aid their integration into Japanese schools and local communities.
Only in 1999 did serious work begin on a proposal to offer a correspondence course that truly stresses conversational Japanese.

Cultural Exchange and the National Interest

I do not mean to suggest that the idea of JET as a cultural exchange program is a bad one. Given Japan's often vexed relations with other governments in matters of global economic or political affairs, it is refreshing to
know that many JET participants and their Japanese hosts forge meaningful personal relationships with each other. In addition, regardless of their
take on Japan, JET alumni are able to put a realistic, human face on a society that is all too often stereotyped by foreign media.