Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program (57 page)

30. John Flanagan, "English Teaching Project Feeling Growing Pains," Japan
Times, 2 August 1988; John Flanagan, "English-Teaching Program a Success
After Overcoming First-Year Trouble," Japan Times, 3 June 1989.

31. Edith Terry, "Just Replacing Tape Recordings, Canadian Teachers in
Japan Find: Teaching in Japan Can Be Frustrating Experience," Toronto Globe
and Mail, 12 January 1989•

32. Teresa Watanabe, "Importing English: Teacher Exchange Offers Tough
Lesson," San Jose Mercury News, 15 August 1988.

33. Satoko Nozawa, "Apathy Prevails in English Classrooms," Daily Yomiuri, 18 May 1989.

34. "School English Teaching Program Faltering: Union," Mainichi Daily
News, 27 October 1988.

35. Morita, "Beijin kyoshi ni bogen, taigaku sawagi."

36. "'Honmono eigo' juken ni fuyo? Seito hanno mo toboshiku, shitsui no
tochu kikoku mo," Kyoto Shim bun, 26 October 1988.

37. The December 1988 issue of the CLAIR Newsletter contained this note
under the heading "Media" on page 1:

It has not gone unnoticed that the JET Program has been receiving some unfavorable
press recently. Many JETs have voiced complaints at being misquoted in local newspapers or having had the meaning of what they've said distorted. Time and again
newspaper reporters focus on the negative aspects of the Program or conveniently
present half-truths which tend to emphasize grievances rather than show the program in an accurate light[:] ... as a word of advice, be wary of giving frank opinions
not only to newspaper reporters, but also to people with whom you are unfamiliar.
Criticism in Japan is not easily forgiven and it only takes one throw-away remark to
destroy months of hard-earned trust and respect.

38. The JET Program(me): Five Years and Beyond (Tokyo: Council of Local
Authorities for International Relations, 1992), 78.

39. "Under the Influence," CLAIR Newsletter, no. 7 (December 1989): 1.

40. The Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme General Information
Handbook (Tokyo: Council of Local Authorities for International Relations,
1995),17-18-_

41. Matsuda Hisako, "Totsuzen no shi: Shigoto, scito wo ai shi ... naze?"
Kyoto Shimbun, 26 January 1990.

42. Nancy Sato has argued that the term "relations oriented" rather than
"group oriented" best captures the dynamic between the individual and the
group in Japanese society. See "Honoring the Individual," in Teaching and
Learning in Japan, ed. Thomas Rohlen and Gerald LeTendre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 119-53. Robert Smith observes that "much of
the definition of a 'good person' involves restraint in the expression of personal
desires and opinions, empathy for the feelings of others, and the practice of civility"; Japanese Society: Tradition, Self, and the Social Order (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), 44-45.

43. Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Japanese Patterns of Behavior (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1976), 209.

44. William Horsley, "An Outsider's View of CLAIR's Activities," Jichitai
Kokusaika Foramu (Forum on Internationalization for Local Governments),
no. 11 (November 1989): 21.

45. Caroline Yang, interview with author, Tokyo, 23 March 1989.

46. Jackson Bailey, "Student Exchanges and the Use of Technology," in Between Understanding and Misunderstanding: Problems and Prospects for International Cultural Exchange, ed. Yasushi Sugiyama (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1990), 96.

47. The "wrong" reasons included (1) you like Japan but not the JET Program (look for other employment), (2) you don't like the JET Program but the
money is good and there's lots of free time (if money is your main consideration there are more lucrative means of employment), (3) you think the problems you had this year will probably not occur next year (problems have a
habit of not going away), and (4) you want to renew to postpone making a difficult career decision (procrastination should not be a reason for renewing).
CLAIR Newsletter, no. 7 (December 1989), P. 2.

48. Since 1992, CLAIR has allowed a few individuals to renew for a fourth
year, so the policy is not ironclad; but such a request usually requires extenuating circumstances and strong support from local officials, program coordinators, or both.

49. The renewal rate was 44.3 percent in 1988, 45.1 percent in 1989, 41.4
percent in 1990, and 45.2 percent in 1991 (JET Program(me), 162).

50. Minutes of First Evaluation Meeting, 1989-9o JET Program (given to
me by a program coordinator).

51. Horsley, "An Outsider's View," 21.

52. Given the secrecy of personnel decisions in Japanese bureaucracies, this
story about his reassignment was impossible to verify. I did speak with Nakamura after he had been transferred, and he confirmed that he had wanted to
stay on at CLAIR longer. Indeed, he confessed that he had really wanted to join the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but was afraid he would be posted to some remote part of the world and so had joined the Ministry of Home Affairs instead.
Now he regretted the decision. The following year he resigned from the ministry to practice law.

53. G. Victor Soogen Hori, "Teaching and Learning in the Rinzai Zen
Monastery," in Rohlen and LeTendre, Teaching and Learning in Japan, 20-4.9-

54• Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the
World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989),12-13.

55. H. J. Jones, Live Machines: Hired Foreigners in Meiji Japan (Vancouver:
University of British Columbia Press, i98o), 30-40, 116-26.

56. Gaimusho, Bunka Koryubu, Bunka Dainika (The Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, Second Cultural Affairs Division), "An Interim Evaluation of the JET
Program" (in Japanese), Shiryo, no. 87-4 (5 February 1988).

57. See, for example, the special issue of the Ministry of Home Affair's magazine devoted entirely to celebrating the inauguration of the JET Program:
Kurea: Jichitai no tame no kokusai ka johoshi (CLAIR: A Journal Promoting
the Internationalization of Local Governments), 1o November 1987.

58. The profile of resigners over this five-year period closely matched the
overall profile of JET participants in terms of nationality, sex, and type of position; JET Program(me), 8o.

59• For an extended and insightful discussion of the cultural foundation of
learning in Japan, see the essays collected in Rohlen and LeTendre, Teaching
and Learning in Japan.

CHAPTER 4. MANAGING DIVERSITY: THE VIEW
FROM A PREFECTURAL BOARD OF EDUCATION

1. To acquire a sense of the "typicality" of arrangements in this prefecture,
I visited boards of education or international relations divisions in government
offices in ten others: Fukuoka, Hyogo, Iwate, Kanagawa, Kumamoto, Osaka,
Saitama, Shiga, Kyoto, and Toyama. I also interviewed officials in two designated cities, Kyoto City and Osaka City.

2. Tanabe-san later confessed that his boss had told him to handle everything, and thus he had spent his first two hours at work that morning frantically looking up English words in his dictionary.

3. I eventually learned that my mentor at the university had played a very
important role in publicly supporting the prefecture's position on a major educational reform issue, and as a result prefectural officials were very much indebted to him. That he had been willing to spend some of this built-up goodwill on a naive graduate student from abroad was a humbling thought. In any
event, over the course of the next eighteen months I met every two months
with Tanabe-san and Sato-sensei over coffee and attended numerous seminars,
orientations, and informational meetings for JET participants, Japanese teachers of English, and local Japanese administrators.

4. Thomas P. Rohlen, "Conflict in Institutional Environments: Politics in
Education," in Conflict in Japan, ed. Ellis Krauss, Thomas P. Rohlen, and Patricia G. Steinhoff (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984), 159.

5. Jackson Bailey, "Student Exchanges and the Use of Technology," in Between Understanding and Misunderstanding: Problems and Prospects for International Cultural Exchange, ed. Yasushi Sugiyama (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1990), 9-7-

6. The road to widespread use of foreign teaching assistants had not been
smooth. In 1976 only six prefectures expressed an interest in having a foreigner
come, even though fourteen had been recommended to the Fulbright Commission. After the Ministry of Education took over the program, it placed foreigners in prefectures with which it had close ties and sought to gradually expand
the program over the years by using these "veteran" prefectures as models. In a
few cases, some major scandal involving a foreign teacher prompted a backlash,
and the prefecture made no requests for several years. Nagasaki, for instance,
refused to participate for ten years following a marijuana-smoking incident.

7. A small number of ALTs thought that the one-shot visit could be educationally valid. See, for example, Suzy Nachtsheim, "Bull's Eye: Keeping Your
One-Shot Visits on Target," Language Teacher 12, no. 9 (1988): 25-26.

8. "Research on the Situation of Foreign Teachers of English in Japanese
Schools," IRLT Bulletin, no. 2 (1988) :62.

9. The Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme General Information Handbook (Tokyo: Council of Local Authorities for International Relations, 1996), 12.

10. Saito Eiji, "AET o mukaete akirakani natta nihon no eigokyoiku no
mondaiten" (The problems of English education in Japan as illuminated by the
arrival of AETs), IRLT Newsletter, no. 104 (1989): 1

ii. The JET Program(me): Five Years and Beyond (Tokyo: Council of Local
Authorities for International Relations, 1992), 169-266.

12. Ibid., 169-278-

13. Rebecca Erwin Fukuzawa, "The Path to Adulthood According to Japanese Middle Schools," in Teaching and Learning in Japan, ed. Thomas Rohlen
and Gerald LeTendre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 295-320.

14. Such "talent benefits" tend to diminish when the foreigner is not white.
One Japanese teacher told me,

Japanese associate speaking English with the image of a white person (hakujin). With
our first [white] AET [assistant English teacher] students would pay attention even if
she was just standing in front of the room. They don't do that with Pat-san [a Japanese American]. When she speaks English it seems strange to us. When we enter the
classroom together, students don't change their behavior at all. That's the kind of
handicap we faced. Students were a little disappointed when they found out our AET
was a Japanese American.

15. In fact, in one new international high school I visited in a neighboring
prefecture, the municipal office of education had concentrated no fewer than eight ALTs in the school, displaying their pictures prominently in the lobby
and in community advertisements for the school.

16. In a few instances, however, principals have actually invited an ALT in
order to combat discipline problems at the school, the naive hope being that the
foreigner might capture students' interest and provide a form of outside pressure (aren't you embarrassed to act like that in front of a foreigner?) that acts
as a deterrent to misbehavior.

17. Gregory V. G. O'Dowd, "Australia-Don't Miss the JET!" Japanese
Studies: Bulletin of the Japanese Studies Association of Australia 12, no. 1
(1992): 39

18. Anthony Gribben, interview with author, Kyoto, io October 1989.

19. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.
A. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 25.

2o. Minutes of First Evaluation Meeting, 1989-9o JET Program (given to
me by a program coordinator).

21. According to the "1989 JET Program Living Conditions Survey" (a
compilation sent to all JET participants), 63 percent of host institutions provided a telephone, 75 percent provided a refrigerator, 79 percent provided a
washing machine, 71 percent provided a television, and 6o percent provided a
futon or bed.

22. I am indebted to Scott Olinger for this insight.

23. See Robert Smith, "Gender Inequality in Contemporary Japan," Journal
of Japanese Studies 13 (1987): 1-25.

24. "Sexual Harassment and Kokusaika," JET Journal, autumn 1989, p. 50.

25. "Assembly Votes to Remove Official: Allegedly Pawed 23-Year-Old AET
at Village Party," Daily Yomiuri, 2 May 1993. The story was also reported on
the national news.

26. "1989 JET Program Living Conditions Survey."

27. Toby did go on to work at CLAIR, and at the next orientation he invited
himself to the prefectural dinner for new JET participants. Sato-sensei showed
no visible anger when he saw Toby, but he complained bitterly to me afterward
that Toby "had a lot of nerve to show his face here tonight!"

28. Robert Whiting recounts similar criticisms about the haggling by
American baseball players in Japan over minute contract details; You Gotta
Have Wa (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 131.

29. JET Program(me), 8o.

30. On these school visits, Kevin invariably ended up meeting with the
ALT alone instead of with the JTLs as well, though that was not his original
intention.

31. Some prefectures effectively used other strategies to deal personally
with their ALTs. Toyama Prefecture, for instance, hired a middle-aged Japanese
woman with excellent English skills and years of experience living abroad.
Based in the prefectural "education center," she single-handedly kept morale
high and defused potential problems by virtue of her excellent rapport with the ALTs; at the same time, the board of education administrators retained key
decision-making powers. In Osaka City the municipal board of education created a special position-ALT liaison-and filled it with a very young Japanese
teacher of English, a fluent English speaker who had spent considerable time
abroad. While his school-based colleagues lamented that he had moved to a position where he couldn't speak his mind freely (ienai tachiba), his language
skills and his similarity in age and marital status to other ALTs made him a
very effective liaison.

32. Frank K. Upham, Law and Social Order in Postwar Japan (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 223. As Clifford Geertz points out, the
dominant Anglo-American worldview is based on the notion of an autonomous individual that is a "bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion,
judgement and action"; "From the Natives' Point of View: On the Nature of
Anthropological Understanding," in Meaning in Anthropology, ed. Keith
Basso and Henry Selby (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976).
It logically follows that a society made up of such individuals would be contractual in nature.