Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program (8 page)

Most Japanese would agree; indeed, the notion has become a part of Japanese perceptions of their own national character. The lament that almost
all students, despite going through six to ten years of English instruction,
remain unable to hold the most basic conversation with a native speaker is
heard from Japanese in all walks of life .5 Former Prime Minister
Takeshita, who himself had been an English teacher, was especially fond of
poking fun at the poor state of English education in Japan, often at his own
expense. Though private English conversation schools (eikaiwa gakko)
have thrived in direct proportion to the exam emphasis in the English curriculum in the public schools, there has been an increasing feeling that the
public secondary schools themselves must do more to promote the acquisition of English conversational skills.

The education system, and foreign language instruction in particular,
thus seems to be an area ripe for reform. Moreover, educational reform has
been identified as vital to successful internationalization-however that is
understood. To be sure, Japanese hold deeply ambivalent attitudes toward internationalization." For much of its history Japan has been content to
pursue global integration primarily through arm's-length strategies. These
included training an elite to act as go-betweens with the outside world, educating a general population to digest foreign languages and foreign ideas
from a distance, and on occasion even importing a few technicians and
teachers. Rather than pursuing global integration through exporting ideology, personnel, and educational services (via such institutions as the Peace
Corps or the British Council), Japan has preferred to pursue selective integration through importing ideas, technology, and, to a more limited degree,
people. But now Japan is being asked to go beyond appropriating skills and
knowledge to transforming its entire value system. What foreign criticism
amounts to is a demand that the Japanese reconstitute themselves and
their society so as to make them more compatible with international
norms and institutions. Reforms-driven both by external pressure and by
domestic calls for change-thus also need to address the persistent image
of Japan as a self-centered and parochial society. The JET program is one response.

With the end of the cold war, the rise of multinational corporations, and
the development of increasingly sophisticated communications technologies, every nation is in the process of adapting to an increasingly global
world. Yet while we hear much about global homogenization and the need
to cultivate a more global outlook on life, we often fail to recognize that
cultural, political, and historical particulars lend each nation its own manner and style of participating in the new world order. The Japanese approach to global integration is distinctive but by no means unique, and we
ignore it at our own peril. Now that Japan has emerged on the world scene,
and Japanese corporations, residential communities, and tourist circuits
have sprung up in our own backyard, the issue of how Japanese cope with
diversity has become more immediate and urgent. An analysis of how Japanese respond to the foreign participants on the JET Program can reveal
the human side of Japan's struggle to come to terms with the profound
changes that one society has undergone in the past few decades.

METHODOLOGY

The sheer breadth and scope of the JET program made the traditional anthropological practice of participant observation highly problematic. Arriving in Japan in late summer of 1988, I was bewildered to find that the JET
Program could not be isolated in one geographic location or even in one
spacially bounded organization, like a company or a school. At the national
level alone, the principal actors included the three sponsoring ministries, the administrative office called CLAIR, the embassies of the participating
countries, and the Japanese consulates abroad." To these structural complexities must be added the realities of implementation as the JET Program
unfolded in dozens of prefectures, hundreds of district boards of education,
and thousands of secondary schools across the country.

I was thus forced to modify the worn-out model of culture as an isolated, bounded entity characterized by internally consistent norms and behavior. While I did not completely jettison the idea that Japanese responses
to the JET Program were culturally patterned, I assumed that alongside the
dominant forces promoting integration were those that reinforced differentiation and fragmentation.57 I also assumed that the numerous external
linkages in the JET Program had a significant capacity to shape internal
policy forms. Finally, I knew I had to take into account how the JET program was historically situated. In short, I needed a methodology that encompassed not only multilevel linkages and internal contradictions but
also the evolution of the JET Program over time.58

My solution was to use an eclectic approach to gather as many kinds of
data as possible over a ten-year period. Most of the intensive fieldwork was
completed during two years of on-site research in Japan from 1988 to 1990,
but I returned for a month each in the summers of 1993, 1995, and 1996
and for a week in 1999. Having served as an assistant English teacher in
junior high schools in Iwate Prefecture in 1980 and 1983 to 1985 in two
similar but smaller programs, I had firsthand experience working in a municipal board of education and team-teaching English in secondary schools;
I also had good conversational Japanese.

Initially, I decided to anchor myself in one locale in order to focus on
one prefectural board of education and its downward linkages. I received a
crucial introduction to the prefectural administrators in charge of the JET
Program from my Fulbright sponsor. These two men, one an English
teacher temporarily assigned to the board of education and the other a career civil servant, were more helpful than I ever could have expected. They
arranged for me to attend all prefectural orientations, seminars, and teamteaching workshops related to the JET Program. They also set up short visits to five district boards of education and twelve secondary schools in the
prefecture. Most important, they arranged for me to conduct regular visits
to a high school that had recently been chosen as a base school for a British
JET participant. I visited twice weekly for three months and for another six
months less frequently. I spent the entire day at the school on each visit
and was able to observe many team-taught and solo English classes and to
interview Japanese students and teachers. I also was able to acquire a variety of written materials on hosting the ALT.

At the same time that I was relying on these formal channels, I also
made informal contact with numerous JET participants as well as Japanese
teachers of English. Usually interviews took place in a coffee shop, and I
guaranteed anonymity. Documentation thus includes field notes from observations of thirty-two team-teaching workshops and classes and notes or
audiotapes from interviews with sixty-five foreign participants, fifty-four
Japanese teachers of English, and thirty-five Japanese students.

I was able to take short trips to other prefectures and to Tokyo to obtain
an overview of the program. At first, I found negotiating access to Ministry
of Education and CLAIR officials and gaining permission to observe
national-level conferences quite difficult; a general ministry policy forbids
any outside research on the JET Program. I met several Japanese researchers who had been turned down by CLAIR and heard that CLAIR officials had become incensed when a foreign researcher distributed a survey
at a conference even though they had denied him permission to do so. My
own relative success was aided by letters of introduction to key officials in
CLAIR and the sponsoring ministries from Caroline Yang, then at the Fulbright Commission, and from Mike Smith, then dean of the School of Education at Stanford University. By far the most crucial introduction, however,
was provided by my mentor, Tetsuya Kobayashi. In fact, Kobayashi-sensei
was a personal friend of Wada Minoru in the Ministry of Education, and his
phone call to CLAIR was instrumental in opening doors there as well. "You
must thank Professor Kobayashi," I was told by a CLAIR official years later.
"He is a very powerful person."

I interviewed officials at the Ministries of Education, Home Affairs, and
Foreign Affairs who were connected with the program on several occasions
during the initial fieldwork period and again during my 1993 and 1995 visits. In ten visits to CLAIR, I interviewed twelve ranking officials of
CLAIR's managerial staff and fifteen of the "program coordinators" (JET
Program alumni working in CLAIR) to learn their vantage point on forming and enacting program policy. The follow-up visits were particularly
useful for examining the learning curve of the Japanese administrators and
for systematically tracing the continuities and changes in program policies
over time.

Several other vehicles for data collection also proved quite fruitful. I attended the weeklong Tokyo orientation for new JET participants in 1989,
two midyear conferences for ALTs in 1989 and 199o, and two "renewers'
conferences" in 199o and 1993 for JET participants who were extending
their contracts. I also interviewed the JET liaisons in the German, Canadian, and American embassies in Tokyo as well as several knowledgeable
professors in Japanese universities. To gain insight into the selection pro cess, I participated in a half-day orientation for new JET participants at the
San Francisco consulate in 1988 and was fortunate to be able to serve on
the selection committee for new JET participants in Boston in 1991. I interviewed a handful of Japanese and American officials at each of these
consulates as well as several other members of the selection committees.

Finally, CLAIR officials provided me with numerous in-house surveys,
documents, and manuals that have been produced over the program's tenyear history. These include copies of most monthly newsletters sent by
CLAIR to program participants, copies of the JET Journal and the CIR Report (a quarterly compilation of short essays written by the foreign participants and their Japanese hosts), orientation manuals for new JET participants, programs for midyear and renewers' conferences, the newsletter
published by the JET participants' "support group," internal surveys, and
the monthly newsletter sent by the Ministry of Home Affairs to all local
government bodies. I have also collected international, national, and local
newspaper articles about the JET Program since its inception. Taken together, these documents provide a wealth of information from which to reconstruct the history and evolution of the program.

In short, I used the techniques of both the anthropologist and the historian to provide a realistic portrait of the JET Program that captures not only
the diverse perspectives of its many participants but also the larger whole to
which they all contributed. As with any study, there are limitations that
must be acknowledged. As an outsider, I found it difficult at times to elicit
anything beyond the knee-jerk response that Harumi Befu has so aptly captured: "To internationalize is fashionable and good, and not to do so or to resist doing so is a sign of the backwardness of a country bumpkin."59 On numerous occasions, particularly when I was visiting public offices for the first
time, I was given only the version of the JET Program designed for public
consumption. Yet I am confident that I was often able to get beyond the official, or tatemae, version. By guaranteeing anonymity, by meeting with
people at neutral places, by tagging along at drinking parties whenever possible, and by nurturing a set of relationships over the entire thirteen-year
period of research, I was able to obtain relatively frank opinions and accounts. In this regard, the extended time frame of the study clearly worked
to my benefit. I was frequently able to locate individuals, now in new posts,
who had played key roles in implementing JET; removed in space and time
from those responsibilities, they were now able to talk more freely.

Three methodological limitations bear particular mention. First, I must
apologize to readers of other nationalities for the American slant to this account. At the time when I did much of my interviewing, Americans made
up nearly three-quarters of all JET participants; moreover, I was unable to visit Japanese consulates outside the United States and thus my data on the
selection process in other countries are much thinner than I would have
liked. My own positioning as a middle-class Anglo-American has undoubtedly colored my analysis in subtle ways as well, though I have made
a concerted effort to highlight differences among JET participants both between and within nationalities. Second, this book focuses heavily on the
ALT (assistant language teacher) component of the JET program rather than
the CIR (coordinator of international relations) or SEA (sports exchange advisor) components. While there are significant similarities among these,
there are also important differences, and the complex roles of the CIR and
SEA in local government are among the many topics that merit further
study. And third, the book emphasizes conflict resolution and policy formation during the early years of the JET Program. In part, this emphasis is
simply a function of the time at which I conducted most of my research;
however, there are also strong theoretical reasons for it. The formative period of the program deserves a closer analysis because that is when most of
the current policies were being hammered out; thus, it is when differences
among the actors were thrown into highest relief. Nonetheless, I do not
mean to slight the many ways in which Japanese and JET participants have
worked together since those early years to create new projects beneficial to
Japanese society, for it is in these cooperative activities that the program's
lasting impact will be felt.

The primary emphasis in this book is on the process of "internationalization" in Japan rather than an evaluation of the JET Program per se. Put
simply, I seek to understand how the JET Program evolved and how that
form is a product of the historical, social, and political contexts in which the
program is embedded.60