Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program

by David L. McConnell

  Over time, however, anxiety about loss of native culture grew, and its superiority began again to be vigorously asserted. This ambivalence was captured in the popular slogan of the times, wakon kansai (Japanese spirit, Chinese technology), which stressed the importance of importing Chinese knowledge without upsetting indigenous traditions. In addition, much of what had been imported from China was domesticated and remolded in the Japanese context, thus establishing what was essentially a new cultural system that blended elements from both. For instance, in the ninth century Chinese characters were simplified into the kana syllabaries used to represent Japanese syllables phonetically. Syncretism is also evident in the transformation of Buddhism; it lost its otherworldly focus to recognize religious significance in secular life and to emphasize activities within a concrete social nexus. 16

  After a long period of feudalism during which Chinese influences underwent further change, the early sixteenth century saw the beginnings of European influence in Japan in the form of Christianity, European languages, and Western technology. Following the return of four Japanese voyagers from Europe, a Western craze set in: even the shogun Hideyoshi Toyotomi and his retainers frequently wore Portuguese-style dress. But in the early seventeenth century, under the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, the tide shifted dramatically; by 1636 the death penalty was prescribed for any Japanese caught trying to visit the outside world. The official policy of seclusion (sakoku) was to last for over two centuries.

  Unquestionably, the insularity that developed during the sakoku period can still be felt today. Yet two important points bear mentioning. First, the Tokugawa policy was a purely practical measure aimed at consolidating po litical power; it cannot be used as evidence of innate Japanese xenophobia.17 Second, the Chinese and Dutch traders were allowed into the artificial port in Nagasaki, enabling the government to continue to pick up foreign technical and commercial information. For example, at Nagasaki officers of foreign ships were routinely questioned about Chinese capacities for agriculture and for silk production.18 By 1740 two of the shogun's retainers were studying Dutch, and between 1764 and 1789, there was a "Dutch craze" (Rampeki) among the merchant class. Temple schools (terakoya) developed during this period, and the view that Western learning was quite appropriate for practical matters, though not for acquiring wisdom and virtue, became widespread.19

  Meiji Japan Awakes to the World

  In their fervor for Western things during the early Meiji period, the Japanese seemed determined to compensate for any attitude of reaction against the rest of the world that had emerged in two hundred years of selfimposed isolation in the Tokugawa period. In a surprisingly short time, English replaced Dutch as the primary medium by which Western ideas and technology were imported. Japanese individuals who had for various reasons been marooned overseas now returned to a very positive reception and sometimes considerable power. In 1856 an Institute for the Investigation of Barbarian Writings (Bansho Torishirabe-dokoro) was set up, thus beginning a systematic borrowing of ideas and institutions from the West. The Iwakura mission, which included many senior government officials, was sent to the United States and Europe in 1871 to renegotiate Japan's international status; a less formal purpose, as W. G. Beasley explains, was to "assess the civilization of the West, with a view to adopting those parts of it which would be of value to Japan .1121 Some of Japan's best and brightest were sent abroad for longer periods before taking up positions of influence. Mori Arinori, for instance, returned from many years in England and the United States to become minister of education. So impressed was he with Western cultures that at one point he officially advocated that Japanese be abolished and English be made the national language.

  In retrospect, several features of cultural borrowing in early Meiji Japan stand out. Japanese were able to incorporate foreign technology with impressive speed, largely because of the high level of education and literacy of the general population, and particularly of workers in the industrial sector, by the end of the late Tokugawa period. Moreover, the cultural borrowing had become extremely selective. As Beasley notes, seventh-century Japan seemed "backward" in every respect compared with China, but late Tokugawa Japan had achieved remarkable heights in poetry, painting, music, and religion and chose to focus on Western scientific skills and technology. In that focus, the Japanese relied on what Rohlen calls "alert objectivity," the ability to scan one's external environment in order to grasp the essence of other social and technological orders." One result was that Japanese borrowing from Western countries displayed remarkable eclecticism. For example, in the field of education Meiji leaders molded a system which resembled that of France in its organization, the United States in its curriculum, and Germany in its theoretical rationale. It was during the first two decades of the Meiji period that the Japanese government hired, at considerable expense, thousands of Western "experts." Some of these technicians and teachers gained considerable influence, and for a while, in the early Christian institutions of higher education, imported texts were used and English was the medium of instruction. The slogan "Boys Be Ambitious," offered by one of these imported oyatoi and inscribed on the gate to Hokkaido University, has now motivated several generations of Japanese youth.

  But even this early catch-up period was closely linked to a larger national purpose, especially to national defense. The modernization policy was sometimes described by the Japanese as "using the barbarian to control the barbarian."22 As a result, Japanese officials took a very pragmatic stance toward the oyatoi; Hazel Jones argues that they were actually treated as "live machines," their humanity overlooked in the rush to appropriate their skills.23 When Japanese officials were satisfied that enough information had been provided, the oyatoi were asked to leave. While this treatment clearly frustrated some of the oyatoi themselves, it provides important insights into how Japanese approach learning from abroad. Japan's intense preoccupation with borrowing seems to be matched only by its drive for mastering what has been appropriated. In the early Meiji period the heavy reliance on cultural adoption and foreign teachers and technicians did not lead to permanent dependence on foreign sources. A combination of humility and willingness to be placed in the position of learner, on the one hand, and national pride and purpose, on the other, proved astonishingly effective in the push for modernization.

  By the i88os, however, enthusiasm for Westernizing was ending. The Meiji oligarchs were increasingly humiliated by their treatment at the hands of the countries they tried to emulate. It had begun with the unequal treaty negotiated in -1858 by the American consul, Townsend Harris, under the threat of naval power: foreign traders in Japan were protected by their own military forces and the extraterritorial privilege of trial by their own judges under their own laws, and at the same time the tariffs that Japanese could levy on Western imports were limited. After the turn of the century, resentment was heightened by the failure to secure a clause on racial equality in the Versailles Treaty and by the continued discrimination against Japanese in U.S. immigration laws; the Japanese felt unwelcome in the community of nations. Reaction against foreign influence took several forms; for example, the Imperial Rescript on Education explicitly linked education with providing glory to the emperor, and the folk religion, Shinto, was harnessed to the goals of state building and the legitimation of the emperor.24 The waging of "the Greater East Asian War" obviously represented the culmination of this nativist sentiment.

  The Postwar Period

  Defeat in World War II marked the beginning of another swing in public opinion away from nationalism and toward democracy. Progressive reform of Japan's constitution, its political system, its education system, and its land policy, as well as dissolution of the large financial conglomerates (zaibatsu) and encouragement of unionization, were all goals of General Douglas MacArthur's temporary government. Yet because implementation of many of these reforms was left to Japanese, and because the advent of the cold war led Occupation authorities to concentrate on rebuilding Japan as an ally, many were r
eversed after the Occupation forces left. For instance, local boards of education, which were to be elected under Occupation guidelines, were made political appointments. But there was no backlash; instead, a series of gradual and moderate changes took place.

  Despite such reversals, the war is today nearly universally rejected as having been immoral. This has created a profound ambivalence about the use of nationalistic symbols in contemporary Japan. Debates about the emperor's responsibility in the war, which surfaced in the media following Hirohito's death in 1989, made it clear that the imperial institution does not unequivocally symbolize national unity. Sometimes the Japanese flag and the anthem are questioned, as neither of them is mentioned in the constitution. While the Ministry of Education has decreed that the flag be raised and the national anthem sung at all official school ceremonies, compliance has not been universal." Finally, official visits by the prime ministers to Yasukuni Shrine, where the souls of all soldiers who died for the country in wars are cherished as sacred, have been very controversial; they are seen as a sign of resurgent militarism by Japan's Asian neighbors, who suffered greatly at Japan's hands. Thus the major symbols of national identity-the imperial household, the flag, the anthem, and national monuments-were largely discredited by World War 11.26

  After the war, the focus of Japan's global articulation shifted from military expansion to economic recovery and then growth. Yoshida Shigeru, a prewar diplomat and postwar prime minister, came up with the formula that has served as Japan's national policy virtually to this day. Japan would ally itself with the United States, which would take over all defense functions and allow Japan to concentrate on its economy. In return, Japan would accept American leadership in foreign policy. As Yoshida said, "If you like the shade, be sure to find yourself a big tree." By most accounts, these efforts have paid off handsomely. Today Japan boasts the second-largest GNP in the world, and its corporations are household names around the globe; it is the world's largest donor of foreign aid; its education system is widely praised for producing uniformly high levels of academic achievement and social order. Many Japanese cite the publication in -1979 of Ezra Vogel's best-seller, Japan as Number One, as evidence that they had finally achieved prosperity. Rather than the emperor system or military might, the Japanese economic system, particularly its community-oriented aspects, had now become the principal symbol of national pride. Japan's alacrity in equaling and surpassing Western countries is all the more astonishing given its relative lack of technical and material advantages in the mid-nineteenth century. Japan can truly lay claim to being the dark horse of the twentieth century's peacetime competition .17

  EDUCATIONAL REFORM AS THE SOLUTION TO INTERNATIONAL PRESSURE

  As it has emerged as an economic power, Japan-with its relatively homogeneous population and sense of isolation-has faced an acute problem of global integration. Western countries have protested with growing vigor what they perceive as the closed nature of Japanese society and Japan's refusal to play by the rules of the international liberal trading order. Foreign pressure on Japan to take concrete measures to liberalize the country and to reform what is seen as a feudalistic value system has been a political constant during the past few decades.

  On the one hand, contemporary Japanese society ranks quite high on most "objective" measures associated with the term "internationalization." Overseas investment is flourishing, and more and more countries are doing business in Japan. Every year millions of Japanese travel abroad, and almost all American and European books of any importance are translated into Japanese. A great deal of attention is given to foreign language learning: most Japanese youth study English for at least six years. The Japanese have a great propensity for importing foreign loanwords, and a typical person knows thousands of katakana words that are derived from English. Today few nations are more acutely conscious than Japan of living in a global environment, and the Japanese appetite for foreign goods and ideas shows no signs of abating.

  On the other hand, critics have observed that evidence of a closed mindset is not hard to find; in fact, there appears to be a direct connection between Japan's forging of international linkages and the rise at home of national introspection and the search for roots.28 Even in the early postwar years, the archaeological excavation of a site from the Yayoi period (300 B.C.E. to 300 C.E.) enabled many Japanese to repair their wartorn national identity with the comforting knowledge of an unbroken 2,ooo-year history of rice cultivation.29 Since then, the boom in nostalgia and furusato (consciousness of native place) can be read as indicating a search for an "authentic" past in the face of new and unpredictable challenges.30 Takie Lebra points out that the increasing number of intercultural marriages has provided fodder for private detective agencies that screen job and marriage candidates for purity of background. Similarly, David Titus notes that the more contemporary Japan accepts influences from the outside, the more the entity called "emperor" is sought after as a symbol of Japanese community and uniqueness.i1 As the homogenizing framework of the world system presses closer, cultural identity is fostered and intensified.32

  One of the most striking manifestations of this national introspection in the postwar period is the surging popularity of a genre of quasi-academic and popular literature known as nihonjinron (literally, "theories of Japanese culture"), in which authors have attempted to define their country's uniqueness.i3 In much of this literature, race, language, and culture become synonymous, resulting in what one Japanese critic calls a "unitary ethnic nation, intolerant of alien elements, constitutionally unable to accept the existence of different kinds of Japanese."34 Dependency (amae), hierarchy (tateshakai), and left brain orientation have all been suggested as defining features of "Japaneseness." Some politicians have taken these ideas to extremes-for example, making the outrageous claim that the Japanese intestinal tract is unable to digest foreign-grown rice. Sales of books in this vein have skyrocketed almost in parallel with Japan's rising economic penetration overseas; any decent bookstore in Japan now has a shelf devoted to the genre.

  These writings have been harshly criticized by Western writers who view nihonjinron as the worst kind of pseudo-scientific enterprise. In fact, the phrase "nihonjinron-like portraits" is now widely used among Japan specialists as a put-down of analyses of Japanese society that perpetuate the homogeneity myth and stereotypical pictures devoid of diversity. So eager are critics to unmask the "real" interests that lie behind nihonjinron, however, that they largely ignore the public's huge appetite for these books. Clearly, the message of nihonjinron is welcome to many Japanese.

  Moreover, a strong sense of separateness and a concomitant arm'slength approach to global integration have some benefits. A feeling of cultural uniqueness, reinforced by a shared language, makes it easier to achieve internal compromises and sustain a decent society without the skewed income distribution that plagues some industrial democracies.35 In addition, speaking English and feeling comfortable in personal meetings with foreigners are not necessarily prerequisites for being able to read technical manuals and acquiring the know-how for conducting concerted export drives.

  Yet foreign criticism and pressure simply will not disappear. In recent years, Japan's success at integrating foreigners into domestic institutions has increasingly come to be seen by outside critics as its litmus test of internationalization. A global economic power such as Japan, they say, should open itself to foreign peoples and learn how to be more comfortable with the Other, both at home and abroad. Indeed, it can be argued that this lack of a certain fellow feeling with the rest of the world is at the root of many of the problems facing Japan in the late twentieth century. In the United State, for example, most of the criticisms that media, politicians, and scholars have leveled against Japan center on relations in trade, but others address the domestic treatment of minorities.

  Though U.S.-Japan trade friction has eased somewhat in the late 199os, for most Americans the bilateral relationship is summed up in the conflict over annual trade surpluse
s, which hovered around $5o billion for much of the 198os. With this imbalance came a sudden anxiety about "losing" to a competitor, and some critics complain that the Japanese are not playing fair. Pointing to the failure of many Japanese firms with U.S. operations to integrate into local communities, they question not only the companies' business practices (e.g., reliance largely on Japanese suppliers) but also their commitment to racial and gender equity (offering as a case in point the notorious April 1996 lawsuit against Mitsubishi alleging sexual harassment). Conversely, they argue that a variety of nontariff barriers within Japan-the rigid and complex distribution system, the timeconsuming system of patenting, the presence of industrial groups (keiretsu) that obstruct free competition, and bid rigging in industries such as construction-make it practically impossible for foreign competitors to succeed there.3" And the charge that the Japanese attempt to win economically at all costs carries over to analyses of foreign policy. Japan has been criticized both for its persistent refusal to link politics and economics (e.g., Japan was one of the last countries to suspend business dealings with the apartheid regime in South Africa) and for the strongly commercial orientation of its foreign aid .17

  Even on the level of personal contacts, Japanese are criticized for preferring package tours over arrangements that might bring them into informal contact with foreign people. And their behavior at home has fallen under still harsher criticism. Japan's increasing visibility internationally has exposed to the world the persistent fissure between dominant and marginal groups, the latter including in particular Koreans (who make up nearly half of the relatively small number of foreign residents in Japan) and burakumin (long-ghettoized descendants of the outcaste class of the feudal pe- riod).38 Foreign suspicions about Japanese prejudices have only been heightened by a series of highly publicized racial slurs by prominent Japanese officials. In 1986 Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro connected the presence of minorities in the United States to declining American intelligence levels, and before the decade's end two cabinet officials were quoted making remarks critical of blacks in particular."