Images do matter, and try as she might, Japan simply has not been able to shake the perception that the country as a whole is intolerant of diversity. The very strengths on which Japan's economic success was built have become liabilities as the country is drawn further into a global environment. How, then, to raise Japan's status in the eyes of the international community without completely sacrificing the familiar modes of social relations that have served the nation so well?
In the mid-i98os, numerous policy prescriptions were proposed and implemented, but some argued that these national-level fixes would not seriously address the underlying problem. If arm's-lengths strategies of global integration were no longer tenable, then "mass internationalization" was crucial to continued economic progress. Though more and more people were traveling and living abroad, these individuals still constituted only a small part of the population. Japan's leaders began to see the examoriented educational system as a major barrier to internationalization. In March 198o the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) issued a report blaming the system for failing to produce the creative and internationalist workers necessary to meet the coming economic challenges. Business organizations have also been loud in their criticism of Japan's one-track school system and its failure to open itself up to diversity. Japanese education, long viewed as an asset in fueling Japan's domestic transformation, has recently come to be seen as a potential hindrance in meeting the challenges of the new world order.
American views of Japanese education have undergone a similar change. For a long time Americans were largely indifferent to Japanese education, but in the early to mid-i 98os interest surged as Japan's economic success was linked to its highly educated and disciplined workforce. Several scholars published influential books arguing that broad public support for education, the social organization of schooling, and culturally specific approaches to child rearing and discipline were the foundation of Japan's educational successes.40 Popular media sung the praises of Japan's schools as models of academic achievement and warned of the follies of ignoring the educational accomplishments of our major economic competitors. Influential American educators such as Diane Ravitch signed on for whirlwind tours of Japan's schools, returning home to exhort their colleagues to consider the merits of the Japanese approach. While liberals applauded the egalitarian streak in Japanese schooling, pointing out that Japan did a much better job than the United States in raising a large proportion of its population to high levels of achievement and making them part of the social order, conservatives praised the streamlined core curriculum and noted the many ways in which "family values" undergirded the system. The overall sentiment was that American educators, parents, and the general public had much to learn from the Japanese.
But dissenting voices emerged: another set of popular and academic accounts purported to reveal "the dark side of Japanese education," to quote the subtitle of Ken Schoolland's 199o book, Shogun's Ghost. Rather than portraying Japanese education as possessing a desirable difference, these reports decried its uniformity, inflexibility, and closed nature. The images offered were poignant if predictable: narrow-minded administrators caught in the deadly grip of the "diploma disease," Ministry of Education officials who ruthlessly censored textbooks, discrimination against Korean and burakumin minorities, "returnee children" who were bullied by their teachers and peers, adolescents driven to suicide or "school refusal syndrome" by exam pressures, the relentless kyoiku mama (education mothers) who pushed their children to do well on the entrance exams, and the limited options for learning-disabled children. A -1995 New York Times article went so far as to claim that Japanese schools are "assembly lines that press students into the same shape," likening their atmosphere to that of a military academy.41
While some of these critiques were clearly based on myths and not reality, others could not be dismissed so lightly. As a whole, they suggested that whereas American educators begin by assuming that all children are different, Japanese teachers and administrators begin from the opposite position; and the notion that all children are basically the same creates enormous pressure to conform to a cultural center. In this view, Japanese education is a closed system that allows little room for deviance and few second chances. In several areas, Japanese education has deservedly been taken to task; many criticisms relate to its insularity.
Nationalistic Textbooks
State control over textbooks in Japan can be traced back to the late 18oos; as one historian explains, "the government promulgated the Imperial Rescript on Education ... to bring to the education system the same system of thought control that had been instituted in the army."42 Textbook revisions to promote new government policies were frequent up to and during World War II. Although Occupation reforms after the war gave schools discretion in choosing textbooks, the Ministry of Education moved in the 195os and 196os to expand its power over their authorization. Today, two advisory bodies in the Ministry of Education-the Council on Textbook Authorization and Research and the Curriculum Council-exert firm control over textbook content.
Social studies and history textbooks have proved most controversial. A 1982 media report claiming that the Ministry of Education had requested that Japan's military activities in Asia in the 193os be described as an "advance" rather than an "invasion" drew harsh international criticism; even though the report was later found to be inaccurate, the whitewashing of textbooks is still widely seen as symptomatic of a deeper reluctance to acknowledge the Nanking Massacre and other war atrocities. But textbooks are more generally purged of materials that may be critical of the government's position and are thus characterized by a bland neutrality on hotly contested social and political issues. Teruhisa Horio points to one case in which the Ministry of Education failed to approve a well-respected work of literature because it did not use the official onomatopoeic word for a river's sound: "We can only conclude from this that the Ministry's inspectors feared that the children might get the idea that it was all right to play with the national language in ways which would encourage them to think of it as something belonging to them rather than as something whose use is controlled by the State for them."43 More recently lenaga Saburo, a professor emeritus at the now-defunct Tokyo University of Education (currently Tsukuba University), won a 1997 ruling in favor of his claim that the government abused its discretionary powers when it ordered him to remove from his textbook a reference to live human experiments conducted by the Imperial Japanese Army's Unit 731 in northern China during World War II.'
Treatment of "Returnee Children"
The overseas migration of Japanese subsidiaries in search of cheaper labor and profitable markets has given rise to another vexed educational issue: children returning to Japan after extended stays in other countries. These children, known as kikokushijo (returnee children), are often pressured by teachers and peers to give up the cognitive and behavioral styles they had learned abroad. While such treatment is by no means universal-in certain schools these children are seen as a cultural asset-kikokushijo are likely to feel they must keep a very low profile, and many have serious problems readjusting. During the 197os and 198os most scholarly and popular accounts portrayed these children as victims of the closed nature of the school system and the tenacity with which cultural boundaries are maintained in Japan.45 The titles and subtitles of books on the returnee children (e.g., "Life in Between" and "Can They Go Home Again?") suggested that returnees occupied a liminal category; and familiar expressions such as gaikoku hagashi (peeling away the foreignness) were seized on as manifestations in the schools of Japan's ideology of blood.
Roger Goodman's revisionist analysis seems to have marked a turning point of sorts in the dominant views of these children.46 Goodman argues that it is misleading to compare the returnee children with Koreans or burakumin, because they are actually the vanguard of a new social elite. As the children of power brokers in Japanese society, the returnees-unlike other minorities in Japan-can expect as adults to find significant empl
oyment opportunities. Goodman's analysis was followed by a number of articles pointing out the special provisions for returnee children who compete for university slots and discussing the resentment such "privileged treatment" creates among other students. Yet a closer reading of Good man's study reveals that even he recognizes the considerable ambivalence many Japanese feel toward these children. Moreover, his analysis is based primarily on data from one special school for returnees; those returning to schools without support systems in place continue to face strong pressure to give up the patterns of speech and behavior that they learned abroad.
The "Education Gap"
Another area that has received increased attention of late is the imbalance in educational exchange. In 1997, for every American going to Japan, twenty Japanese were studying in the United States.47 While a lack of interest and language ability on the part of American students may be partly to blame, Japan has long been criticized for the low numbers of foreign students that its universities accept. Drawing parallels with Japan's trade surplus, critics argue that this gap is symptomatic of the self-centered and narrowly instrumental approach taken by Japanese schools toward the issue of global integration. The United States has opened up its educational institutions to Japanese students, so the argument goes, and thus expects reciprocal treatment.
The system of support in Japan for foreign students, the large majority of whom come from Asia, is poorly developed. For example, high prices and landlords who refuse to rent to foreigners can make good housing hard to find. One longtime observer claims that the role of foreign students in Japanese universities resembles that of imported laborers .4' For their part, Japanese faculty and graduate students privately complain about the burden of caring for foreign students who aren't sensitive to the norms of reciprocity and tend to follow codes of local behavior only when doing so is in their best interest.
Sensitive to criticism in this area, the Ministry of Education embarked on a series of steps to import diversity and create more parity in educational exchange. In 1983, shortly before the advent of the JET Program, the ministry drew on the example of France and began a "ioo,ooo Foreign Students Plan," hoping to meet that goal by the turn of the century. Through the early 199os the program reached its annual target every year, but since 1994 the pace of growth has slowed considerably and the target now appears impossible to reach. Searching for a solution to the slowdown in growth and to the Asian background of the overwhelming majority of foreign students, the Ministry of Education in 1996 created a new category of scholarships, which in effect pay American and European students to study in Japan.
Foreign Language Education
Perhaps no other aspect of Japan's education system has been so sharply criticized for its insularity as the teaching of foreign languages. Although oral English had been held in high esteem during the early Meiji period, by the early twentieth century Japanese interest in learning foreign languages-particularly spoken English-had declined. The rise in nationalism led many foreign teachers to be replaced by native-born Japanese who were not always very proficient in spoken English. During the same time, the Japanese system of higher education took on an increasingly pyramidal structure, funneling the most capable students into a few elite schools; the keen competition that resulted only magnified the importance of the entrance exams. This, in turn, affected the way English was taught at the precollegiate level, and soon English became a means of sorting students rather than a basis of communication. 49
Worsening relations with the West and the popularity of continental European fiction also contributed to a revulsion against spoken English and a perception that English was a language for businessmen. This too encouraged a return to the "translation method"-that is, an almost sole reliance on written texts-by which Chinese had been appropriated nearly a thousand years earlier. Inazo Nitobe conveys the prevailing sentiment:
For the Japanese ... the advantages of studying foreign languages are of a higher and more intangible nature than are the so-called "practical" benefits. In some ways the most valuable advantage lies in its "unpractical" aspect, namely, in its hidden and unutilitarian effect on the mind.... The age of Chinese classics is gone and with them the severe disciplinarian. His place is taken now by the English grammar, which with manifold rules and exceptions to rules, with its mysterious orthography and esoteric idioms, exacts of the neophyte the most strenuous use of his reason and memory, together ... with unbounded admiration for the people who have mastered its intricacies.50
Thus two schools of thought developed on teaching the English language, one emphasizing cultural enrichment through reading of literature and the other stressing communication for international business. Nitobe comments, "Japanese teachers make no secret of their utter incompetence in oral intercourse; it is not expected of them. In fact, there is a deplorable propensity to boast of colloquial ignorance."51 For most of the twentieth century the translation and literature school has been dominant, but there has always been a small but vocal minority of teachers calling for an emphasis on the practical dimensions of English communication.
Today, in sharp contrast to the highly politicized debates over bilingual and multicultural education in the United States, there is virtually no opposition in Japan to the idea of teaching English. All junior high students study a foreign language for three years, and most continue it for three more years in high school. Private English juku, or after-school classes catering to students who want to learn to speak, are a multimillion-dollar business in Japan. Yet language teaching in the Japanese public school system has continued to be harshly criticized on several grounds. Some object to the domination of one language: foreign languages are technically electives in Japan, but English has become almost mandatory. And because the approach emphasizes rote and grammar-much as Latin was long taught in American schools-students gain little sense of a living language. The six years invested in the study of English thus yield meager returns. It is not uncommon for students' conversational abilities to decline from the eighth grade on. The American linguist Roy Andrew Miller minces no words: "What are potentially the most valuable years for foreign-language learning are totally wasted in the course of hour after dreary hour in the English classroom with Japanese teachers, most of whom drone away in Japanese explaining the grammar and pronunciation of a language that they themselves have rarely even heard and certainly cannot speak."'z Masayoshi Harasawa concurs: "Of all the countries in the world where English has been taught on a nationwide scale, Japan seems to me about the least successful.... On balance, our English teaching has become a disastrous failure.""
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 purs
uing 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.
Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program Page 4
