Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program

by David L. McConnell

  Racial Insensitivity?

  A much more serious blow to the credibility of the JET Program came in April -1989, when Karen Hill Anton, who was subsequently featured in Reggie Life's documentary Struggle and Success: The African-American Experience in Japan, devoted her weekly column in the Japan Times to the JET Program. Anton had written an earlier article praising the JET Program; now, in "Japan Pulls in Welcome Mat with Racial Insensitivity," she described the experience of a pseudonymous African American ALT, Sandra Evans, with impeccable academic credentials and considerable international experience:

  Evans remembers well her first meeting with the head of the English department[;] ... he greeted her not with Hello or Konnichiwa, but "Hey, you're big!" His first two questions were: "How many black ALTs are there?" and "Will you teach the black dialect?" Later she would regularly hear, "Can you speak standard English?" .. .

  Evans says it was clear from the beginning her school felt they were being "punished" by being assigned a black person. It was obvious they were let down; the administration acted as though they'd been cheated; had been given a defective gaijin.

  Evans is both sad and confounded when she says "the Japanese don't realize how ugly their behavior is." Clearly, it's impossible to reconcile the image of Japanese politeness with the crude, unconscionable behavior she's been subjected to; difficult to draw parallels between Japan's well-educated populace and the narrow, ignorant racially insensitive people she's encountered .14

  Anton was not the first to voice the issue of race. The "white bias" in program structure was also criticized by the AJET vice-chair in an article widely circulated among JET participants:

  More to the point, the JETs from all six countries represent a very narrow and carefully selected segment of their respective nations. Apart from Asian-Americans, very few of us fall under headings other than WASP... Color, variety and pattern have been screened out of the controlled sample brought here for this experiment.... What about native English speakers from India? Why haven't the Philippines been added to the list of participating countries?

  Through the JET Programme, the Japanese government has stated very clearly its position on racial and social equality. The JETs working here show in black and white, mostly white, that the concept of "internationalization" has been grossly distorted.... Japan is alone in its reluctance to promote racial equality, and this exposes the hypocrisy that it calls "internationalization." Japan is connected with the rest of the world; it can't ignore what the rest of the world thinks.

  While the above article was circulated only among AJET members, Anton's feature story reached much of the foreign community in Japan; obviously, it raised quite a stir at CLAIR and the sponsoring ministries. One African American participant teaching in the same prefecture as "Sandra Evans" recalled: "You can imagine what happened when this story hit the press. I had Mr. Wada call, I had CLAIR call, I had everybody calling, ask ing 'Was it me?' I said, 'Well, she [Anton] interviewed me, but it was not me who was written up in the paper.' Then they kept warning me about how I have to be careful with the press."

  My conversations with several persons acquainted with the situation verified the accuracy of Anton's account. Shortly after the story broke, I also had the opportunity to attend a meeting of the Minority Support Group at the 1989 Tokyo Orientation.25 The comments by several renewing JET participants of color confirmed the ways in which the social perception of skin color in Japan constrained their experiences.

  You're gonna have to deal with stereotypes. The first day I walked into class and on every desk there were Little Black Sambo pencil cases and bags. I nearly hit the roof, but then I thought, "OK, it's just my first day," so I asked them why they bought them, and they said, "Oh, they're cute-kawaii." I said, "No, they make me wanna cry."

  If I had a dollar for every time someone says, "Oh, I bet you can run fast!"

  Here's what I do, I get on my soapbox. I use blue chalk and yellow hair and I say, "On TV you see this, but guess what? This is not the sum total of America." We need to let them know the U.S. and the world has different people and different languages.

  Media come and they don't want to interview me; they don't want my picture, just the blond hair and blue eyes.

  Yet my interviews with African American JET participants also revealed the dangers in pigeonholing any group. The experiences of minority JET participants showed considerable diversity, and many had very positive assessments. One program coordinator put it this way: "Most of the schools would say, 'We're amazed, we've got this black and she speaks fantastic English; she's so enthusiastic and the kids love her.' So there was this one place that hit the newspapers and that was unfortunate. There were other black participants who were doing a great job but you never heard about them." Anton herself eventually came to see the JET Program as a positive force, and she became a very popular keynote speaker at JET Program conferences in the early to mid-199os.

  Nevertheless, her article raises a very pertinent policy question, drawing our attention to how CLAIR negotiated between its sincere desire to foster understanding of diversity and the reality of widespread preference for whites at the local level. It is important to note, first of all, that from the beginning CLAIR has stated that prefectures are not allowed to make requests about the race of the foreign participants (though they could specify preferences for nationality, sex, teaching credentials, Japanese language competence, and sister-city locations). But some prefectures and municipalities let their desire for whites be known in other ways. Philip articulated the problem to me:

  Philip: Naturally one of the things we never considered asking prefectures was whether they wanted someone who was black or white or Asian or whatever. But not surprisingly some prefectures on their request sheet wrote in they didn't want someone of a particular race.

  DM: How many?

  Philip: Very few. Two prefectures out of forty-seven. But still two too many. Luckily, the other two people in my department and the kacho (section chief), the four of us absolutely opposed even considering that sort of request. And we told the prefectures involved, this is impossible. At the same time, you're faced with an interesting dilemma. That is, you already know that X prefecture doesn't want someone of a particular race. So what do you do? What if someone of that race goes there? Is it fair for the person going because he or she isn't going to know that, at least initially. But there's a chance they'll find out the prefecture made a particular request, or else they'll sense it. Ethically, it's a difficult question because you refuse to accept that type of request, but at the same time once you know that sort of situation exists, you can't really ignore it and throw that person to the wolves, so to speak. So that was awkward, but perhaps because the number of nonwhites in the first year of the program was so small, it didn't become a problem.

  In the early years of the JET Program, CLAIR's solution was to use hairyo, which literally means "special care" or consideration. One former secretary-general of CLAIR described it this way: "We do give those applications special consideration in placement (hairyo wa shimasuyo). But it's for their own benefit." What hairyo meant in practice was that nonwhites were rarely placed in rural municipalities that had been assigned only one JET participant, as everyone from the mayor down to the parents and students was probably counting on a white face. Instead, most were sent to prefectural or large city boards of education, where often there was a history of receiving minorities; sometimes they were placed in high schools, where students were assumed to be more mature, or in the prefectural education center, where they interacted primarily with teachers. In addition, the supervisor at the local level was consulted beforehand.21

  This practice of singling out African American and other nonwhite applicants in the placement process deeply disturbed some of the program co ordinators. Because it involved separating groups by race, it was often perceived as yet another example of discrimination. Caroline recalls: "What I found is that the foreign ministry is still very prejudiced. Tho
se applications will come from the foreign ministry with tags on them for CLAIR. ... And John was furious, especially when he went back there and found two Korean Americans applications and one for a black guy that was married to a Korean. 'If you can't place them, please tell them that they can't come' type of thing."

  The practice of hairyo, then, illustrates a problem endemic to crosscultural interaction. The checkered history of Japan's relations with nonwhites and the visible presence of subordinated groups in Japanese society lead many JET participants, including some program coordinators, to be suspicious of the intentions of CLAIR and ministry staff. Yet Japanese officials in the late i98os and early 199os steadfastly refused this interpretation. For them, it was precisely the knowledge that sentiment in some local areas was still "backward" that necessitated their approach to intervene, moving very cautiously to deal with each potentially volatile situation. In the very act of working to create an ideal of a cross-cultural learning in which race becomes irrelevant, Japanese officials felt it necessary, at least initially, to call attention to race as an issue in the placement process.

  Contradictions in English Education

  While the articles discussed above generated the most vigorous responses from CLAIR and the Ministry of Education, most newspaper and magazine treatments of the JET Program between 1987 and -1989 examined the difficulties created by introducing native speakers into a school system dominated by government-controlled textbooks and entrance exams. Some of these articles were quite positive in their assessment of the program, reading almost like a series of mission statements from CLAIR.27 Also upbeat were the dozens of features that began appearing in local newspapers throughout Japan, introducing the new foreigners in town and profiling their activities. Pieces in the San Francisco Examiner ("Foreign Teachers Find Fame") and the Christian Science Monitor ("How to Make English More Fun for Japanese High School Students") stressed the potential for cross-cultural learning inherent in the JET Program.2s In June 1988, Gerald LeTendre in Fukui-ken wrote a series of three feature articles for the Daily Yomiuri that chronicled his work at Takefu Higashi High School and suggested positive steps ALTs could take to integrate themselves into the school community and to engage their students in conversational En- glish.29

  Other feature stories seemed to sit on the fence. The Japan Times ran an article after the first year of the JET Program titled "English Teaching Project Feeling Growing Pains," which cited the one-shot school visitation system as a major disappointment of the program scheme and the reduction of gaijin phobia as a significant achievement. A more positive view was offered the following year: in "English-Teaching Program a Success After Overcoming First-Year Trouble," the practice of basing more ALTs directly in schools and improved communication with participants and host institutions were said to have lowered the percentage of participants who left prematurely, breaking their contracts.30

  Most disturbing to CLAIR and Ministry of Education officials was the persistent regularity with which reports sharply critical of the JET Program surfaced throughout the inaugural years. The first year that Canadian participants joined the JET program, the Toronto Globe and Mail published an article on the frustrations of Canadian teachers in Japan: "They [JET participants] arrived in Japan last August to discover that, for the most part, their role was to replace tape recordings of English dialogue. Not only that, but many of them faced hostile attitudes on the part of local teachers who feared the outsiders would derail the process of preparing students for the 'examination hell."'"' The author went on to note that the Japanese government apparently finds it easier to foot the bill for the imported language teachers than to create a substantive role for them. In a similar vein, in 1988 the San Jose Mercury News ran a scathing front-page article on the "tough lessons" of the JET Program, claiming that it had exposed the insularity of Japanese culture. It related stories of JET women being sexually harassed, JET men being called "AIDS" as they walked down the street, JET minorities being grossly misunderstood, and Japanese teachers of English displaying fierce resentment. The pull-quote for the article cited an anonymous Japanese official: "People just aren't ready to listen to foreigners tell them what to do, to be perfectly blatant. The most unfortunate fact is that the Japanese government is spending millions of yen to create potential enemies, people who don't like each other, and that's exactly contrary to what they intended to do."32

  Nor were the critical articles confined to overseas or to Englishlanguage newspapers. In the third year of the program, the Daily Yomiuri took aim at the Japanese government, particularly the Ministry of Educa tion, in "Apathy Prevails in English Classrooms." The reporter sat in on a team-taught class of forty-eight boys at an exam-oriented school in Saitama-ken and observed students who gave only a faint reply to roll call, mumbled through the song "Puff the Magic Dragon," and struggled to give simple answers to simple questions asked by the ALT. Claiming that English education has not changed as much as JET participants expected, the author concludes that the Japanese government "should take the blame, as it introduced ALTs into Japanese middle and high school English classes without changing anything else in the English educational environ- ment."33

  The Mainichi Daily News carried an article in which Japanese teachers took issue with the high salaries and favorable working conditions of JET participants. The reporter also cited a student survey done by a Japanese teacher in which 28 percent of fifteen-year-olds called conversational skills useless on the exams.34 A Yomiuri Shimbun summary of presentations at a prefectural teachers' union meeting had this to say:

  What stood out in the reports is the favorable reception of students (8o percent in one survey said they enjoyed team-taught classes). But this becomes the seed of a new worry for Japanese teachers (atarashii nayami no tane).... Whether Japanese teachers like it or not, it is their fate to have been assigned the task of making strong test takers out of all students. To do well on the exams, what is important is grammar, translation, and essay-writing skills.... The kind of classes the ALTs conduct is another species entirely, and among most ALTs exam English has a terrible reputation. Yet Japanese teachers feel that the students must live in an exam-governed society and at a time when the number of English classes per week is down, they can't afford to spend time on conversation. 35

  Articles about the JET Program in Japanese language papers typically picked up on this theme of the tradeoffs in emphasizing conversational English. The Kyoto Shimbun, for instance, ran an article titled "Is Live English Useful on Exams? Foreign Teachers Have Been Invited, But." Even more revealing was the subcaption, "Students' Reactions Are Feeble; Some Teachers Have Returned Home Early in Despair."36 It also featured a cartoon (see figure 2) in which a stereotypical ALT (big nose, polkadot tie, blond hair), surrounded by Japanese students, is taken aback as they ask him all manner of personal questions (Are you married? Are you single? How old are you?). Meanwhile, the JTL, suddenly ignored, is shown standing behind the podium with a textbook in hand, tapping his foot angrily. As the cartoon suggests, puzzlement and anger over being asked numerous personal questions by Japanese students and teachers were not uncommon among ALTs, yet from the Japanese point of view such questions were usually just intended to gather information that would allow them to be helpful and to place the foreigner meaningfully in the larger framework of social relationships. Questions that were seen by ALTs as "meddlesome" and as an invasion of privacy were often sincere attempts to gain a better basis for communication with the foreigner. Such efforts to size up a new member of the group are ubiquitous in Japan. The age and marital status of one's conversational partner, for instance, can be crucial determinants of the language and demeanor used during face-to-face interaction.

  Figure 2. Students in a classroom. Illustration by Suzuki Yasumasa.

  That media accounts of the JET Program in the early years tended to play up the negative aspects of the JET Program, to pigeonhole Japanese responses, and to sensationalize JET participants' complaints caused great con
sternation among Ministry of Education and CLAIR officials. Even by the fall of 1988, the secretary-general of CLAIR thought the matter important enough to raise at the midyear block seminars:

  One matter which has been of concern to those of us at CLAIR is that several articles have appeared in the press about JET. Some are constructive but some are negative, and most of the negative articles seem to be based on misunderstanding or intentional distortion. For instance, Orient, a leading English newspaper, interviewed an Australian JET who said he had no interest in teaching and came to Japan mostly for the money. I'm sure this idea does not reflect the majority. I think we must make efforts to defend the program from unfair coverage. Please raise your voice for the protection of the program against unfair at- tacks.37

  Many JET participants were already puzzled about their role in Japanese schools and communities; this plea only strengthened their suspicion that the government was trying to keep them in the dark and even played into their stereotypes of an authoritarian Japanese state. After the secretarygeneral finished speaking, an ALT next to me turned with an exasperated look: "I really thought he was going to ban us from talking to the media, period."

  THE LIMITS OF "INTERNATIONALIZATION": HOMOSEXUALITY

  One issue that caused a considerable amount of friction between CLAIR and AJET but never made it into the media was CLAIR's response to gay JET participants. I first learned of this "problem" when I attended the orientation for new participants at the Keio Plaza Inter-Continental Hotel in Tokyo in 1989. Mingling with JET participants on the first day I soon caught snippets of a rumor that was making the rounds. "We tried to start a support group and CLAIR freaked out. You can guess what it was about!" commented one ALT. "The head of AJET said CLAIR really played hardball," noted another. Finally, I was able to interview Garth, a gay JET participant, who was at the center of much of the controversy and who filled in the pieces for me: