Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program

by David L. McConnell

  An Administrative Coup: Pension Rebates

  One of the most dramatic turnarounds in program policy occurred in 1995 when the Health and Welfare Ministry, following a vote in the Diet, issued guidelines that would allow short-term foreign employees of Japanese government offices to collect a partial rebate on their pension contributions when they left Japan. The decision was hailed as a breakthrough by CLAIR officials and JET participants alike, and it came after years of sustained pressure.

  The possibility of pension reform had seemed slim indeed in the early years of the program. The Ministry of Education had no interest in pursu ing the cause, and Wada Minoru tended to see JET participants' dissatisfaction as yet another example of their complaining about issues far beyond their understanding: "The JETs and the program coordinators should not get mad over the pension. It's not their specialty so they can't judge the issues involved. It involves very complex legal issues and it's not just an ALT problem. It's part of the larger foreign worker problem." Yet CLAIR officials not only supported the ALTs but tried to use the Association of JET Participants, and the "foreign pressure" it represented, to further the cause, as a former AJET chair attested:

  I remember on one of my visits to CLAIR the secretary-general took me into his back room and said, "Look! They won't listen to us. I hope you'll put some heavy pressure on this person in this ministry. Here's his address: Write to him." So I told the AJET prefectural representatives to report this to their constituencies. I think it was the beginning of a bombardment scheme, though whether or not it had the intended effect, or if many letters were actually written, I'll never know. I would like to think that we helped.

  AJET's letter-writing campaign did eventually put the problem on the radar screen of Health and Welfare Ministry bureaucrats. Behind the official administrative silence about pensions, which was long interpreted as a refusal to entertain the idea of change, the wheels were slowly turning.

  Conference Woes and Successes

  Perhaps the most striking indicator of CLAIR's increasing efficiency and responsiveness to the concerns of JET participants is the evolution of the national-level conferences. Most contact with JET participants and local Japanese officials occurs by phone, fax, email, or mail. Each year, however, there are several events that bring together many of the major players in the JET Program (except students) for several intense days. These nationallevel conferences include the Tokyo orientation (held during the first week of August to welcome new JET participants), midyear block seminars (regional conferences designed to improve strategies for team-teaching and work relations), and the spring renewers' conference (to reinvigorate JET participants who have chosen to extend their contracts for an additional year).15 Especially during the early years of the program, CLAIR and ministry staff typically spent months preparing for these conferences, and they worked furiously during them.

  Though the purpose of each of these conferences is slightly different, the format and flavor are strikingly similar. All JET participants are provided with free transportation, meals, and hotel rooms, giving the entire affair the feel of a corporate working retreat. The program usually involves an opening and closing ceremony, as well as keynote speeches by a Japanese ministry official and an invited guest; but the bulk of the time is spent in workshops on topics ranging from team-teaching techniques to office relations. Over a period of ten years I attended five of these conferences: a Tokyo orientation, two midyear block seminars, and two renewers' conferences. Because of the logistical difficulties of convening such large numbers of people and the potential for public confrontations among them, they often make visible the conflicts among the various constituencies in the JET Program.

  The very first problem that had to be resolved was control of the agenda. Early on it was decided that a strict division of labor between CLAIR and the Ministry of Education would minimize friction, with the result that each conference is divided into two consecutive sessions: the first, on team teaching and educational matters, is sponsored by the ministry; the second, on broader program-related issues, is sponsored by CLAIR. Compartmentalization of duties is rigid, and face-to-face interaction between ministry and CLAIR officials is kept to a minimum. At times this reached almost comical proportions. At the 1989 Tokyo Orientation, the agencies' offices were forty floors apart in the hotel, and one CLAIR official told me that the two sides met with each other exactly once during the entire week.

  Negotiating AJET's role in the conferences proved to be much more problematic. Relying on feedback from its members, AJET compiled a long series of complaints, most of which centered on the content of the workshops and the selection of speakers. The AJET Magazine, for example, carried a critical review of the midyear block conferences in 1988:

  The Kanto Block Conference ... was a haphazard, ambulatory attempt at professional orientation. Speakers were selected at random by some far-removed body/bodies with scant knowledge of whom they were conscripting for workshops. Residents of 500,000 + populated cities were talking on "Life as a Rural JET"; those who had never administered a Teacher's Seminar were delivering presentations on it; in short, planning and organization were poorly done, and the ensuing conference rendered about as entertaining as a circus and about as professionally beneficial as one.... Why were we not consulted upon for content and logistical support? ... Aside from CLAIR, AJET appears to be receiving little recognition and cooperation from any other administrative body despite the enormous effort we contribute on the program's behalf.16

  AJET particularly resented being shut out of the process of selecting speakers and presenters at the ministry-sponsored workshops. Craig, a program coordinator from Britain, explained, "The first year Mombusho just contacted the ETCs [English teachers' coordinators] and asked them to submit a list of ALTs, but the ETCs don't know what ALTs do, so they'd send a list of their drinking buddies or the first five letters of the alphabet-it was disastrous."

  The lack of consultation with AJET only fueled the conspiracy theories that had begun to circulate among JET participants. The magazine's critique continued:

  Is somebody afraid that the conferences will become too professional or beneficial should we get actively involved in the planning process? Doesn't there appear to be desired stagnation? Perhaps the benefits an organized JET Programme could effect upon the education system are purposely shunned.... If we are here to balance the exportation of walkman units, automobiles, and semiconductor chips, why would there be a need for anything more than a half-hearted attempt to assemble us for a few days of semi-structured, innocuous chatter?17

  CLAIR and Ministry of Education officials, however, saw the situation differently. They believed that it was necessary to go through the "appropriate channels" in selecting speakers. One ministry official insisted, "The ALTs don't understand our administrative structure. We have to allow prefectural officials to recommend their own speakers. We can't order them to choose certain people."

  Other difficulties in the interactions between Japanese officials and JET participants began to arise almost immediately. One of the first things that ALTs noticed about the midyear block conferences, for instance, was that relatively few Japanese teachers of language attended. Having worked in schools for several months, most ALTs had come to the conclusion that the "problem" with team teaching lay with the system of entrance exams and the resistance of Japanese teachers rather than with their own limited training. Consequently, they dismissed the workshops on how to do effective team teaching as simply preaching to the converted. Leslie, an American ALT, summed up the general frustration: "It ticks me off. We spend a week in Tokyo learning all this crap about team teaching and then again at the block conferences, and they [the JTLs] don't have the foggiest idea what's up. It puts the obligation on us to teach them what team teaching is all about. I mean, it puts you in a really tough position. Why don't they send more Japanese teachers to these conferences?"

  The small number of Japanese participants exacerbated yet another prob
lem: those Japanese teachers and administrators who did attend often felt overwhelmed by the aggressive, sometimes confrontational, styles of the foreigners. In December 1988 the Daily Yomiuri even ran an article ("ALTs Overwhelm Japanese at Kanto Block Seminar") that focused on this point, noting that "as is often the case with the discussion conducted in English, the ALTs were quite vocal in expressing their opinions while the Japanese barely uttered a word."18 In some cases, JTLs or ETCs were put on the spot and asked to defend (in English) their teaching practices. Answers that justified current approaches by invoking "Japanese custom" were privately, and sometimes publicly, ridiculed by ALTs. The Japanese tendency to treat their own cultural forms as places where analytic thought and discourse must or should stop made little sense to most ALTs, who preferred to treat cultural explanations as critically as any other. Yet underlying their critiques was the ALTs' assumption that their own organization of thought was somehow more sophisticated than the "naive" thinking of Japanese who spoke of "Japanese history" or the "island mentality.""

  My own observations of workshops during 1988 and 1989 as well as conversations with JTLs and ETCs who attended confirmed that overall, they had the tone of extended gripe sessions for JET participants who, having suffered in various ways in Japanese schools and boards of education, were suddenly granted a sympathetic audience. But informal gatherings in which ETCs or JTLs were in the majority could be equally cynical and pessimistic. At lunch at one conference I retired with a group of JTLs and ETCs I knew, and listened to a different set of gripes. "Everyone talks so fast, I can't follow the train of thought," complained one, to many murmurs of agreement. "Yeah, the moderator kept telling them to slow down, but they wouldn't," added another. "Why do ALTs raise their hand before some- one's finished talking?" another wondered. "We think it's more polite to wait till the speaker is finished and then raise our hand." Another teacher grumbled that ALTs had "too much energy."

  I do not mean to imply that there were no ETCs and JTLs who could hold their own in the public discussions, but in the early years of the con ferences they were few and far between. In 1989 ministry officials decided that a good way to inject more "dialogue" into the midyear conferences was to require every ALT, JTL, and ETC in attendance to write a one-page essay on "what effective team teaching means to me." These were copied and distributed to all participants, but the resulting collection of papers was so bulky and heavy, and so varied in quality, that for most JET participants it simply became the butt of running jokes; the clumsy attempt only seemed to fuel nagging doubts about Japan's commitment to internationalization. How could a conference to change English education be useful when there were virtually no Japanese teachers engaging in dialogue?

  Another problem was that the JET participants quickly turned into fierce critics of the speeches by Japanese officials. Cultural standards of speechmaking clearly influenced their opinion. To CLAIR and ministry officials, these were primarily symbolic occasions and thus were properly governed by protocol. Relevance, humor, liveliness-these are not the qualities by which ceremonial speeches are ordinarily judged in Japan. Moreover, in Japan seniority is often more important than charisma when speakers are chosen for events such as these, but CLAIR and Ministry of Education officials soon learned that senior officials were rarely a hit with the JET participants. At one conference I attended, the speaker talked for an hour about the pre-World War II era, much to the dismay of ALTs in the audience. Indeed, the conference speeches by ministry officials were virtually the same year after year, and their rehashed abstractions and advice had little appeal after the Tokyo orientation. Wada himself was often taken to task by ALTs for repeatedly giving a standard speech on team teaching, though he became quite adept at counterattack:

  I want you to remember my name correctly. Wada is a very nice name because Wa means "peace" and Ta means "paddy field." I am the type of person who likes peaceful paddy fields. Some ALTs have called me Mr. Yada [Mr. Yuck], and I wondered why. One reason is I gave a very long speech to ALTs last year. According to Western logic, you like to have a question-and-answer type discussion, but in Japan we like to talk and talk and talk. Today I'm going to talk for more than one hour. I hope ALTs will get used to this kind of presentation.

  Wada rightly recognized that some ALTs found the absence of a questionand-answer session-a common feature of Japanese speechmaking-quite irksome. They objected not because they had burning questions that had to be asked in public but because they believed they were engaged in a symbolic struggle over the "right" to ask questions. Stopping them from asking questions was thus seen as an affront to democracy: what Yoshio Sugimoto has called "friendly authoritarianism" was affirmed and individual opinion devalued.20

  For Japanese officials, the most challenging problem posed by the conferences was to manage and control the behavior of JET participants. In particular, they struggled with the apathy and cynicism of renewing JET participants who were making presentations at the Tokyo orientation. In 1988 a number of those invited to do workshops did not even shown up at their sessions, leading Wada to write a letter to the AJET Magazine the following month: "At this point I have to be honest with you in adding something unpleasant about a happening which is unprecedented in my many years' cooperation with MEFs, BETs and ALTs. Some ALTs, most of whom were renewers, 'evaporated' from the workshops in the heat of the summer.... To be frank, my trust in you nearly collapsed when I found out about the poor attendance of the renewers in the workshops."" The following year the cynicism of workshop presenters, all of whom were renewers, had become such an issue that the program coordinators at CLAIR had to explicitly ask them to be less negative in speaking to incoming participants: "Remember that they've just got off the plane and have high expectations. Try to present a realistic but positive picture. Last year I heard people saying, 'Gosh, after I heard these renewers talking, I wanted to leave."'

  Another serious problem was that many JET participants treated the conferences more as a social event than as a business meeting. One CLAIR official complained to me that JET participants were so enamored with the nightlife that they would wear T-shirts and shorts to the business meeting in the day and then dress up to go out at night! A more fundamental problem was simple nonattendance, particularly at the midyear block seminars and the renewers' conferences. Though all of the conferences qualified as a fully paid business trip, a not insignificant minority of ALTs viewed the sessions as a waste of time and skipped them altogether, using the opportunity instead to reunite with friends and enjoy some relief from the constant stress of being a gaijin in an all-Japanese community. Some officials seriously proposed holding the conferences in more remote locations, where there would be fewer tempting diversions, but because of logistics and other considerations these proposals never won out.

  Even worse, a very small number of JET participants caused property damage at these conferences. At the 1989 Renewers' Conference in Kyoto, an ALT (who had been drinking) smashed a huge glass window while playing baseball in his hotel room. He agreed to pay for the damage, but the incident caused acute embarrassment to program officials. At another conference CLAIR ended up paying nearly $2,000 for drinks from hotel room refrigerators when JET participants checked out without paying their tab.

  CLAIR and Ministry of Education officials found the solution to these various difficulties not in large-scale interventions or drastic overhauls of conference format and agenda but in incremental improvements. First, they looked very closely at the written evaluations for each conference, as well as analyzing all the conferences at annual "evaluation meetings" at CLAIR. Thus every year they received a great deal of input from participants as to what did and did not work. In addition, from the very start Japanese officials at CLAIR gave the program coordinators fairly wide latitude to make changes; indeed, to a remarkable extent the program coordinators have run the show.

  The workshops themselves were improved in several ways. JET participants were required to apply to be presenters, and th
e Ministry of Education advised prefectural administrators to meet with AJET prefectural representatives before approving their applications. In addition, teams of JTLs, ALTs, and ETCs were assigned to moderate each session and were specifically instructed to ensure that Japanese points of view were aired and fairly represented. Criticisms of the keynote speeches helped make clear who was a hit, who bombed, and why, resulting in an annual search for speakers who would be popular with JET participants. The ministry began to rotate its speakers more often and to stress variation in the speeches. At one renewers' conference, CLAIR even brought in a Zen monk as the keynote speaker. A brief experiment with a question-and-answer session after the keynote speeches was dropped after one year when it proved to be too uncomfortable for the Japanese speakers, but a permanent Q&A box was established at each conference so that written questions could be submitted to CLAIR. A program coordinator was put in charge of drafting official responses, which were subject to approval by Japanese officials.

  Integrating Japanese teachers and administrators into the conferences proved to be a stiffer challenge, and JET participants outnumber their Japanese counterparts to this day. Few JTLs were clamoring to attend these conferences, and ETCs were also reluctant to act as presenter or moderator in sessions governed by the rapid-fire comments, sarcasm, and humor of college-age English speakers. Over the years, however, the Ministry of Education has gradually increased the numbers of JTLs that prefectures are required to send to the Tokyo orientation and the midyear block seminars and also now expects ETCs to play a substantial role in workshops. Ministry officials promote these conferences as a chance to "travel abroad in your own country" and to "learn how to give a lecture in English" or to "learn how to participate in a Western-style discussion." Wada put it this way: "Honestly speaking, the majority of Japanese don't know how to give a speech or moderate a discussion in English. I believe ETCs and JTLs should learn how to do this in this age of internationalization." Not surprisingly, many ETCs and JTLs pulled into the conferences spent weeks brushing up on English and preparing their ideas and comments. By 1993-94, it was obvious that Japanese teachers and administrators were becoming more assertive in the workshops. In one conference in Ishikawa Prefecture, a JTL even stood up and admonished the ALTs: "Look, do you want us to be involved in this conference or not? If so, then stop talking so quickly and help us understand. Otherwise, you totally dominate the workshop and we have no reason to be here."