Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program (11 page)

To the Prime Minister's Office, the JET Program was rich in symbolic
capital. The proposal would be taken by the American negotiating team at
the summit as a gesture of goodwill and, while not directly related to opening up Japan's economy, it would nevertheless provide a concrete example
of Japan's determination to change how it relates to the outside world. The
proposal was ultimately presented as a "gift" to the American side and thus represented a prime example of what Aurelia George has called "package
diplomacy," a process by which Japanese negotiators present a plan that
may be tangential at best to American demands but that nevertheless
demonstrates their good intentions.16

The JET Program also meshed with Nakasone's policy goals in another
area-the field of education. In the mid-i98os the sense of crisis over Japanese schooling seemed to climax as the news media ran daily stories of
bullying, teen suicides, and students attacking teachers. In response, Nakasone formed a blue-ribbon commission to make recommendations on
sweeping changes for public education. This council, according to Leonard
Schoppa, was "originally conceived by the Prime Minister as a means of
breaking Mombusho's conservative hold on the education system and radically transforming Japanese education."" Schoppa goes on to argue that
the council will ultimately be remembered for behind-the-scenes struggles
and its failure to deliver significant reform proposals. The ad hoc committee was sharply divided between members chosen by Nakasone, who favored liberalization but were fiscal conservatives, and representatives from
the Ministry of Education, including Liberal Democratic Party Diet members with a special interest in education (bunkyozoku). Major changes such
as deregulating textbooks, restructuring the 6-3-3-4 system, and building more flexibility into the entrance exams were largely tabled or were
blocked by the Ministry of Education during the implementation process.

Viewed from a long-term perspective, however, the impact of Nakasone's educational reform appears to be more substantial than Schoppa allows, particularly in areas such as international education.18 The JET Program represented a chance to implement Nakasone's will in a small but
symbolically important manner. By leapfrogging the reluctant ministry's
decision-making apparatus, the administration could administer shock
therapy to English language education. Better yet, it could be covered by
the excuse of foreign pressure.

THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION PUTS ON THE BRAKES

Under the proposed plan, over go percent of JET participants would be
placed in public schools. Technically, this was the turf of the Ministry of
Education, and to work effectively the proposal needed its support. This
was the final, and most difficult, hurdle for Ministry of Home Affairs officials-securing the cooperation of their counterparts just down the street
in the Kasumigaseki section of Tokyo. In marked contrast to the reaction of
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Prime Minister's Office, the initial
response was decidedly negative. The issue was not so much that the Min istry of Education was opposed to internationalization in principle; it had
endorsed most of the general proposals offered in this area by Nakasone's
ad hoc council. Rather, its reluctance centered on the twin issues of control
and scope of change.

The "New, Improved" JET Program

Though the fanfare surrounding the arrival of the first wave of JET participants in 1987 would seem to testify to its novelty, the Ministry of Education saw the JET Program as simply the "new, improved" version of a long
history of attempts to reform English education. In fact, ever since the
grammar and translation method had established hegemony in the late
Meiji period, there had been periodic attempts to move the public school
system back toward a more communication-oriented focus. The JET Program had a number of postwar antecedents.

In the early 195os a small group of American reformers had formed the
English Language Exploratory Committee (ELEC); sponsored by John D.
Rockefeller III, they had enthusiastically launched a campaign to promote
the oral approach of Charles Fries in Japan. ELEC, however, refused to establish formal ties with any Japanese groups, and after ten years of heavy
expense and intense effort, even Rockefeller's staff recognized that "ELEC
had failed to achieve its main objective. . . . ELEC was not able to change
the grand strategy of English-language teaching in Japan or to bring overall improvement in teaching methods."19

The next effort was a joint enterprise in the late 196os between the
Japan Association of College English Teachers (JACET) and the JapanUnited States Educational Commission (JUSEC) of the Fulbright Program.
Their collaborative effort to bring over from the United States specialists
trained in English as a second language (ESL) also failed miserably. The intense conflict that erupted when ESL specialists, wedded to their particular
techniques and goals, were placed in the public school system forced speedy
abandonment of the idea of recruiting foreign specialists. Japanese public
school teachers simply felt too threatened by Americans who thought they
knew all about language teaching.

This failure set the stage for the first direct precursor of the JET Program. American college graduates with no special training in ESL theory
and pedagogy were hired by the Fulbright Commission and then placed in
prefectural boards of education by the Ministry of Education. In 1969 the
first four assistant teachers' consultants (ATCs) arrived in Tokyo for orientation. Richard Rubinger was among them, and his recollections provide a
sense of the time:

When we first came, this program was explained to us as the continuation of years of attempts by the Fulbright Commission to improve English teaching in Japan. They had already tried many other things; they
had hired academics to give courses at teacher training colleges, and
they were giving lectures on linguistics and direct method, that kind of
stuff. In those days, direct method, practice drills, that was the thing,
exactly what everyone is trying to get away from now.... Anyway this
had gone on for some time and they had failed in everything. So now
the idea was to hire people as assistants to the shidoshuji (English
teachers' consultants) who would actually get into the public schools on
a regular basis. They had never done that before. The point is, behind
this program was a conscious, articulated effort to revolutionize English
teaching in Japan. That was clearly the goal and that was the term they
used, "revolutionize the teaching of English in Japan."

[DM: "But you never team-taught with a Japanese teacher?"] No,
never. We would be invited as guests for the day to a certain school, and
we would actually walk into the classroom and the class would be
handed over to us. And I would teach the lesson for the day, using the
textbook, using the direct method, with no recourse to grammatical explanation at all. And the Japanese teachers would sit in the back of the
class and there would be a seminar afterwards where we would explain
what we had done, and the idea was that the teachers would run home
immediately and adopt this, but of course this never happened. And we
were under some pressure to write monthly reports to the Fulbright
Commission to convince them that things were changing, that we were
useful. And this always involved some chicanery on our part. It soon
became quite obvious that the Japanese weren't interested in revolutionizing anything.21

Nevertheless, by 1976 the number of ATCs had risen to fifteen, and the
Fulbright Commission had contracted with the New York-based Council
on International Education Exchange (CIEE) to handle recruiting. But that
year the Fulbright Commission informed the Ministry of Education that
because of budgetary constraints, it could no longer support the program.
Caroline Yang, the executive director of the Fulbright Commission at the
time, explained that "it was a very difficult decision to give up the program,
but we simply couldn't afford its cost. We approached Mombusho, which
canvassed prefectures, and there was enough interest that they decided to
take over the program. Mombusho agreed to provide a subsidy from 1977
on and to require participating prefectures to cover the remainder of the
cost."21 Thus was born the Mombusho English Fellows (MEF) Program for
American college graduates to teach English in Japan. CIEE was kept on to
recruit in the United States and to coordinate orientation and counseling in
Japan.

At the same time that the Fulbright Commission had been working to
bring American youth to teach English in Japan, the British Council had
been actively promoting the same idea in Britain. A few years after the
startup of the MEF Program, the British English Teaching (BET) scheme
was initiated. The latter, unlike the MEF Program, was administered by the
Ministry of Education in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs;
it also had somewhat broader goals, including the promotion of foreign
understanding of Japan. In any event, by 1986, the last year of both, over
two hundred British and American youth were teaching English in Japan.
This precedent has particular importance because that year virtually every
one of Japan's forty-seven prefectural boards of education employed at
least one or two American or British teachers. The JET Program thus involved not starting totally fresh but largely reorganizing and expanding
two existing programs. Yet Ministry of Education officials continued to
drag their feet.

First of all, they were upset at the prospect of losing control of these
smaller English teaching programs that they administered. Relations with
the Prime Minister's Office were already strained, and now it seemed as if
larger, more powerful ministries, with Nakasone's backing, were attempting to go over their heads to radically change English education. In addition, the trained pedagogues and educators employed in the Upper Secondary School Division of the ministry worried that they would be forced
to implement decisions made by politicians and bureaucrats who were untrained in educational matters. "The bureaucrats in the Ministry of Home
Affairs don't have the power to judge educational ideas," one curriculum
specialist noted. "They like to have festivals and go out in flowery parades
and be in the newspapers." Second, in the context of the Ministry of Home
Affairs' initial target of 3,000 JET participants, the MEF and BET programs
suddenly seemed insignificant. Efforts to teach English conversation had
always been peripheral to exam-oriented English instruction, and Ministry
of Education officials were understandably worried that there would be
considerable resistance among Japanese teachers if the numbers of foreign
participants increased dramatically. The proposal forced the ministry to
confront the result of decades of relative inflexibility in foreign language
education policy and the complete lack of major reforms in the system
since the 1950s.22

At the same time, there were several arguments to be made in favor of
the proposal. The Ministry of Education had already committed itself in
principle to internationalization. In the report of Nakasone's ad hoc committee on educational reform, it had endorsed the call for education compatible with a new era of closer international relations. Having caught up with other advanced industrialized nations technologically, the report argued, Japan could not survive in cultural and educational isolation but
would have to interact in those spheres as well. Among the report's concrete proposals were calls for more exchanges of educational personnel,
greater acceptance of Japanese students returning from abroad, and more
emphasis on Japanese students mastering English as a tool for communication. In addition, growing local demand for native speakers in the public
schools was coupled with the prospect of no more than incremental increases in the budgets for the MEF and BET programs. If the Ministry of
Education could keep the numbers of JET participants from increasing too
rapidly, some argued, this was an opportunity to continue a fundamentally
sound program without having to foot the bill. A further complication was
the feeling on the part of ministry officials that by the time the proposal
had been brought to them, it was a virtual fait accompli. If they refused to
cooperate, the Ministry of Home Affairs would in all likelihood go ahead
with the plan with the backing of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the
Prime Minister's Office. Even at the local level, superintendents of education are political appointees: given the leverage of Home Affairs with governors and mayors, it was not inconceivable that officials could implement
the program without Ministry of Education support.

The ministry's point man at this time was Wada Minoru, a senior curriculum specialist in the high school education section (kotogakkoky(5iku
ka). Fluent in English and holding a master's degree in teaching English as
a foreign language (TEFL), he had served as the Ministry of Education's coordinator for the MEF Program. Shortly after Wada retired from the ministry in 1993, I was able to talk with him about the behind-the-scenes negotiations when the program was being formed:

I remember the new idea was discussed by a very limited number of
Ministry of Education officials-fewer than five. The kacho (section
chief) of the section in charge of MEF, a few other persons in the section, and myself. At the early stage of the discussion we didn't like the
idea because we were afraid that the Ministry of Home Affairs would
take control of the program and the educational purpose would be lost.
If we participated in the new program, we thought it would be impossible to keep our influence in the field of teaching English. But we knew
that it would be impossible to increase the budget, and local prefectures
and cities and towns wanted to have more native speakers of English.
The Ministry of Education couldn't support them financially. So we
were in a dilemma.23