Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program (18 page)

The Tokyo Journal Controversy: A Case of Missing Identity

Later in the same year, under the title of "Teacher Torture" an article in the
Tokyo Journal began:

Patricia Smith was a JET. She thought Japanese were diligent, obedient
people with a high regard for education. But to her, Japan was like a bad
dream.... Every class was supervised by a Japanese teacher. Soon Patricia felt like a living tape recorder. "Here, read this part," the teacher
would command.... She went to the principal to discuss the situation
and was immediately given a sermon: "You dress too colorfully. Please
wear more conservative clothes...."

One day five students came to her and said they had some questions.
She brightened for a moment, thinking "progress at last." Then she
found out what they wanted to know-the meaning of a list of words:
F-, S-, D , C , B . "The students giggled as they
watched my face while I read that list," Patricia said. "I have never seen
more hateful expressions than were on those students' faces. Even
though I feel I can take a lot, a month later I decided to go back to America. Now, when I tell people what kind of experiences I had in
Japan, no one will believe me." 22

Alarmed by such an extremist perspective, CLAIR officials decided to
look into the matter. They discovered that the article, though not so identified, was a composite of interviews with several JET teachers. To compound problems, the author had inadvertently chosen as a pseudonym a
name that in fact belonged to a former participant in the program. Indeed,
that Patricia Smith had had a very different experience. CLAIR officials
and the program coordinators decided to go on the offensive. They persuaded the real Patricia to write a letter in defense of the program, and they
pressured the editor of the Tokyo Journal (using the threat of a lawsuit) to
publish it with an apology. "JET Brag" appeared in June 1989:

This is in response to the article which appeared in the March '89 issue
of the Tokyo Journal as an excerpt from the monthly, Shincho 45....
[It] tells of a gaijin nightmare-existence as a JET and reads like antiJapanese propaganda. It is, however, anti-JET propaganda. There was
only one Patricia Smith in the JET Program in 1987. I am she, and I did
not write that article. I loved my year in Japan and have the utmost respect for the JET Program. It is suspected that the article is in fact by a
Japanese writer working for Shincho 45 who was in hopes of stirring
up resentment toward the JET Program.... This attempt to manipulate
public opinion through subterfuge can only be viewed as malicious and
cowardly.

In addition, The Tokyo Journal is equally culpable in this subterfuge
because of its failure to verify the authenticity of the article.... The
damage done to my reputation and to the trust I worked so hard to
build in the community in which I lived is permanent; however, I expect the editors of The Tokyo journal and Shincho 45 to do something
to redress this wrong.

We hope that by running this letter from the real Patricia Smith
that we can put this matter to rest for all parties involved. We feel, as
Patricia points out, that this unfortunate case could have been avoided
by a more extensive checking on all levels, including the translation
stage-Ed., Tokyo Journal.'-;

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. Those 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