Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program (19 page)

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
consternation 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:

When I first got to Japan I went up to one of the program coordinators
and said, "Is there any information at all for gay JETs?" And she's like
suddenly pulling me aside, "Oh, you better come over here, let's not
talk about this in the open." And she said there was nothing. No possibility of any formal support network. After about four months of
struggling along on my own, even though I was in a very good prefecture, I finally met another gay JET at the midyear conference. I finally
had someone to talk to about issues that were important to gay JETsyou know, when you come into a society with very different concepts
of sexuality and body language, it can be very disorienting. And there's
always the questions, "Who do I tell? How much do I tell?" Keeping it
a secret is a very difficult thing, a very stressful thing.

Finally I talked to the chair of AJET and told him I wanted to form a
gay support group. Well, we started, we had some meetings, and then
the people in AJET wanted me to write an article for the Tokyo orientation issue of the AJET newsletter to (a) let gay JETs know that support
was available, (b) tell them that things are different in Japan-you can't
use the same assumptions as in your own country, and (c) tell them to
be discreet-don't come out! At the time that was my basic message.
You have no idea what's going to happen-don't come out!

Well, for some reason, CLAIR saw a copy of that before it came out
and basically threw a litter. The situation was made more difficult because the vice-chair of AJET at the time was gay. CLAIR was doing all
sorts of things. They were threatening to close down AJET, they were
threatening to stop the newsletter altogether, they said the future of
the JET Program would be in jeopardy. And ultimately what happened
is that they printed the page blank in the newsletter because it was too
late to pull it out altogether. Even so, AJET let all prefectural representatives know that they could have the page sent to them if they wanted.
And we went around to all the prefectural meetings at the orientation,
basically to say "I'm here, there'll be a meeting at a certain time, support is available-if you're gay, don't freak out." We did that anyway.

When I asked CLAIR and Ministry of Education officials about this incident, the responses were virtually identical. All stressed that homosexuality
was still highly stigmatized in Japan, particularly for those in public office.
One CLAIR official ventured: "Because JET participants are government
employees, we have to hold them to very high standards. There's no way we
can tolerate a public discussion of homosexuality in connection with the JET
Program. Anyway, the JET participants themselves are very much divided
on this issue. There are lots of JETs who don't feel comfortable with the idea
of homosexuality." So fearful were Japanese officials that the possibility of
requiring AIDS testing of all JET participants was seriously discussed (but
rejected) at a meeting between program coordinators and Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials during the first year of the program.

Although AJET gave in to CLAIR's demand over including information
on the gay support group in their monthly magazine, the issue of how
CLAIR should respond to gay JET participants did not disappear. And in
one of the JET Program's great ironies, Japanese officials at CLAIR actually
hired Garth to be a program coordinator two years later, unaware that he
was gay. The offer of employment came shortly after the Japanese management at CLAIR had done away with the practice of allowing program
coordinators to choose their own successors. Because they had consolidated
the decision-making apparatus entirely in their own hands, they had to
rely primarily on reports from prefectural officials and a short interview. Garth himself realized that he would most likely not have been hired had
input from current program coordinators been sought: "The program coordinators that preceded me, with one exception, were against hiring me
because they all knew I was the 'gay troublemaker."' Even a subsequent
secretary-general of CLAIR admitted that hiring Garth came to be viewed
as a mistake: "Eventually everyone found out that Garth was gay, but if
they had known for sure at the time, they never would've hired him."

In any event, Garth took up his assignment at CLAIR only to find it full
of personal difficulties:

My first promotional trip abroad happened to be with the secretarygeneral of CLAIR and I remember we were in the Midwest-I think it
was in Kansas City-and we were having breakfast, and one of the articles in the paper was on Governor Wilson in California vetoing a gay
rights law. The secretary-general suddenly turned to me and said, "Is
there any way we can screen out gay participants from the program?" I
was completely taken aback and managed to say, "I think it's more
trouble than it's worth. It'll open a can of worms that we don't want to
deal with." But it was galling to be put in this position by someone who
could make my life really difficult. Later when things came to a head,
we started talking about issues gay people face and he said, "These people are choosing their lifestyle. We don't have to give them any support
whatsoever," and I'm like "Excuse me, why would you choose a
lifestyle that involves alienation?" So I went out and got all the information about how this is hereditary and he said, "Hmm, I'll have to
think about this," and he went to his son who was a psychiatrist who
corroborated everything I'd said.