Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program (22 page)

These actions were taken because CLAIR officials felt strongly that the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs (i.e., the Japanese consulates abroad) needed to
portray JET participants' jobs more realistically. Indeed, the ministry was
in a difficult position: it had to promote a positive image of the program
abroad in the face of criticism from the foreign media. Realizing that most
potential applicants were not primarily interested in English instruction,
ministry officials tended to downplay the teaching component of JET, instead presenting the program as a chance for foreigners to experience Japanese language and culture. Predictably, the result was confusion; during
the first few years of the program a handful of ALTs reported that they
didn't realize they would be involved in team teaching until they arrived in
Tokyo for their orientation.

Tightening Visa Regulations

At the same time that CLAIR officials were discussing with the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs how to improve selection procedures, they were also talking with Justice Ministry officials about how to tighten the visa regulations. Japanese officials saw two problems in this area. First, a small minority of JET participants whose hearts were not in public school teaching
were resigning from the JET Program in favor of other employment in
Japan. Private English conversation schools, for instance, offer roughly the
same salaries for only four hours of work per night; though some of these
are fly-by-night operations, in some cases JET participants were willing to
take their chances. A few even won jobs in Japanese corporations or at
English-language newspapers and left the JET Program early in order to
take up their new posts in April, according to Japanese custom. While
CLAIR had little standing to protest if the JET participant had a Japanese
sponsor, officials did ask the Justice Ministry to intervene in such cases. In
addition, CLAIR added a stipulation that return airfare would be withheld
if it was discovered that a JET participant signed another contract for employment in Japan while in the program.

Second, an increasing number of JET participants were staying on to
work in Japan after their term of service was up. This problem was of growing concern to the Justice Ministry, the agency concerned with regulating the flow of personnel across Japan's borders. One secretary-general of
CLAIR explained:

The Justice Ministry doesn't welcome the idea of ALTs changing jobs
and staying on in Japan, and makes it difficult for them to do so. It's all
right if they stay on to study, but JET is a simplified screening process,
so if they use this as a route to get working visas, that's not good. I
agree with this, and have personally instructed the Justice Ministry to
make it difficult for ALTs to secure working visas. It's true, there's a
sense in which this constitutes poor treatment of ALTs (ijiwaru to iu
men mo arimasu), but as a principle I think it's preferable if ALTs return home when they finish here.

In addition, to discourage JET participants from using the program as a
stepping-stone to get working visas the grace period for leaving Japan on
completion of the program was changed from ninety days to thirty days.

This determination that JET participants should quickly return home is
curious, particularly in light of the demands to open up Japanese society
that gave rise to the program. One could argue that the desire of a high
percentage of JET participants to stay on and work in Japan is a striking indicator of the success of the program, and should be encouraged. Yet the
Japanese caution is fully consistent with studies that have shown a preoccupation with protecting a pure and homogenous society from foreign pollution. Jackson Bailey's characterization of the underlying mind-set seems
apt here:

The thrust and structure of Japanese rules and regulations regarding
the entry into Japan of people or things whether they are part of commercial or of cultural exchange demand that proof be offered that the
person or item should be allowed to enter. The implicit assumption is
that persons or things should not be allowed in until there is clear and
explicit evidence that they should be. This assumption underlies all
transactions whether they involve a small matter such as a video cassette of a television program from the United States, a set of photo negatives for a cultural exchange poster, or the appointment of a foreign
professor to a regular faculty position in a university. In each and all of
these cases the implicit parameters of the situation assume that the answer is "no" until incontrovertible proof is supplied, normally in writing, that the item or person is eligible to come in.46

According to this logic, although the entry of JET participants into Japan
had already been negotiated, a continued stay must be renegotiated from
scratch. It is worth noting, however, that with the help of a legitimate Japanese sponsor, JET participants do not find it too difficult to subvert the general principle and keep working in Japan. In fact, there are numerous
JET alumni currently living and working throughout Japan, and neither
tightening the visa process nor imposing a three-year limit (discussed
below) was enough to thwart their determined efforts to stay on.

Cautions to Renewers and the Three-Year Limit

Realizing that several serious incidents involved renewers who presumably had become complacent and whose reasons for staying were not jobrelated, in 1989 CLAIR sent out a list of the pros and cons of renewing to
discourage ALTs and CIRs from extending their contracts for the
"wrong" reasons.4' CLAIR also encouraged local governments to exercise
their option of rejecting applications for renewal from "problem JETs."
To that end, the wording on application forms was strengthened: "Contracts are for one year[,] ... renewable in certain circumstances by mutual
consent between the host institution and the JET participant." In reality,
prefectures are loathe to refuse a request for renewal. One prefectural official confessed to me, "This year there was one person we didn't want to
renew, but because CLAIR didn't give us the forty we had requested
(only thirty-three) we had to renew him. If they gave us all we wanted,
there would have been room to refuse renewers." The cultural aversion to
face-to-face confrontation was also a factor. Their fears were not unfounded. Chiba Prefecture refused to allow an American woman to renew,
pointing out that she did not have good relations with her schools and
that she had been ill for some months without a clear diagnosis; she became incensed, contacting CLAIR as well as the American embassy to demand their intervention. When they did not act, she contacted lawyers to
see about legal recourse. Ultimately, she left the program, but the possibility of this kind of reaction makes local governments reluctant to take a
tough stance.

Because renewals are so common, an incoming prefectural teacher's
consultant, with limited English skills and little knowledge of the JET Program, may find him- or herself dealing with JET participants who have
three or more years of experience working in the program. These veterans
both know internal precedents and, as a result of visiting a number of
schools in the prefecture, they are often more in touch with teachers and
school-level realities than the teacher's consultant is. Though most longterm ALTs and CIRs are dedicated to their jobs, others manage to minimize
their exertions while cultivating other interests or even augmenting their already-generous income by offering lucrative classes in private conversation on the side. In other words, they have learned how to milk the system
to great advantage.

To remedy this problem, a handful of local government officials approached CLAIR and asked for a new national policy stipulating that JET
participants renew no more than two times. This would make it easier for
local officials, who jokingly referred to themselves as "the Japanese who
can't say 'no,"' to get rid of problematic ALTs and CIRs: they could say that
the three-year limit was set by higher authorities and therefore out of
their hands. For a while, CLAIR wavered on this issue and even conducted
a survey of local governments, which showed mixed sentiments. But the
suicides and serious accidents led to a reconsideration; beginning in
1991-92, those serving in or beyond their third year were not allowed to
renew.4' Not coincidentally, this policy was vigorously supported by Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials. They thought the renewal rate, which had
averaged 44 percent for the first four years of the program, was too high
for a cultural exchange program and limited the number of new partici-
pants.49

Indeed, the official explanation for the three-year limit was that since
JET is a youth program, it is important to let as many youth as possible
participate. This did not satisfy long-term JET wanna-bes, and voices were
raised in protest, as this excerpt from the minutes of the first evaluation
meeting for the 1989-9o JET Program reveals:

Putting limitations on the application criteria is acceptable, but once a
JET has been on the Program demonstrating his/her ability, how can
the host institution disregard the efforts made and say, "Go back to
your home country?" Could it be that Japan doesn't want foreigners to
stay so long that they learn/understand too much? Gaining too much
insight into the system represents a threat? For JETs who have done
their best and contributed a lot, it is a slap in the face to suddenly be
told that they are no longer wanted. Very distressing. It is a very arbitrary decision reflecting very badly on CLAIR.50

To be sure, some incompetent JET participants have stayed on primarily to
collect their salaries, and CLAIR's wish to deter them is quite understandable. CLAIR officials even noted that should a JET participant really become indispensable to a host institution, local authorities could hire that
person directly for the fourth year and beyond. There is no question, however, that by setting the three-year limit, Japanese officials were explicitly acknowledging that the ALT and CIR slots would forever be positions for
temporary outsiders.

WHEN TRUST BREAKS DOWN: BETWEEN PROGRAM
COORDINATORS AND CLAIR OFFICIALS

The first few years of the program suggest that a bureaucracy known the
world over for its organizational efficiency had suddenly run aground.
Many participants themselves, disillusioned by the gap between rhetoric
and reality, adopted conspiracy theories. In addition, ministry infighting
proved to be as strong as ever. The Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Home
Affairs berated Education and the conservative public school system for
sapping the enthusiasm of the JET participants. The Ministry of Education
responded that Home Affairs officials were interested only in "symbolic
internationalization." Both the Ministries of Education and Home Affairs
criticized Foreign Affairs for lack of rigor in the selection process and for
putting Japan's diplomatic priorities above internal needs. In retrospect, we
can see that in addressing one set of concerns at the national level-the
trade crisis and Japan's image in the world-JET created a whole host of
new problems, which continued to snowball.

In the face of this administrative confusion, the striking contrast between the informal evaluations offered by the program coordinators and
those offered by Japanese ministry officials is particularly significant. On
the whole, the program coordinators in CLAIR were severe in their assessments of the Japanese policy response during the early years of the program. Philip described the first year as a "disaster" but pointed to steady, if
incremental, improvement after that. Tellingly, though, he attributed successes largely to the efforts of the program coordinators in overcoming the
barriers erected by the Japanese ministries:

The program coordinators were certainly closer to the JET participants
and most of us felt that the bureaucracy made it very difficult to provide the kind of care and support the JET participants deserved. But I
don't think the lack of personal touch on the Japanese side really undermined the program because we had a lot of dedicated program coordinators. And of course the result was that the program coordinators
were very stressed out most of the time. We received no overtime compensation and yet we had emergency phone calls at all times of the
night and on the weekends. But we felt it was our job, so we did it. It
was a very awkward position to be part of the Japanese administration and at the same time having to represent the interests of the foreign
participants on the program.

Meredith had much harsher words for the CLAIR staff:

As program coordinators, our primary job is to push. Most of the time
I'm sure we're looked at as difficult. As international as they say
CLAIR is, they're treating the program as an internal Japanese group
would. People should walk in here and feel it's different. To be perfectly
honest, they're clueless. This is an office of mediocrity. They allow
themselves to be mediocre, to cut corners, to be less than honest, to
out-and-out deceive. When you have integrity become a nonentity in
international affairs, it's scary. The staff here are good people, but
they're not willing to push and the few that are get shoved out.

Perhaps the most frustrated of all was Caroline, whose volatile outbursts at
Japanese staff and tendency to bang her computer when frustrated fueled
gossip even among JET participants. It was widely rumored that the CLAIR
staff eventually stopped listening to her opinions and finally asked her to resign. In any event, she found another job and left in despair. "The reason I
quit," she confessed to me, "was because basically nobody at CLAIR cares."

"Uncaring," "clueless," and "prone to deception": the reasons for these
strong negative appraisals are worth exploring in some detail because they
reveal a set of evaluative criteria sharply diverging from those used by the
Japanese hosts. First, the program coordinators tended to judge the success
of the program, and of CLAIR in particular, both by its transformative outcomes and by the decisiveness with which Japanese officials anticipated,
confronted, and resolved problems. Their basic assumptions were that Japanese culture was in need of "development"; that the desired changes entailed moving toward a Western model, variously defined; and that the JET
Program was the vehicle by which theory and practice were to be joined.
By these standards, the responses of Japanese ministry officials simply did
not measure up. They did not anticipate problems well, they reacted too
slowly when problems did arise, and they seemed to lack the gumption to
tackle the really tough issues. It wasn't long before the phrase "it's glacial,"
referring to the cautious reaction that seemed inevitable when any specific
change was proposed, had entered the vocabulary of program coordinators
as a running joke.