Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program (23 page)

In short, the program coordinators felt that Japanese officials were not
treating CLAIR as different from any of the other hundreds of bureaucratic offices in Tokyo, arguing that several policies at CLAIR illustrated an attitude of business-as-usual instead of a commitment to substantive
change. They lent credence to William Horsley's caution that "Japanese officials who run the scheme should guard against the power of their country's culture to transform outside influences into another version of
Japan's own value system."51

Personnel Procedures

The program coordinators' first complaint, concerning personnel policies,
cut three ways. First, the program coordinators saw the high turnover rate
among secretaries-general as evidence of a lack of concern for continuity in
program policy. Meredith noted: "The Japanese staff is transient. We
worked so hard to get the embassy liaison meetings to involve some real
give-and-take and then [the new secretary-general] came in and went right
back to the formal style of meetings." "Institutional memory" tended to be
fairly poor and worked to the disadvantage of long-term change, according
to Philip. Caroline agreed: "CLAIR has been through four directors in just
over two years, and if you know anything about Japanese organizations,
that says a lot."

It is certainly true that at times the brief tenures of CLAIR's directors
have suggested a game of musical chairs, but the meaning of this rotation
may not be obvious. It is widely known that jinji ido (personnel rotation) is
a common practice among the ministries to offset the powerful tendency toward sectionalism. But critics are less likely to note that in the Ministry of
Home Affairs such rotation is particularly common, because of its close relations with local governments. In fact, CLAIR and ministry officials see
nothing significant in the frequency of shifts. "There's nothing special about
CLAIR. We're always shifting personnel on the spot to make room for people coming and going to local governments," said one ministry official.

Second, program coordinators were deeply skeptical of the criteria used
by the Ministry of Home Affairs in choosing the secretary-general. If the
government were really serious about reforming Japanese society and education, their reasoning went, then it logically should choose the most "international" person to head up that effort. Yet the Japanese staff at CLAIR
proved to vary considerably in their command of English and their willingness to support the program coordinators' requests. This variability led
program coordinators to cast the Japanese staff starkly as heroes and villains. Those who supported their causes were good people, and those who
played by the rules of Japanese bureaucracies were either obstructionists or
cowards.

For instance, in the second year of the program, the reins of secretarygeneral were handed over to Nakamura Hajime, a generous man, warm by
almost any standards. He genuinely enjoyed dialogues with the program coordinators. He would stay up late at night memorizing his speeches in English and was very responsive to the concerns of program coordinators.
Reaching out to AJET members as well, he worked with them to further program objectives. His reassignment after one year was widely regarded by the
program coordinators as retaliation for the reputation he had achieved as a
"gaijin lover. 1112 Nakamura's successor, by contrast, promptly moved his desk
to the far end of the room, where he was much less accessible; suspended regular meetings with the program coordinators, claiming that he was "too
busy"; and thus quickly acquired the label of obstructionist.

The third and final personnel complaint concerned the issue of overlap.
Meredith explained: "They have every single program coordinator quitting
in August and the secretary-general is oblivious. He had never thought of
the fact that we needed to overlap." Here again, however, different cultural
models seem to be operating. Under the personnel rotation system, it is
considered extremely rude for the outgoing person to offer unsolicited advice to the newcomer. The basic philosophy is to start with a new spirit, not
influenced by the jaded perceptions of the incumbent. This nondidactic approach to learning on the job, which requires of the newcomer an acute
sensitivity to job expectations, can be seen in numerous other contexts as
well. G. Victor Soogen Hori, for example, has labeled this approach "teaching without teaching" in his description of the training of Zen monks.53

Us-Them Mentality

The second major factor underlying the disillusionment of program coordinators was their perception that they were not treated as equals and were
"excluded" in various ways by the Japanese staff at CLAIR. On the one
hand, this involved being shut out from the little things that are a crucial
sign of group membership in Japan. According to Meredith,

We're still outsiders and they're insiders. We're foreign and treated differently. We're not told things that concern us. Even if we work late,
they forget to ask us if we want an obento (box dinner). They forget to
say otsnkaresamadeshita or osaki ni (see you tomorrow) to us when
they leave the office.... One time someone came over and wanted to
ask where [A-san] was. I was the only one there at the time so he went
back to his seat and waited till a Japanese came back. They treat us the
same as them when it's convenient for them and when it's not, they
don't.

On the other hand, program coordinators also felt they were gradually
closed out of the decision-making process. Initially, the program coordinators had been consulted about virtually every aspect of program policy;
they held primary responsibility for publishing all guidebooks, writing the
CLAIR Newsletter and JET Journal, handling all counseling calls from JET
participants, planning conferences, and interacting face-to-face with the
JET participants at the orientation and midyear conferences. As a result,
they quickly came to feel that the success of the program rested largely on
their shoulders. Over time, however, as program policies and procedures
became more routinized, the program coordinators began to feel excluded.
Meredith noted, "We often feel we're not a part of CLAIR and have to fight
for a place. Caroline's in charge of Tokyo orientation, and she wasn't even
invited to a meeting yesterday with Kinki Tourist to organize the airport
greeting." Sarah pointed out that "Whenever money is involved, we're not
consulted." Even Philip, widely respected as the "most Japanese" of the
program coordinators because of his thoughtful and restrained demeanor,
spoke somewhat bitterly about CLAIR's refusal to draw on his experience
during his third year:

For me personally, being in CLAIR the longest, it became extremely
difficult because I had been there longer than any of the Japanese. And
maybe I was just so stressed that I was imagining more than there actually was. I felt a sense of, not so much animosity, but almost a sense
of fear that there was a non-Japanese in this government-affiliated office who knew more about what the office had done up until now than
any of the Japanese there. So there was, for me, what seemed an active
effort on the Japanese part to keep me in place. "You may have been involved in the administration up till now, but it's not necessary any
more. We know how to run the program." Certainly those of us who
were there from the beginning felt that our opinions were welcomed
and valued and in many cases heeded and put into practice, but once
CLAIR had successfully run the program a year or two, well, the
amount of innovation and modification became less. So I think CLAIR
probably felt that "if we have to, we can do without the program coordinators."

Contributing to strained relations between the program coordinators
and the Japanese staff was a sudden change in how new program coordinators were hired. For the first few years the program coordinators had more
or less handpicked their successors. The Japanese staff had asked the departing program coordinator to recommend someone and then had interviewed that person. But in 19go, the program coordinators were informed that they would not have an official voice in the selection process. Meredith recalled the soap opera-like events that followed:

Meredith: But we wouldn't let them.... They had extended my contract, but there were seven points I had added to my contract before I
would extend it, and one of those stipulations was being able to choose
my successor. I already had the person picked out, so for that one slot
anyway, it was already guaranteed that I could select it. Then we got
wind of some of the other people they were considering. It was such a
secret thing. They kept lists away from us, and my manager wouldn't
let me look at them. We actually stayed late one night so we could go
through his drawer because we knew he had the list of people they
were considering. And they were holding the interviews on days
where they wouldn't even tell us these people were coming in, and
they told the candidates they couldn't contact us. We felt like we were
working at the CIA or something, it was so ridiculous. And it was all
very much the way [the secretary-general] operated. It was all coming
down from him, and he said he didn't want us involved in that kind
of thing. So it really caused a lot of hurt feelings, hard feelings. There
were at least three people on that list that we were appalled they were
even considering.

DM: How did they come up with the lists, do you have any idea?

Meredith: It was from letters, from people who had been brownnosing the secretary-general. So then we called the people that we wanted
them to choose and said, "Look, he's taking these letters people are
sending him seriously! Send him a letter! Have someone from your office call him and tell him you would be a good program coordinator."
So we went through the back door. And we had a Japanese guy helping
us because he understood that the secretary-general didn't know what
kind of person would make a good program coordinator.

In fact, the rationale for the Japanese decision was not as sinister as
Meredith made it out to be. By the third year of the program, the number of
program coordinators had to be increased to four (and in the fifth year, as the
program continued to grow, to five), and more and more JET participants
were asking how to apply for the position. Indeed, some had begun accusing
CLAIR of unfair hiring practices because the method was entirely subjective. CLAIR officials thus felt pressure to switch to a more formal process.

Yet excluding the program coordinators from any direct voice in the selection was clearly a political move. Having had their fill of embarrassing
confrontations with overly "aggressive" program coordinators, CLAIR officials reasoned that the problem would continue as long as they let those
currently in the position pick their successors. By controlling the selection
process and relying heavily on recommendations from local officials, they could guarantee that those chosen spoke better Japanese and were more in
tune with Japanese bureaucratic norms. While this decision did not sit well
with most of the program coordinators, it spoke volumes about the growing confidence of the Japanese. As one deputy secretary-general put it, "We
began to feel that since this was a program run by the Japanese government, it made sense that we ought to be in charge of all personnel decisions."

Within this climate of mutual skepticism about motives and goals, program management often turned into a game of opposing strategies. For
instance, in order to fend off their demands, CLAIR officials attempted to
ascertain whether there was serious disagreement among program coordinators. Such conflict was then used as support for the official position-for
example, on rescinding the age limit ("Britain and the United States disagree") or on censoring the advertisement placed by the gay support group
("many JET participants themselves are uncomfortable with homosexuality"). For their part, faced with what they believed to be an unresponsive
bureaucracy, the program coordinators made great efforts to present a unified front. Sarah told me, "One of the things the program coordinators
tried to do was stay united, like if three of us agreed and one didn't, then
that person would have to bend because we're trying to get some kind of
unity going. If we don't present a solid front, the secretary-general will
play us off each other. [X] was really good at that."

Of course, presenting a unified front meant informal censoring of behaviors of other program coordinators that were deemed too "Japanese."
Consider Sarah's recollection of what happened when the secretarygeneral proposed that JET participants pay for their own lunch at the Kobe
renewers' conference. A controversy arose after Japanese officials realized
their calculations for the budget were off and asked Don, the program coordinator in charge of the conference, for his opinion:

Don, whom we had a lot of trouble with, to be honest, decided to be
Japanese and agreed to that plan without consulting us, and he also
contacted AJET, and they had a fit. Like, it's a business meeting and
you're telling them it's mandatory, and then you're telling them they
have to buy their own lunch? Well, Don went ahead and approved it
without all of us, and so Meredith and I called over the secretarygeneral and the section chief of implementation and in the middle of
the office we had a good yelling match-well, we were yelling a lot at
Don, too. They usually let me do the yelling because I've been there
longer, and after a while, the Japanese will usually say, "Oh, we agree." But this time it came down to a lack of communication, and again it
came down to cultural differences. The secretary-general couldn't see
anything wrong with making them pay for their own lunches and
being back in an hour. And we're saying, "It's not going to happen."
That was a sore point, but ultimately, after he'd heard everyone's side,
the secretary-general ended up paying for lunch, and they just shifted
the budget around.

Worth noting here is not only how the charge of being "too Japanese" is
leveled against a compatriot, but also how routinely the strategy of foreign
pressure ("they usually let me do the yelling") is used to achieve their objectives-successfully, in this case.