Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program (30 page)

This feeling that ALTs who moved were somehow lacking in their sense
of obligation and their willpower to hang tough in the face of slight inconveniences was widespread among Japanese officials. As one twenty-eightyear-old JTL explained,

Many schools have trouble finding housing because they must get a
guarantor, so we had an agreement to rent an apartment for five years
and had paid the key money and deposit. Then the ALT wanted to
move. They just don't understand. At first the school said, "OK, if you
do that, you'll have to pay with your own money." But eventually they
backed down. I told the vice-principal and principal, "Why don't you
make a contract?" but they said, "It's not a good way to treat the ALT,"
and so they helped her out. I think some ALTs are spoiled and make
unreasonable and immature demands.

While there is no question that some ALTs took advantage of their "foreign" status to press unreasonable demands, in many cases they felt justified precisely because prefectural variations in employment seemed so unfair. As one AJET vice-chair put it, "all people hired for the same job should
get the same duties and terms!" Adding to the injustice was that JET par ticipants had little say over where they ended up. Whether one paid $500
per month in rent or had one's rent subsidized, for example, pretty much
depended on the luck of the draw. Ironically, JET participants were pushing
for more standardization in a country that has long been taken to task by
some Western countries for its top-heavy regulatory system.

The disparities raise another issue as well. Because funding for the program is based on the local allocation tax (see chapter 2), each host institution receives approximately 5.5 million yen per participant to pay for
salary, airfare, conferences, and other related expenses. That some host institutions pay less for housing and other allowances means that these institutions pocket more of the money allocated to them by the government
than do others. 22

Sudden Departures

Much more serious than apartment switching, however, was vacating the
apartment for good. While every prefecture in Japan had a handful of early
departures during the first years of the program, Sato-sensei and Tanabesan were hit particularly hard. The first case occurred less than two months
into the program when an American woman became depressed over the
strain of a long-distance relationship and decided to return home suddenly.
Anxious to avoid embarrassment to the school, Sato-sensei negotiated
with CLAIR officials to have an alternate fill the spot. But when Satosensei went to Tokyo to meet the new ALT at the airport, he was informed
that the alternate had changed his mind at the last minute and had not
boarded the plane in Chicago!

At Christmas yet another sudden resignation occurred. In this case, a
British ALT had returned home for a brief vacation over the holidays. Satosensei and Tanabe-san never spoke with him again. He called CLAIR in
early January to say that because a friend had been killed in a plane crash,
he had developed a fear of flying and would not be coming back to Japan.
Both officials were clearly baffled by this story, which they said was "inconceivable from the Japanese point of view" (nihonjin no kankaku de
arienai koto), but they had no way to verify the account. In both cases, the
departures left an apartment to be cleaned, unpaid bills, and numerous
other loose ends that took days to wrap up.

The Sexual Harassment "Accident"

Later in the spring a more serious incident occurred, one that changed one
ALT's "Japan experience" irrevocably and left a profound impression on Sato-sensei and Tanabe-san as well. The incident itself lasted less than ten
seconds. Lisa, a California native posted to a base high school in a major
city in the prefecture, came out of the bath in her first-floor apartment one
evening to find a man standing inside her living room, pants open, hand at
his fly. Before she could even scream, he turned and was gone, as quietly as
he had entered. Shaken and in tears, she immediately notified the board of
education and called her parents.

Sato-sensei was not available at the time, but the section chief, Ikuo
Tsurukawa, went immediately to Lisa's apartment, bringing along an Australian ALT, Clara, to translate. They found themselves dealing not only
with a distraught young woman but also with her extremely irate parents
on the phone. Panicked at the thought of an assault attempt on their
daughter thousands of miles across the ocean, they demanded to know
why no one had warned their daughter of the danger of rape. From everything they had heard, Japan was a peaceful society with admirably low
crime rates. How could the prefecture have let this happen? At the very
least, the prefecture should compensate them for round-trip airfare to
travel to Japan to be with their daughter. Clara tried to interpret the logic
of their request as best as she could, and at first Tsurukawa hesitated at
what he clearly considered to be an overreaction. But it soon became clear
that Lisa's parents would not be easily appeased. Were round-trip airfare
not forthcoming, they would take the case directly to the American embassy in Japan. In the heat of the moment, and under the considerable
weight of this foreign pressure, against his better judgment he verbally acquiesced. At the very least, he thought, this gesture of goodwill would be
enough to convince Lisa to stay in Japan for the remainder of her contract.

But Tsurukawa had miscalculated, and his offer to fly Lisa's parents to
Japan to see their daughter raised a storm of protest within the prefectural
government. The budget section and the general affairs section chiefs
balked openly at the request, arguing that Tsurukawa had overstepped the
boundaries of his authority. Apologetic, he offered to pay for the trip out of
his private bank account, but this was rejected as inappropriate, and a meeting between representatives of the board of education, the budget office,
and the general affairs division was called to weigh the pros and cons of the
matter. Tanabe-san, who participated in the subsequent negotiations, recalled:

That meeting lasted for three hours! Most of us felt the response of
Lisa and her parents was out of proportion to the magnitude of the incident and that Mr. Tsurukawa had erred in making the offer. But we
also felt that since it had already been extended, the prefecture proba bly ought to go through with it. Frankly, we were afraid that this could
turn into an international incident if we mishandled it, particularly
since Lisa's parents were doctors. We simply couldn't risk the chance
that our handling of it would backfire. But the thing was, the general
affairs section chief (somu bucho), who had been sent here from the
Ministry of Home Affairs, was dead set against paying. Finally, he
phoned a colleague in Home Affairs' Tokyo office to get some advice. I
happened to be right there in his office during the whole conversation.
He kept yelling, "Why do we have to pay? Why do we have to pay?" It
was quite a scene!

Much to the section chief's dismay, the ministry advised him to authorize
payment for the flight. Ultimately he relented, and Lisa's parents were reimbursed for their airfare.

In the meantime, the circumstances surrounding the incident, and the
starkly contrasting interpretations of them, had become clearer. The intrusion had occurred shortly after Lisa had returned from jogging alone in
shorts and a tank top, something she did on a regular basis and usually
along the same course. Moreover, she had not locked her front door while
she was in the bath. These two facts alone were enough to convince Satosensei, who visited her apartment the following morning, that Lisa was
largely responsible for what had happened: "It was her mistake. She was
quite attractive, you know, and had a propensity for jogging in shorts and
sleeveless shirts; and for some reason she didn't lock her door. Someone
probably followed her home that night, and being curious and most probably drunk, entered her house. I doubt he intended to harm Lisa."

Lisa and Clara perceived the same events quite differently: they saw a
criminal offense and a gross violation of Lisa's basic human rights and they
expected the Japanese to respond accordingly. Though Tsurukawa's initial
reaction had seemed sympathetic, the general tone shifted the next morning. The head English teacher at Lisa's base school called to express dismay
that she wouldn't be coming to school to participate in the humorous skit
they had practiced the day before for English class; later, he chided her for
not acting as a Japanese woman would have. When Sato-sensei arrived at
her apartment, he consulted the contract and after some deliberation decided that the only way Lisa could be excused from school without being
docked in pay was if she filed a police report, which she did. Lisa then asked
if she could move to a second-floor apartment, but Sato-sensei said that the
prefecture was bound by their agreement with the landlord. If she moved,
she would have to make all the new arrangements herself, including payment of key money (roughly $3,000). When she asked if the prefecture would pay for her return trip should she decide to go home, Sato-sensei
read her the section in her contract about the penalties she would incur for
leaving early.

The stalemate continued for a day, and Lisa was still undecided about
what action to take when her parents arrived. Sato and Tsurukawa expressed their deep regret for the incident and their intention to put it behind them. They stressed the changes that Lisa could make in her behavior-wearing more conservative clothes when she jogged, changing routes,
and locking the apartment door afterward. But Lisa's parents were quite
adamant that the prefecture take some action to ensure that such an intrusion would not happen again. When Sato-sensei resisted, they demanded
that CLAIR officials be contacted; under pressure from CLAIR, he finally
agreed to search for a second-floor apartment. By this time, however, Lisa
and her parents had become thoroughly disillusioned by the apparent reluctance of the prefecture to deal effectively with the problem, and they decided to return home together.

In the end, the incident left all parties with a bitter taste in their mouth.
Most of the other prefectural ALTs who learned of the incident from Clara
saw the prefectural response as confirming their preconceptions about bureaucratic insensitivity. Chad recalled, "I heard Sato-sensei called the attack incident an 'accident.' That phrasing was more than a little humorous
to all of us. The women involved were very upset because it was clearly an
assault, and the term 'accident' removes responsibility. By cautioning them
on how to dress, they felt like they were being told not to act out of line,
and that Lisa had somehow caused the problem." John suggested that
blame lay mainly with national and prefectural officials who had failed to
provide enough information at orientation. Lisa apparently was never told
that her jogging wear might be interpreted as suggestive, nor was she cautioned about locking her door.

Nevertheless, the few ALTs who knew Lisa personally felt that she and
her parents had overreacted. Pat, a Japanese American ALT in a neighboring school, commented that Lisa had not been particularly happy in her
school placement because the head English teacher, Ikuno-sensei, was an
overbearing man who treated her more like a pet than a human being. All
the other teachers were afraid to talk to her because Ikuno-sensei was sure
to show up to embarrass them. To make matters worse, her high school was
one of the top academic schools in the prefecture; its disciplinary policy
was extremely strict and entrance exam preparation ruled the day. Pat concluded, "So, I don't know, she may have used the incident as a chance to get out of a difficult situation. I don't think she had many friends among the
rest of us ALTs either. She struck me as very naive and immature; it was almost like she fit the 'valley girl' stereotype perfectly." Even Clara, who was
quite critical of the way that prefectural administrators handled the incident, found some fault with the behavior of Lisa and her parents.

But Lisa's inadequate sensitivity to customs in Japan hardly excuses the
"blame-the-victim" mind-set of the male board of education officials.
Though Tsurukawa was never officially reprimanded for offering to reimburse Lisa's parents for airfare, he was informally censored within the prefectural office for overstepping the bounds of his authority. For their part,
Sato-sensei and Tanabe-san were completely nonplussed by the reaction of
Lisa and her parents and by their demands for plane fare. "I can't believe a
doctor would be that worried about money," Tanabe-san recalled with bafflement. Sato-sensei added, "We can't imagine a Japanese woman reacting
the way Lisa did. And you know," he continued, "Lisa never even apologized to us for leaving the door unlocked or for causing such an inconvenience to her school and the board of education."

A broader moral to be drawn from Lisa's story is that while the experience of some form of discrimination and harassment at the hands of males
may be universal for women, there are culturally specific repertoires of responses. In spite of the considerable gains made in the legal and economic
position of women in Japanese society after World War II, attitudinal and
behavioral changes have lagged far behind statutory reforms.23 The brave
talk about a new generation of Japanese women is occurring against the reality that economic and political power is still largely in the hands of men;
thus, female resistance to harassment in the workplace still largely takes
the form of subtle manipulations (not serving tea in a timely manner, etc.)
rather than outright confrontation or lawsuits, though the latter approach
is becoming more frequent. It is not uncommon to see Japanese women
who have been the object of offensive talk or groping at a party find nonconfrontational means of coping, perhaps even sending the drunken offender off in a taxi with a flurry of bows.

Lisa's was not the first case of the ill-treatment of women to come to
CLAIR's attention. AJET had formed a Women's Support Network during
the very first year of the program to assist female JET participants in making the transition to a society with a higher degree of gender inequality
than their own. Unlike Lisa's case, most of the complaints addressed inappropriate conduct on the part of ETCs or JTLs themselves, such as that described in this anonymous letter to the JET Journal: