Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program (38 page)

In talking further with this teacher, I was struck that at least as strong as
her desire to better understand African American history was a determination to learn the practical steps to take in order not to offend an ALT the
next time.

DIVERSITY AMONG JTLS

If nothing else, the above vignettes all demonstrate beyond dispute the
tremendous range in how JTLs and other school staff react to their encounter with the ALT. Such variety undermines the simplistic view that all
Japanese respond to foreigners solely on the basis of a deep-seated cultural preference for keeping them at arm's length. No one better recognizes this
diversity than the ALTs themselves, who, in the course of a year on the JET
Program, will normally visit a handful of different schools and team-teach
with dozens of JTLs. Though typologies-which tend to pigeonhole complex responses and to minimize change over time-have their limitations,
they nevertheless are useful as a heuristic device to sketch out the varying
stances taken by JTLs toward the ALTs.10

The Enthusiasts

Likening the JET participants to Commodore Perry's "black ships" opening
a reluctant Japan to the Western world is not necessarily a negative
metaphor; there are a small handful of teachers, quite competent in English
conversation, who view the ALTs as much-needed medicine for what they
consider to be the ailments of an outdated and insular system of education.
These JTLs see the foreigners as providing a breath of fresh air-exactly
what Japanese education and society need to bring the country into the
twenty-first century. Historically, they point out, it is only through outside
intervention and external pressure that Japan has been able to change.
They must therefore rely on the ALTs to do what they themselves cannot,
and thus they openly welcome the JET participants. Most larger schools
can count on having one or two of these enthusiastic teachers, and not surprisingly the bulk of the supervision of the ALT falls on their shoulders. Of
the fifty-four JLTs I interviewed, eleven shared this view of the ALTs.

Within this category there at least two subgroups. On the one hand are
the "teachers turned social critics" who, as a result of their political views
and more confrontational interpersonal styles, are already somewhat marginalized within the school. They may use the ALT as a sounding board for
their critique of Japanese society, in many cases confirming the ALT's own
superficial assessments of the "problems" with Japan. As we saw in the case
of Ikuno-sensei at Nishikawa, the team-taught class becomes a fertile
ground for developing not only oral communication skills but also a critical quality of mind about all manner of injustices in the contemporary
world.

On the other hand are a group of "cautious enthusiasts," such as Uedasensei and Yamada-sensei, who embrace the ALTs but attempt to channel
the positive energy of the visit in ways that are acceptable to the school
culture. While by no means hiding their support for the program, they
nevertheless recognize the imperative of maintaining goodwill with other
teachers. As they are often expected to serve as the ALTs' liaison, they may face the challenging task of toning down ALTs' views or requests that challenge the status quo. In general, they bring imagination and creativity to
the task of team teaching; they become true partners in planning and implementing lessons.

As a whole, the enthusiasts feel that the JET Program has been a great
step forward, no matter what the current difficulties might be, because it
has undeniably provided more Japanese teachers and students the opportunity to communicate with native speakers of English and, to a lesser extent, French, German, Korean, and Chinese. In addition, because Japanese
teachers are rotated to a variety of schools over the course of their careers,
ALTS are almost as likely to meet an avid supporter of team teaching in a
remote mountain village as in a large metropolis. Even the enthusiasts,
however, take the risk that team teaching will be blamed if their students'
test scores should decline while they are embracing communicationoriented teaching techniques.

The Detractors

At the other end of the spectrum are a minority of teachers who view the
ALTs with a great deal of skepticism and the JET Program as illustrating the
problems created when Japanese leaders bow to foreign pressure. To these
JTLs, the ALTs are a virus whose potential for harm must be controlled and
contained as much as possible. They see Japanese education as in no way outdated but instead as a striking success precisely because of its emphasis on
rigor, standardization, and homogenization. Not surprisingly, these JTLs talk
at length about keeping ALTs in their proper place and have little tolerance
for activities designed to liven up the English classroom. One female JTL,
thirty-six, expressed her frustration with the JET Program in some detail:

What I want to know is why the Ministry of Education hired so many
people. I've heard it's because of the trade imbalance. But they can't
even speak English in the ministry. What do they think they're doing?
Which are they aiming for, ability (noryoku) or individuality (kosei)?
It's a terrible dilemma I face between choosing a fun class or raising
students' abilities. Of course, I have to choose ability and exam preparation because that's what will help them more in the future, even
though the questions on exams are ones that bright native speakers
can't answer...

We don't know how to handle ALTs. We Japanese are all of one race
and we understand each other. We disregard contracts. Maybe I'm a
workaholic to Americans, but I don't care. Our prosperity is because of
our hard work; it's because of education that we have today's standard. If we educate like Americans, then our students will become lazy and
idle. Nurturing students with individuality (kosei yutakana seito) really means producing overly frank and arrogant students (jishin mo-
chitsugi). To understand the Japanese heart you have to understand a
Noh play and the idea of modesty. This is a virtue in Japan. The merits
of internationalization are that we'll learn to speak frankly and lose our
inferiority complex. The demerits are that we risk losing the Japanese
heart.

When we have ALTs at school, we fall behind in the textbook and
then parents complain because many of them are kyoiku mama (mothers preoccupied with their children's education). When Katherine came
to our school, she was very sensational and brought an international atmosphere, but nothing was gained in terms of ability. Her lesson was
just an amusement. Of course, I didn't tell her, but inside I was thinking, "She's just a young girl, this is such a waste of time." So I'm
against ALTs.

Though it is almost unheard of for Japanese teachers to speak in this way
directly to the ALT, nine of the JLTs I interviewed expressed similar views
to me.

Most JLTs in this category have little interest in interacting with foreigners in general and are likely to try to avoid team teaching. They usually have little skill in conversational English, and if forced to team-teach,
they are likely to reduce the ALT to the status of a human tape recorder.
Without question these teachers receive the harshest criticism from ALTs.
One recalled:

I had one teacher, a head teacher actually, who would only speak to me
in Japanese and I'd ask him, a week ahead of time, "What are we going
to do for class?" and he'd just smile and say, "Don't worry," and wander
away. And so I'd keep trying to get information out of him but he'd either avoid me or profess ignorance all the way up to the lesson. He
would send two students to bring me to class; he wouldn't even walk
there with me! And all he ever did was follow the book. Completely
book-centered, and the entire class was conducted in Japanese. After
one class he'd tell the class monitor to mark page 17, and then the next
class he'd check with the monitor and say, "We're picking up right here
at the bottom of page 17." He'd put a big chair at the back for me, and I
wouldn't have to do a thing, except read a few new vocabulary words.
So I'd sit there in this chair while he taught and he'd do pair reading
and choral reading and then ask them some true-false [questions], and
then class was over.

The danger of such an approach, of course, is that the ALT may not accept
it; thus the likelihood of conflict escalates. ALTs love to tell war stories when they get together socially, and an entire genre is dedicated to creative
ways of sending a message to JTLs who, as one ALT put it, have their
"heads in the sand." In addition to telling the JTL point-blank that "I don't
do tape-recorder classes," these methods include taking out a novel to read
in class or wadding up the lesson plan and depositing it in the trash in full
view of the JTL and students.

The Ambivalent JTLs

Between these two attention-getting extremes lie the majority of JTLs,
who are quite ambivalent about the JET Program and view the ALTs as a
mixed blessing. These teachers acutely feel the difficulties created by the
insertion of reform-minded native speakers into an exam-oriented school
environment. They recognize both the limitations of their own training
and the need to prepare students for an international age, yet by force of
habit if not by conviction they are wedded to teaching English by the
grammar translation method. Not only are they faced with losing precious
class time to conversational activities and games, which they perceive as
having little relevance to the entrance exams, but they feel at a severe disadvantage: because many of them were schooled via rote memorization
with an emphasis on grammar, their own conversational skills are limited.
As a result, many genuinely fear the prospect of interacting with an unpredictable ALT who may cause them to lose face (kao wo tsubusu) in front
of colleagues or students by asking a question that they cannot answer. Indeed, the stress of working with an ALT can manifest itself in physical
symptoms.n

Moreover, given the cultural imperative of treating the foreigner as a
guest, the amount of extra work associated with hosting an ALT is considerable. One veteran high school teacher tried to put a positive spin on their
situation, again using the black ship metaphor:

"Black ship benefits" (kurofune koka) accrue to teachers when the AE-
Tea (only one cup keeps you up the entire night) awakens you from
your peaceful slumber and causes acute anxiety. You begin to wonder
whether you should have been using more classroom English and to
worry whether the students will respond well to the team-taught class.
In a dither, you hasten to make preparations but when the preparations
take too much time or the paperwork becomes too much of a bother,
you begin to resist and eventually fall into the "expel the foreigner"
camp. On the other side, however, is the "open up Japan" camp, which
seeks to usher in a new era and thus gives wholehearted approval to the
appropriateness of the ALT system. Most teachers, myself included, are probably somewhere in between these two extremes, fumbling along in
a trial-and-error mode as we struggle to respond to this new system.

These teachers feel acutely that the JET Program has exacerbated tensions
already present between those JTLs wedded to grammar translation and
the study of literature in translation and those who see merit in cultivating
the ability to communicate orally. If they weigh in too heavily on the side
of conversation-oriented language activities, they run the risk of disappointing parents, the homeroom teacher, and the principal. If they opt to
teach only in the traditional manner, they may incur the wrath of the ALT.

In their attempts to cope, several different strategies were discernible.
Some JTLs attempted to script the entire visit, thereby making the teamtaught classes as predictable as possible. On one-shot visits this meant
marking the ALT's shoe box at the entranceway, arranging for the ALT's
box lunch well in advance, and typing out a detailed lesson plan. One ALT
described this type of JTL as "Mr. Serious" (Majime-Sensei): "He's very
thorough, he types everything, it's like a movie script. You're to say, 'Hello
everybody! Good morning!' Then the students must ask, 'How are you?'
and you have to answer, 'Fine, thank you, and you?' If you say something
different, he gets mad at you because you deviated from the script. Then he
has you follow the traditional textbook pattern to a T. He doesn't want you
wavering from it." JTLs in this category tended to be especially concerned
about classroom management and often interpreted virtually everything
the ALT said in English on the spot.

Another coping strategy was to view the ALT's visit in very narrow and
instrumental terms. For example, he or she could be useful as a walking
dictionary for solving complex grammatical problems that occurred on the
entrance exams or as a practice partner for JTLs who wanted to improve
their spoken or written English. In other instances the ALT could be used
by JTLs to show off their competence in English. This could be taken to extremes, as one female ALT made clear: "One reason the other teachers
never come over to my desk is because if they do Mr. Yano jumps right in
and says, 'Why don't you try to make yourself understood in English?'
until finally they slink away. One teacher told me he treats me like a pet,
and no one wants to come near me." Sometimes the ALT served as a model
of "typical" foreign behavior; in fact, a handful of JTLs told me they preferred ALTs who were stereotypically "American" (Americappoi) or "foreign" and thus more interesting for them and their students. Presumably,
such ALTs also provided a clear standard against which these Japanese
would define themselves. ALTs often resented such instrumental attitudes, particularly if they were working hard to learn Japanese and to fit into Japanese schools. One complained: "I've heard teachers say, 'We don't need
that ALT because he can speak Japanese. We don't need anybody like that.'
It just boils down to language. They don't even consider the idea that you
might have a different way of looking at things or that you can just discuss
things and have different viewpoints. It's completely alien. From their
point of view, if you are not learning English from this person, then the
ALT has no utility."