Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program (47 page)

AJET particularly resented being shut out of the process of selecting speakers and presenters at the ministry-sponsored workshops. Craig, a program
coordinator from Britain, explained, "The first year Mombusho just contacted the ETCs [English teachers' coordinators] and asked them to submit
a list of ALTs, but the ETCs don't know what ALTs do, so they'd send a list
of their drinking buddies or the first five letters of the alphabet-it was disastrous."

The lack of consultation with AJET only fueled the conspiracy theories
that had begun to circulate among JET participants. The magazine's critique continued:

Is somebody afraid that the conferences will become too professional or
beneficial should we get actively involved in the planning process?
Doesn't there appear to be desired stagnation? Perhaps the benefits an
organized JET Programme could effect upon the education system are
purposely shunned.... If we are here to balance the exportation of
walkman units, automobiles, and semiconductor chips, why would
there be a need for anything more than a half-hearted attempt to assemble us for a few days of semi-structured, innocuous chatter?17

CLAIR and Ministry of Education officials, however, saw the situation differently. They believed that it was necessary to go through the "appropriate channels" in selecting speakers. One ministry official insisted, "The
ALTs don't understand our administrative structure. We have to allow prefectural officials to recommend their own speakers. We can't order them to
choose certain people."

Other difficulties in the interactions between Japanese officials and JET
participants began to arise almost immediately. One of the first things that
ALTs noticed about the midyear block conferences, for instance, was that
relatively few Japanese teachers of language attended. Having worked in
schools for several months, most ALTs had come to the conclusion that the
"problem" with team teaching lay with the system of entrance exams and
the resistance of Japanese teachers rather than with their own limited
training. Consequently, they dismissed the workshops on how to do effective team teaching as simply preaching to the converted. Leslie, an American ALT, summed up the general frustration: "It ticks me off. We spend a week in Tokyo learning all this crap about team teaching and then again at
the block conferences, and they [the JTLs] don't have the foggiest idea
what's up. It puts the obligation on us to teach them what team teaching is
all about. I mean, it puts you in a really tough position. Why don't they
send more Japanese teachers to these conferences?"

The small number of Japanese participants exacerbated yet another
problem: those Japanese teachers and administrators who did attend often
felt overwhelmed by the aggressive, sometimes confrontational, styles of
the foreigners. In December 1988 the Daily Yomiuri even ran an article
("ALTs Overwhelm Japanese at Kanto Block Seminar") that focused on
this point, noting that "as is often the case with the discussion conducted
in English, the ALTs were quite vocal in expressing their opinions while
the Japanese barely uttered a word."18 In some cases, JTLs or ETCs were
put on the spot and asked to defend (in English) their teaching practices.
Answers that justified current approaches by invoking "Japanese custom"
were privately, and sometimes publicly, ridiculed by ALTs. The Japanese
tendency to treat their own cultural forms as places where analytic
thought and discourse must or should stop made little sense to most ALTs,
who preferred to treat cultural explanations as critically as any other. Yet
underlying their critiques was the ALTs' assumption that their own organization of thought was somehow more sophisticated than the "naive"
thinking of Japanese who spoke of "Japanese history" or the "island mentality.""

My own observations of workshops during 1988 and 1989 as well as
conversations with JTLs and ETCs who attended confirmed that overall,
they had the tone of extended gripe sessions for JET participants who, having suffered in various ways in Japanese schools and boards of education,
were suddenly granted a sympathetic audience. But informal gatherings in
which ETCs or JTLs were in the majority could be equally cynical and pessimistic. At lunch at one conference I retired with a group of JTLs and ETCs
I knew, and listened to a different set of gripes. "Everyone talks so fast, I
can't follow the train of thought," complained one, to many murmurs of
agreement. "Yeah, the moderator kept telling them to slow down, but they
wouldn't," added another. "Why do ALTs raise their hand before some-
one's finished talking?" another wondered. "We think it's more polite to
wait till the speaker is finished and then raise our hand." Another teacher
grumbled that ALTs had "too much energy."

I do not mean to imply that there were no ETCs and JTLs who could
hold their own in the public discussions, but in the early years of the con ferences they were few and far between. In 1989 ministry officials decided
that a good way to inject more "dialogue" into the midyear conferences
was to require every ALT, JTL, and ETC in attendance to write a one-page
essay on "what effective team teaching means to me." These were copied
and distributed to all participants, but the resulting collection of papers
was so bulky and heavy, and so varied in quality, that for most JET participants it simply became the butt of running jokes; the clumsy attempt
only seemed to fuel nagging doubts about Japan's commitment to internationalization. How could a conference to change English education be
useful when there were virtually no Japanese teachers engaging in dialogue?

Another problem was that the JET participants quickly turned into
fierce critics of the speeches by Japanese officials. Cultural standards of
speechmaking clearly influenced their opinion. To CLAIR and ministry officials, these were primarily symbolic occasions and thus were properly
governed by protocol. Relevance, humor, liveliness-these are not the
qualities by which ceremonial speeches are ordinarily judged in Japan.
Moreover, in Japan seniority is often more important than charisma when
speakers are chosen for events such as these, but CLAIR and Ministry of
Education officials soon learned that senior officials were rarely a hit with
the JET participants. At one conference I attended, the speaker talked for an
hour about the pre-World War II era, much to the dismay of ALTs in the
audience. Indeed, the conference speeches by ministry officials were virtually the same year after year, and their rehashed abstractions and advice
had little appeal after the Tokyo orientation. Wada himself was often taken
to task by ALTs for repeatedly giving a standard speech on team teaching,
though he became quite adept at counterattack:

I want you to remember my name correctly. Wada is a very nice name
because Wa means "peace" and Ta means "paddy field." I am the type
of person who likes peaceful paddy fields. Some ALTs have called me
Mr. Yada [Mr. Yuck], and I wondered why. One reason is I gave a very
long speech to ALTs last year. According to Western logic, you like to
have a question-and-answer type discussion, but in Japan we like to
talk and talk and talk. Today I'm going to talk for more than one hour. I
hope ALTs will get used to this kind of presentation.

Wada rightly recognized that some ALTs found the absence of a questionand-answer session-a common feature of Japanese speechmaking-quite
irksome. They objected not because they had burning questions that had to be asked in public but because they believed they were engaged in a symbolic struggle over the "right" to ask questions. Stopping them from asking questions was thus seen as an affront to democracy: what Yoshio Sugimoto has called "friendly authoritarianism" was affirmed and individual
opinion devalued.20

For Japanese officials, the most challenging problem posed by the conferences was to manage and control the behavior of JET participants. In
particular, they struggled with the apathy and cynicism of renewing JET
participants who were making presentations at the Tokyo orientation. In
1988 a number of those invited to do workshops did not even shown up at
their sessions, leading Wada to write a letter to the AJET Magazine the following month: "At this point I have to be honest with you in adding something unpleasant about a happening which is unprecedented in my many
years' cooperation with MEFs, BETs and ALTs. Some ALTs, most of whom
were renewers, 'evaporated' from the workshops in the heat of the summer.... To be frank, my trust in you nearly collapsed when I found out
about the poor attendance of the renewers in the workshops."" The following year the cynicism of workshop presenters, all of whom were renewers, had become such an issue that the program coordinators at CLAIR
had to explicitly ask them to be less negative in speaking to incoming participants: "Remember that they've just got off the plane and have high expectations. Try to present a realistic but positive picture. Last year I heard
people saying, 'Gosh, after I heard these renewers talking, I wanted to
leave."'

Another serious problem was that many JET participants treated the
conferences more as a social event than as a business meeting. One CLAIR
official complained to me that JET participants were so enamored with the
nightlife that they would wear T-shirts and shorts to the business meeting
in the day and then dress up to go out at night! A more fundamental problem was simple nonattendance, particularly at the midyear block seminars
and the renewers' conferences. Though all of the conferences qualified as a
fully paid business trip, a not insignificant minority of ALTs viewed the
sessions as a waste of time and skipped them altogether, using the opportunity instead to reunite with friends and enjoy some relief from the constant stress of being a gaijin in an all-Japanese community. Some officials
seriously proposed holding the conferences in more remote locations,
where there would be fewer tempting diversions, but because of logistics
and other considerations these proposals never won out.

Even worse, a very small number of JET participants caused property
damage at these conferences. At the 1989 Renewers' Conference in Kyoto, an ALT (who had been drinking) smashed a huge glass window while playing baseball in his hotel room. He agreed to pay for the damage, but the incident caused acute embarrassment to program officials. At another conference CLAIR ended up paying nearly $2,000 for drinks from hotel room
refrigerators when JET participants checked out without paying their tab.

CLAIR and Ministry of Education officials found the solution to these
various difficulties not in large-scale interventions or drastic overhauls of
conference format and agenda but in incremental improvements. First,
they looked very closely at the written evaluations for each conference, as
well as analyzing all the conferences at annual "evaluation meetings" at
CLAIR. Thus every year they received a great deal of input from participants as to what did and did not work. In addition, from the very start Japanese officials at CLAIR gave the program coordinators fairly wide latitude
to make changes; indeed, to a remarkable extent the program coordinators
have run the show.

The workshops themselves were improved in several ways. JET participants were required to apply to be presenters, and the Ministry of Education advised prefectural administrators to meet with AJET prefectural representatives before approving their applications. In addition, teams of JTLs,
ALTs, and ETCs were assigned to moderate each session and were specifically instructed to ensure that Japanese points of view were aired and fairly
represented. Criticisms of the keynote speeches helped make clear who was
a hit, who bombed, and why, resulting in an annual search for speakers
who would be popular with JET participants. The ministry began to rotate
its speakers more often and to stress variation in the speeches. At one renewers' conference, CLAIR even brought in a Zen monk as the keynote
speaker. A brief experiment with a question-and-answer session after the
keynote speeches was dropped after one year when it proved to be too uncomfortable for the Japanese speakers, but a permanent Q&A box was established at each conference so that written questions could be submitted
to CLAIR. A program coordinator was put in charge of drafting official responses, which were subject to approval by Japanese officials.

Integrating Japanese teachers and administrators into the conferences
proved to be a stiffer challenge, and JET participants outnumber their Japanese counterparts to this day. Few JTLs were clamoring to attend these
conferences, and ETCs were also reluctant to act as presenter or moderator
in sessions governed by the rapid-fire comments, sarcasm, and humor of
college-age English speakers. Over the years, however, the Ministry of Education has gradually increased the numbers of JTLs that prefectures are
required to send to the Tokyo orientation and the midyear block seminars and also now expects ETCs to play a substantial role in workshops. Ministry officials promote these conferences as a chance to "travel abroad in
your own country" and to "learn how to give a lecture in English" or to
"learn how to participate in a Western-style discussion." Wada put it this
way: "Honestly speaking, the majority of Japanese don't know how to give
a speech or moderate a discussion in English. I believe ETCs and JTLs
should learn how to do this in this age of internationalization." Not surprisingly, many ETCs and JTLs pulled into the conferences spent weeks
brushing up on English and preparing their ideas and comments. By
1993-94, it was obvious that Japanese teachers and administrators were
becoming more assertive in the workshops. In one conference in Ishikawa
Prefecture, a JTL even stood up and admonished the ALTs: "Look, do you
want us to be involved in this conference or not? If so, then stop talking so
quickly and help us understand. Otherwise, you totally dominate the
workshop and we have no reason to be here."

Solving the twin problems of poor attendance and irresponsible behavior by JET participants has proved more difficult, but a number of approaches have met with some success. First, the program coordinators leveled a variety of warnings and pleas; as one secretary-general of CLAIR
told me, "Because the program coordinators are a kind of 'in-group' for
JETs, they can say these kinds of things in a way that won't sound as harsh
as if Japanese were to say it." When these exhortations had no effect,
CLAIR required all JET participants to sign in on the first day of the conference; but some simply left after signing in. Finally, at one renewers' conference an unannounced attendance check was done, revealing that over 25
percent of ALTS were missing. As program coordinators apologized profusely for treating the JET participants like kindergartners, the ALTs were
informed that this time the names of all those not present would be forwarded to their prefecture or municipality, and ultimately to their base
school; the offenders were then required to write a letter to their principal
or ETC explaining their absence.22 The strategy led to more problems,
however: JET participants who had missed the session for legitimate reasons became defensive, and local Japanese supervisors were put in the awkward position of having to respond to the transgression of their ALT. This
last tactic was not used again, though attendance is still taken at some conferences.