Since its creation in 1987, the Japan Teaching and Exchange (JET) Program has sent thousands of young native English-speakers to Japan to teach English and to internationalize the country's education system. David McConnell weighs the success of this program and considers its impact on Japanese education and society.

David McConnell is Associate Professor of Anthropology at The College of Wooster. His book, Importing Diversity: Inside Japan’s JET Program (University of California Press, 1999), received the 2001 Masayoshi Ohira Prize. This paper is based on a talk sponsored by The Program on US-Japan Relations at Harvard University on November 27, 2001. Excerpts are taken from Importing Diversity: Inside Japan’s JET Program (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).

Over the past decade a fascinating social experiment has been quietly unfolding in schools, communities and local government offices throughout Japan. Conceived during the height of the US-Japan trade war in the mid-1980s, the proposal for the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program was first presented as a “gift” to the American delegation at the “Ron-Yasu” (President Ronald Reagan and Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone) summit in 1986. At considerable expense, the Japanese government would invite young people from the US and several other English-speaking countries “to foster international perspectives by promoting international exchange at local levels as well as intensifying foreign language education.” 

Fourteen years later, with an annual budget approaching half a billion dollars, the JET Program is now the centerpiece of a top-down effort to create “mass internationalization.” Noting that it eclipses in magnitude even such highly regarded exchange programs as the Fulbright and the Peace Corps, Japanese officials have proclaimed the JET Program as “the greatest initiative undertaken since World War II related to the field of human and cultural relations.” 

For over a decade I have been tracking the JET Program as a lens on the cultural form and meaning of internationalization in Japan. During two years of intensive fieldwork in Japan between 1988-1990 and six follow-up trips from 1993-2001, I was able to observe many classes taught by the program’s Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs) and to conduct numerous interviews with Japanese administrators, teachers and students. I also collected a large number of in-house surveys, manuals and documents that have been produced over the program’s history.

SETTING THE CONTEXT

As Thomas Rohlen of Stanford University has noted, if we were to divide American attitudes toward Japanese schooling into three phases, the better part of this century could be characterized as the era of indifference. In the late 1970s and 1980s, however, we entered the age of discovery. As Japan’s economic success was linked to its highly educated and disciplined workforce, there was an increasing examination of how broad public support for education, the social organization of schooling and culturally-specific approaches to childrearing and discipline formed the foundation for Japan’s educational successes. On the political left, liberals applauded the egalitarian streak in Japanese schooling that led Japan to do a much better job than the US in raising a larger percentage of its population to higher levels of academic achievement and internalization of social norms. On the other side of the political spectrum, conservatives noted the presence of a streamlined core curriculum and the many ways in which “family values” supported the educational system. The overall sentiment was that we had much to learn from Japan.

In reaction to the “Japan is great” theme, however, another set of popular and academic accounts emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s that purported to reveal “the dark side of Japan,” to quote the subtitle of Ken Schooland’s book, Shogun’s Ghost. In sharp contrast to the portrayals of Japanese education as a “desirable difference,” these reports criticized the uniformity, inflexibility, and closed nature of the Japanese system. 

We heard of Ministry of Education officials who promoted nationalistic textbooks, which whitewashed coverage of Japan’s military activities in Asia. Politicians dropped racial slurs, such as former Prime Minister Nakasone in 1986 when he attributed Japan’s educational success to racial homogeneity and the apparent decline of US achievement to racial diversity. Relentless kyoiku mama (education mothers) pushed their children to do well on entrance exams at virtually any cost. “Returnee children” went through a hazing process in which they were forced to give up the cognitive and interactive styles they had acquired abroad. Finally, we were told that Japanese teachers of English could not speak the language and reduced its study to solving discrete lexical items for the entrance exam, thus rendering six years of compulsory study of a foreign language virtually useless.

Some of these criticisms clearly perpetuated stereotypes, but others could not be dismissed so lightly. As a whole, they suggested that whereas Americans began with the assumption that all children are different, Japanese educators began with the opposite assumption. This notion that all children were basically the same created enormous pressure to conform to culturally appropriate standards of behavior. In this view, Japan was a “closed system” and its inability to cope with diversity was its Achilles heel. 
When I was doing fieldwork in Japan in the late 1980s, a hot item circulating among the foreign community was one of those national character jokes that accentuate the worst stereotypes of a country but sometimes have a grain of truth. An international team commissioned several nations to do a book on the elephant: Germany produced a 3-volume set called A Short History of the Elephant; Britain’s book was titled Stalking the Elephant in the Wilds of Africa; the US came up with How to Raise Elephants in your Own Backyard for Fun and Profit; and Japan produced two volumes. The first was Elephants: How They See Us, and the second was The Elephant-Japan Perception Gap, both of which allude to an exaggerated sense of uniqueness. 

In response to the conflicting sets of interpretations about Japan that arose over the past quarter century, the American public thus came to be of two minds about Japanese education and Japanese society in general. On the one hand, the recognition that Japan had completed one of the most dramatic economic turnarounds in human history, coupled with the continued high performance of Japanese students on international tests of science and mathematics, raised the real possibility of using Japan as a mirror for American practice. On the other hand, there was plenty of evidence to suggest that ideas of Japanese homogeneity were still powerful and that “difference” was negatively marked. It is little wonder that Joseph Tobin of the University of Hawaii-Manoa began referring to the dominant American view of Japan as the “Yes, but . . .” approach: it conceded the superiority of Japanese achievements in certain areas but argued that those achievements came at too high a cost. 

Thus, in spite of its considerable accomplishments, Japan in the mid-1980s continued to suffer from an acute image problem. Japanese public officials were under intense pressure from the US and from European countries to take steps to reduce the trade surplus and to dismantle the formal and informal barriers to foreign investment in Japan. At a time when pluralist nations around the world were struggling to integrate their ethnically diverse populations, Japan’s government was asked to solve a problem of precisely the opposite order: to “create diversity” and to acquaint its insulated people with foreigners at the level of face-to-face interaction. Dependent on the goodwill of the foreign community, particularly the US, both for national security and for continued economic prosperity, it became increasingly important that Japan be able to show that it was, in fact, “international” and that foreigners could be integrated into Japan’s tight-knit society.

In 1987 Japanese government officials decided to try to solve this problem by emphasizing people-to-people contact rather than structural negotiations at the governmental level. Their solution was to drop thousands of college graduates from primarily Western countries into public secondary schools all over the nation. 

Four countries were invited to join the JET Program in its inaugural year: the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. The total number of JET participants in 1987 was 813 individuals, with the large majority coming from the US (570) and the UK (149). Canada and Ireland were added in 1988. Job types for participants were also divided into two major categories. Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs), comprising over 90 percent of all participants, were to be based in public secondary schools or offices of education, where they would “team-teach” English classes with Japanese teachers of English. Those in the second category, Coordinators of International Relations (CIRs), were to be placed in prefectural or municipal offices where they were to assist in the internationalization of local communities. (A third category, Sports Exchange Advisors (SEA), was added in 1994. Though their numbers were few, CIRs and SEAs were invited from dozens of different countries. This paper, however, deals primarily with the ALT component of the JET Program). 

Rhetoric and hyperbole aside, what is the JET Program really about? In the next few pages, I use the JET Program as a lens to examine the accuracy of the “closed system” image of Japan. How did Japan chart a course between its sincere desire to be recognized as international and the strong sense of separateness still felt by many Japanese today? What were the powers and limitations of the Japanese state to facilitate top-down change? How did the JET Program diffuse through the many layers of Japan’s public education system?

I believe that the JET Program is an ideal case for examining the “closed system” image because it represents a buzzword (namely, “internationalization”) turned into reality (thousands of foreigners arriving each August at Tokyo’s Narita airport). It gives us an opportunity to see how “internationalization” gets defined not by academics or politicians or the media, but rather through the implementation of a policy. The myriad decisions made about the program give a form to internationalization, even if it is unintended. 

THE STRUGGLE TO COPE WITH DIVERSITY

There is some evidence suggesting that the overall structure of Japan’s attempt to “import diversity” was shaped by a preoccupation with Western countries and that Japanese officials and teachers did have trouble integrating the JET participants into local institutions and established routines. First of all, as one ALT pointed out, “the six initial participating countries represent a very narrow and carefully selected segment of the English-speaking world. Very few of us fall under headings other than WASP…color, variety and pattern have been screened out of the controlled sample brought here for this experiment.”

In addition, there have been a variety of incidents that point to serious difficulties on the Japanese side in dealing with the diversity represented by the ALTs. In one case Japanese officials threatened to disband the program when they discovered that a few ALTs were planning to advertise a gay support group in a program-sponsored newsletter. In another case, The Japan Times ran a column on the JET Program by Karen Hill Anton entitled, “Japan Pulls in the Welcome Mat With Racial Discrimination.” The piece chronicled the struggles of an African-American participant who met stereotypes and even ill will in a community that had expected a white ALT. 

The school visitation system devised by prefectures in the early years of the program also reflected a lack of empathy for the ALTs’ situation. Many prefectures adopted the strategy of “spreading the wealth” by sending the foreign youth to as many schools as possible on a one-shot basis, where they were wheeled out like living globes. One ALT compared himself to a teabag dipped in dozens of cups of tea and went on to point out: “That makes for one weak cup of tea!”
Even the structure of the team-teaching system revealed that internationalization was conceived of as situational accommodation to Western demands more than fundamental cultural change. The widely shared view was that team-taught classes were something entirely distinct from regular English classes, which were taught in traditional grammar translation style solely by a Japanese teacher. 

Finally, Japanese at all levels tended to see internationalization less as breaking down walls between individuals. Instead, they saw it as building bridges of communication between cultures or groups that they assumed would always be fundamentally different. There was little expectation on the part of the Japanese hosts that the ALTs would really “join the group”; rather, the expectation was that they were short-term guests. This mentality was reinforced by all kinds of special treatment, including generous salaries, a five-day work week, a three-year limit on their stay, as well as a relative lack of Japanese language learning options during the early years of the program. 

While Japanese officials had not conceived of the program as a permanent integration of foreigners into Japanese society, some ALTs were upset that they were treated differently from regular Japanese teachers. They began to complain that the “guest mentality” served as a distancing mechanism, one which kept foreigners at arms-length. Japanese were often puzzled by this reaction because they saw the politeness and hospitality as illustrative of the high esteem in which they held Westerners. One Ministry official told me that if such special treatment was discrimination, then it was “accidental discrimination,” because the intention was good. 

In sum, we do find some evidence of Japanese officials shaping program structures and initiatives in ways that ran counter to the cultural sensibilities of many ALTs. That there was difficulty integrating the ALTs into local institutions is not surprising given the origins of the program in foreign pressure and the extent to which Japanese continue to view cultural identity as rooted in blood and conferred by birth. 

If we were to end the analysis at this point, however, as if the Japanese response to the ALTs was the unproblematic outcome of a monolithic “culture of suspicion” towards foreigners, we would miss a significant part of the picture. At least as interesting as the uniformities in Japanese responses were the variations.

TURF WARS AND COMPETING PRIORITIES AT THE NATIONAL AND PREFECTURAL LEVELS

There were different reactions to the JET Program at the national, prefectural and local school levels. Each of these administrative levels is a distinct socio-cultural subsystem with its own set of pressures and priorities. At the national level, tensions were virtually assured by the fact that three government ministries – Home Affairs, Education and Foreign Affairs – were charged with oversight of the JET Program. Each had its own goals for the program, and since good foreign policy does not always make good domestic policy, and vice versa, there were plenty of turf battles between the internally and externally focused ministries charged with implementation.

The Home Affairs Ministry gained overall control of the program and established its own office called the Council of Local Authorities for International Relations (CLAIR) to administer the program. CLAIR in turn hired former program participants to serve as buffers between the foreign participants and the Japanese staff. Why would this ministry, which was probably the least international ministry in Japan by almost any definition, gain control of a program that would seem to be under the clear jurisdiction of the Education Ministry? The answer is that the Home Affairs Ministry was involved in a delicate and much broader balancing act to promote regionalism and local development and at the same time ensure a coordinating role for itself. Home Affairs officials did not like relying on the Foreign Ministry when local governments approached them for advice on international matters. The high-profile JET Program thus provided a vehicle for raising the Home Affairs Ministry’s status and power vis-à-vis both local governments and rival ministries. Moreover, its close relationship with Finance Ministry officials and its role as coordinator of the taxation system ensured the Home Affairs Ministry that it could raise the money for the program through the local allocation tax (koofuzei), a form of general revenue sharing. 

The Ministry of Education was charged with overseeing the “team-teaching” portion of the program, and officials there have seen the goals primarily as enhancing the teaching of conversational English. The Education Ministry, however, initially opposed the plan for the JET Program, not so much in principle as because it would lose control of two smaller English teaching programs it operated. It also feared that the scope of the JET Program would lead to widespread resistance by Japanese teachers.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, by contrast, which recruits participants overseas, was wildly enthusiastic about JET because of its potential for enhancing foreign understanding of Japan. One Ministry official put it bluntly: “From the viewpoint of our ministry, it is a significant part of Japan’s national security policy that these youths go back to their respective countries in the future and become sympathizers for Japan.”

With such a diverse group of players it is doubtful the proposal for the JET Program would have seen the light of day without the intense American pressure surrounding the US-Japan trade wars of the mid-1980s. The announcement of the JET Program came on the heels of The Maekawa Report, a high-level policy document outlining the steps Japan would take to reduce her trade surplus and decrease non-tariff barriers for American companies in Japan. This report, coupled with the need for a goodwill gesture to President Ronald Reagan at a Tokyo summit in 1986, lead Prime Minister Nakasone to personally authorize the program. 
As one example of the kinds of conflicts that erupted due to intersectoral competition, former Prime Minister Takeshita on a trip to Europe in 1988, suddenly announced that French and German participants would be invited to join the JET Program the following year. The announcement was scripted by the Foreign Ministry, and no doubt served a real diplomatic benefit, but it came as a complete surprise to Education Ministry officials, who had to scramble to find base schools for this new group. Most of the French and German participants ended up teaching English more than their native tongue.

When we move down to the prefectural level, we find that governors and mayors have been very enthusiastic about the idea of a heavily subsidized program which would put them on the bandwagon of internationalization. Some prefectures, such as Saitama, Chiba, Hyogo and Nagano, now hire three to four hundred ALTs each year. But it is Japan’s curriculum specialists (shidoo shuji), career teachers temporarily appointed to local boards of education, who bear the brunt of handling ALT concerns on a daily basis, and they typically see this responsibility as a heavy burden.

In my book, Importing Diversity, I give detailed accounts of how two of these prefectural administrators use social type (gender, race, nationality, age) in placing ALTs in local schools and how they handle incidents such as premature departures, cases of sexual harassment, and conflicts over conditions in schools. The overall picture, however, closely approximates what Michael Blaker of the University of Southern California has described as “coping”– they take a reactive posture that involves taking as few risks as possible. Such a stance is usually seen as spineless by the ALTs. In fact, it is a very pragmatic response given the unevenness of English skills among the curriculum specialists and the necessity of juggling conflicting priorities. For example, a number of these administrators were striving mightily to raise prefectural exam scores in English at the same time that they were promoting team-teaching of conversational English.

BEYOND THE STEREOTYPES: THE JET PROGRAM IN LOCAL SCHOOLS

It is at the school level, however, where the symbolic agreement on internationalization, so easy to maintain when kept at a level of generality, begins to break down. The most powerful realities in Japanese secondary schools are preparation for entrance exams and the cultivation of proper character and morality in students. The dominant model stresses propriety and organizational maintenance, and by these standards, the ALTs often behave poorly (not intentionally, but because their upbringing leads them to view the goals and process of education differently).

For instance, the cultural theory of learning underlying the English as a Second Language methodologies in which ALTs are “trained” at an initial orientation stress concepts such as student as active learner; teacher as facilitator; communication rather than grammar; a curriculum that is inherently interesting; and classes marked by spontaneity. But this philosophy of “education through play” finds few adherents in Japanese secondary schools. Many teachers described classes lead by the ALTs as “classes without rigor” (kejime no nai juugyoo) or “just a playtime” (tan no asobi), and they would preface the shift from an ALT-lead conversational exercise to the study of grammar with phrases such as, “Now, let’s get down to studying!” (Soredewa, benkyoo ni hairimasu). The discrepancy between the mandate of teaching conversational English and the reality of the entrance exams has lead to an immense contradiction, resulting in the underutilization of many ALTs.

Of course, the Japanese teachers I interviewed were not a homogeneous group. On the one hand there were a small handful of teachers, quite competent in English, who viewed the ALTs as much-needed medicine for an outdated and insular education system. Most schools could count on having one or two of these enthusiasts, and not surprisingly, the bulk of responsibility for ALT supervision fell on their shoulders.

At the other end of the spectrum were a minority of teachers who viewed the ALTs as a virus whose potentially deleterious effects needed to be controlled as carefully as possible. One middle-aged teacher from a small rural school put it this way:

When an ALT 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 such a young girl; this is such a waste of time’. 

Yet these two extremes mask the presence of a large majority of Japanese English teachers who are quite ambivalent about the program. One veteran high school teacher, alluding to Commodore Perry’s forced opening of Japan to the West in 1854, called the JET Program “the second coming of the black ships” and articulated the dilemma this way:

‘Black ship benefits’ accrue to teachers when the AL-Tea (only one cup keeps you up all night) awakens you from your peaceful slumber and creates acute anxiety. You begin to wonder whether you should have been using more classroom English and worry whether students will respond well to the team-taught class. In a dither, you hasten to make preparations, but when they take too much time, 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 timeliness of the ALT system. Most teachers, myself included, are probably somewhere in between the two extremes, fumbling along in a trial-and-error mode as we struggle to respond to this new system.

Mirroring the spectrum of views just described, team-teaching strategies among Japanese teachers also ran the gamut from using the ALT in a highly controlled manner (much like a human tape recorder) to turning the entire classroom over to the ALT. 
I also discovered a wide range of backgrounds and motivations among the ALTs. At one end of the spectrum were those who came with a “tourist mentality” and were content to remain largely outside the social worlds of their hosts. At the other end were those who practically rejected their own culture in the rush to embrace Japanese language and society. There were ALTs who approached change in a culturally sensitive manner and more activist ALTs, as well as those who came with very specific motives, such as gaining credentials for a career in international business or finding a spouse. 

To be sure, the ALTs brought their own views of ethnicity to the cross-cultural encounter, which were equally culture-bound as those of their Japanese hosts. In general, they saw ethnicity as a personal religion, a matter of individual choice, and they tended to assume that individuals could belong to more than one cultural group if they so desired But such conceptions of ethnic flexibility failed to recognize the strict reality of Japanese group identities, which demanded constant loyalty and attention. Many ALTs were not willing to put themselves at the bottom of the pecking order, nor did they try to develop heightened sensitivities to interpersonal relations, both of which would have been expected of a new member of the school faculty in Japan. 

Moreover, in spite of the variation in their backgrounds, many ALTs tended to see Japanese education and society as in need of “development” at some level. Their behavior – from bringing plastic chopsticks to school to protest the destruction of the rain forest by Japanese lumber companies to telling everyone that their best friend was Korean, just to make the point that they valued diversity – often reflected a demand that Japanese reconstitute themselves and their society in order to bring it more in line with Western expectations. 

In short, the degree and quality of integration of ALTs into schools and classrooms was not simply the result of a cultural model stipulating that foreigners be kept at arms length. Rather, it was the product of a complex process of negotiation that depended on prefectural and district priorities, school type, faculty composition and disposition, and the language skills and motivation of the ALTs themselves. 

A LONG-TERM VIEW OF THE JET PROGRAM

A long-term perspective on the JET Program is important because it allows us to sort out those features of the program that are malleable from those that are relatively unchanging. When we examine the learning curve on the Japanese side, it is hard to come away with anything but admiration for the tenacity with which they have struggled to acquire ownership of the JET Program. Simply put, they have not given up.

The conflict in the early years of the program went far beyond the disillusionment many participants felt about their under-utilization in the classroom. Three JET participants, each for different reasons, committed suicide by jumping in front of trains, leading to a call for counseling services to be made available to JET participants. Several participants returned home early due to sexual harassment in the workplace, leading to calls for better education on both sides and more efficient responses. JET participants protested having to pay into a pension fund from which they never collected benefits. In fact, in the first few years of the program, the large majority of JET participants joined a “support group” called AJET (the Association of JET) to pressure CLAIR for changes. 

From the perspective of Japanese officials, AJET was nothing more than a “quasi-union” and privately they held little sympathy for it. But over the years, CLAIR and Ministry officials took up AJET’s concerns one by one, and though the wheels turned very slowly, they took significant steps to address ALT concerns. By the year 2000, AJET had virtually been incorporated into CLAIR’s decision-making apparatus.

Nearly 95% of JET participants now say they would recommend the program to a friend; less than 1% return home prematurely; and close to half renew their contracts for a second year. The alumni ripple effect has also begun to be felt. The total alumni population now stands at more than 30,000 individuals, and there is an increasingly active alumni association in all participating countries. In spite of the preference for white Westerners in the early years of the program, by the year 2000 invitations were being extended to Koreans and Chinese (albeit in much smaller numbers) and the intake from all countries was increasingly diverse, including Maoris from New Zealand and Native Americans from the US.

Viewed over the long term, one can only be impressed by the receptivity of Japanese teachers of English, who were never consulted about the program. In spite of initial ambivalence and resistance, they have learned to cope with a top-down intervention that walks, talks and even talks back. In the course of the past 14 years, ALTs have been based in nearly one-half of the nation’s 16,000-plus public secondary schools and have visited every school on at least a semi-regular basis. Given the conventional wisdom in the US that top-down reforms rarely get through the classroom door, the receptivity of the Japanese system appears to be nothing short of phenomenal.

There are a number of reasons for this success in at least getting the forms of implementation in place, one of which is the nature of the intervention itself. Unlike a written directive from one’s superiors, or a new set of curriculum materials, one cannot put an ALT “on the shelf” to be used at a later date. The Japanese cultural predisposition to put oneself in the position of “learner” was also a factor; even older teachers were usually willing to try their hand at team-teaching. Moreover, the extensive professional development opportunities available to Japanese teachers meant that they could attend workshops, conferences and demonstration classes on team-teaching in order to get advice from other colleagues in the field. Over time, team-teaching gradually worked itself into the mechanism of craft – into the dynamic and ongoing process of honing pedagogical techniques for the classroom. 

This success had less to do with the coercive power of the central government than with the degree of consent which already existed among educators at lower levels of the system. While some still see internationalization as a disagreeable pill which the country must take, most recognize the necessity of increased interaction with foreigners. They continue to salute the flag of internationalization, even though the final implementation usually involves some slippage in order to protect local priorities.
Japan’s capacity to evolve economically and to adapt to an exterior world of superior technology has rested on an extraordinary capacity for learning. The opening of Japan’s markets has been slow but steady, and while coping with diversity is not the same as opening markets, Japan does have a very public goal of becoming more cosmopolitan. The JET Program is perhaps a very small part of this larger picture. I would argue, however, that in spite of some initial difficulties, the overall track record of Japanese teachers and administrators in handling the influx of ALTs is cause for optimism regarding the country’s likelihood of meeting the considerable challenges posed by diversity in the future.