International Education Policy in Japan in an Age of Globalisation and Risk [1 ed.] 9789004243729, 9789004235281

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International Education Policy in Japan in an Age of Globalisation and Risk

International Education Policy in Japan in an Age of Globalisation and Risk by

Robert W. Aspinall

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISBN 978-90-04-23528-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-24372-9 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

For Naomi

CONTENTS Foreword���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ix Acknowledgements��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������xi Selected Abbreviations, Conventions and Japanese Language Terms���������������������������������������������������������������������� xiii Introduction: International Education Policy in Japan�����������������������������������1 1. Theoretical Considerations���������������������������������������������������������������������������� 17 2. The History of International Education Policy from the Opening of Japan to the 1960s���������������������������������������������������� 37 3. English Language Education Policy Making at the National Level����� 61 4. Putting English Language Education Policy into Practice: The Role of Teachers����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 89 5. Putting English Language Education Policy into Practice: The Role of Learners���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������117 6. The Private Sector and International Education������������������������������������137 7. Study Abroad Policy and Practice��������������������������������������������������������������157 Conclusion��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������179 Interviews���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������189 Bibliography�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������191 Index ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������203

FOREWORD One of the great mysteries of Japan for first-time visitors is how, in a country which is so embedded in the global economy and networks of communication, the level of spoken English is so low. They find they need interpreters in almost all of their meetings: with business community, with government officials, with politicians, even with academics. Quite unlike contemporary China and South Korea, as well as most countries in South-East Asia, the Japanese individual able and willing to conduct a conversation fully in English is not only something of a rarity but seems to be regarded as something of an oddity by his contemporaries. This mystery is compounded many times when the visitor discovers that virtually everyone he or she meets will have formally studied English for three hours a week for eight years (three at junior high school, three at senior high school and two at university) and many will have started studying while still at elementary school and have supplemented their English language education with many hours of extra study at cram schools, known as juku. For those who have spent any time in Japan and looked at its education system, the mystery is not how it is that the level of spoken English is so low, but rather that anyone can speak the language at all. English is taught in Japan in the same way that Latin has been taught in European countries for centuries, as a dead language which provides a mechanism for sorting out those with certain intellectual skills (such as the ability to memorise large amounts of material from which they can logically create Latin sentences) that separate them from the rest. When colleagues express surprise to me about the inability of Japanese to speak English after studying it for three hours a week for eleven years, I tell them that I had exactly the same amount of education in Latin when I was at school and, while I have never had the opportunity, I am confident that I would not be able to put together even the most simple of sentences in Latin if I was ever asked to do, say on meeting a Benedictine monk with whom I had no other common language. The key question for anyone looking at the use of English in Japan, therefore, is why it continues to be taught the way that it is. It would not be very difficult for the level of spoken English to be raised rapidly and effectively. The examples of China and Korea make that clear. Indeed, there are

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foreword

young Japanese who do speak fluent English, often as a result of having spent several years accompanying their parents while they were posted overseas, which demonstrates that there is no linguistic reason why Japanese people cannot speak the language, but even they have not managed radically to alter the way in which the language is taught in schools. There are, as we shall see, many people in Japan who advocate a complete overhaul of the system for teaching English in schools and universities so that the level of spoken English improves. Indeed, as the book shows, many programmes have been introduced – and a huge amount of money has been invested – by central, regional and local governments in order to improve the level of spoken English. These programmes appear to enjoy the support of all sections of the political and non-political classes. So why have the results been so disappointing? Robert Aspinall’s wonderfully entertaining book is the first full examination of this question and, as such, will be of equal appeal to the firsttime visitor and those with long experience of Japan. His argument is supplemented with numerous examples over many decades and it will be of interest to those who teach English as well as those who study about Japan. He addresses the apparent conundrum that surrounds English language education in Japan through the application of some key ideas in social science, drawing on a range of literature that looks at notions of risk, globalisation and boundary maintenance. He sets these in a deep understanding of the debates around English language education in Japan over the past hundred years and combines that with a full understanding of the changing political and economic landscape in which those debates have taken place. His conclusions – which I will allow the reader to discover for themselves – are very compelling. Indeed, one is left with a sense that what is surprising, given all the roadblocks along the way, is not that the teaching of English has changed so little over the past century in Japan but that it has changed at all. The case study of the non-reform of English language education in Japan is a fascinating example of how social actors and societies can create institutions which actively prevent them from making changes, even if there is consensus that those changes are necessary. The politicians, bureaucrats and teachers in Japan who want to reform the education system are all prisoners of their own structures and roles. One occasionally wonders if they themselves understand why their attempts at reform have been so unsuccessful. If so, they would also learn a great deal from reading this book. Roger Goodman Oxford July 2012

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book is the product of experience at the genba or ‘chalk-face’ as well as research in the academy. It draws on my experiences as a student and teacher in the UK, as well as my time spent at several educational insti­ tutions in Japan. I have been helped and inspired by many people in both sectors and in both nations, but only have space here to mention those who had a direct influence on the research that went into this book. In Japan, I am grateful to the staff of Urawa High school and Urawa Commercial High school for making my time on the JET programme such an enjoyable and meaningful experience. I owe special thanks to Yoshizumi Kaori for showing me what successful teaching in a Japanese high school English classroom can look like. I would like to thank the staff and students of the Center for International Education in Kushiro for welcoming me to their corner of Hokkaido and helping me learn about the great varieties of eikaiwa that are taught in Japan. Thanks go to the members of JALT for their collective expertise on language teaching in Japan without which this book would not have been possible. One particular JALT Special Interest Group, PALE (Professionalism, Administration and Leadership in Education), deserves special thanks. It is a group that has worked tirelessly to defend the rights of foreign language teachers in Japan. I especially want to say thank you to Tom Goetz, Joe Tomei, Bern Mulvey, Arudo Debito and James McCrostie for their ideas and advice. In the UK I am grateful for the help and advice of Paul Norbury of Global Oriental. He helped me to put a mix of ideas, theories and impressions into concrete form. Without him this book would not exist. I must also thank Professor Roger Goodman of the Nissan Centre of Japanese Studies, Oxford University for continued inspiration and for advice on the manuscript. At Shiga University I thank my friends and colleagues in the English department and the International Center. I would also like to thank the Center for Risk Research at Shiga University for generous funding that allowed attendance at various conferences in Japan and abroad that contributed to the completion of this book. Finally I would like to thank my wife Naomi and my son William for their love, support and patience, especially in the final stages of manuscript preparation. Naomi, this book is dedicated to you with love. William, it’s your turn next.

SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS, CONVENTIONS AND JAPANESE LANGUAGE TERMS ALT Assistant Language Teacher CALL computer assisted language learning CLT communicative language teaching EFL English as a Foreign Language EJU Examination for Japanese University Admission for International Students ETS Educational Testing Service IIBC Institute for International Business Communication JACET Japan Association of College English Teachers JALT Japan Association for Language Teaching JET Japan Exchange and Teaching (programme) JHS junior high school JTE Japanese teacher of English (in a secondary school) L1 a person’s native language L2 the foreign language being studied (sometimes referred to as the ‘target language’) METI Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry (from 1 January 2001) MEXT Ministry of Education (from 1 January 2001) MITI Ministry of International Trade and Industry (until 31 December 2000) MOE Ministry of Education (until 31 December 2000) MOFA Ministry of Foreign Affairs MOHA Ministry of Home Affairs (until 31 December 2000) MOHW Ministry of Health and Welfare PALE Professionalism, Administration and Leadership in Education (a JALT Special Interest Group) PISA Programme for International Student Assessment SHS senior high school SIG special interest group STEP Society for Testing English Proficiency TEFL teaching English as a foreign language TESOL teaching English to speakers of other languages TOEFL Test of English as a Foreign Language TOEIC Test of English for International Communication WEIS World Economic Information Services

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selected abbreviations Japanese Words

Chūkyōshin Central Council on Education eigo English eikaiwa English conversation [teaching] Eiken another name for the STEP test (see above) gaikokujin kyōin foreign member of university faculty with similar terms of employment to Japanese colleagues special category of foreign university lecturer gaikokujin kyōshi gairaigo loan words brought into Japanese from a foreign language genba the actual site at which education is delivered (schools, universities etc.) hikikomori a term used to describe the withdrawal of people (especially young men) from society personal autonomy jishusei juku private exam-preparatory schools attended by children part-time kakusa shakai ‘gap society’, referring to increasing inequality in Japan katakana Japanese syllabic script for writing words of foreign origin kikokushijo returnees: Japanese children who have spent part of their education overseas kokugo ‘the national language’ (i.e. Japanese language taught to Japanese children) kokusaika internationalisation kosei individuality nihongo Japanese language taught to foreigners nihonjinron theories of Japanese uniqueness Nikkyōso Japan Teachers’ Union oyatori gaikokujin Foreign experts brought to Japan during the Meiji Period Rinkyōshin Ad Hoc Council on Education Reform (1982–85) senmon gakkō specialised training colleges at the tertiary level shūshoku katsudo job hunting activities (of university students) shutai-teki handan independent decision-making yakudoku method of teaching a foreign language based on reading and translating ‘education with leeway’, or less stressful education yutori kyōiku

INTRODUCTION

INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION POLICY IN JAPAN For the purposes of this book, international education policy in Japan will be taken to mean what the Japanese Ministry of Education says it means. We will focus on the most important parts of a set of policies that the Ministry of Education (MOE) has itself described as aimed at internationalisation. The ministry literature divides internationalisation policies into the following five categories: 1. The development of Japanese citizens who can live in the international community 2. Promotion of international exchange and cooperation in education, sports and culture 3. Promotion of student exchange 4. Expansion of Japanese language education for foreigners 5. Improvement of education for Japanese children overseas and children returning from overseas (MOE 1995) Categories one to three clearly require improvements in the teaching of foreign languages to Japanese people. Because of their size and importance, foreign language education and programmes relating to study abroad (both the bringing of foreign students in and the sending of Japanese students out) will be the focus of the present study. The interconnectedness of all the ministry’s five categories, however, means that success or failure in one area will have an impact on the others. What is the goal that the government is aiming for in this area of public policy? The Ministry of Education states that the main purpose of Japan’s international education policy is to help it ‘make an active international contribution in keeping with its international status’. The ministry wants schools and universities to nurture young people who will be loyal Japanese citizens aware of their own nation’s heritage and culture, but at the same time able to interact with people from other nations in mutually beneficial ways. Representatives of Japan’s business community argue that Japan, with its shrinking and aging population, has no option but involve itself more in global business ventures.

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introduction

The ministry’s enthusiasm for more engagement with the outside world is not shared by everyone, however. While there are no serious commentators who deny the importance of engaging in foreign trade (properly regulated), there are those who advocate that Japan keep the rest of the world at arm’s length and become an Asian version of Switzerland.1 One of the very few Japanese political figures who has successfully led a major international body, Ogata Sadoko, former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, has warned that Japan seems to be indulging in ‘happy isolationism’. The present study does not take a position on the normative debate about whether Japan should involve itself more or less with the affairs of the outside world. Instead it is concerned with how Japan makes international education policy, and especially with how that policy is implemented. Implementation, it will be seen, often falls short of the goals set by government. The Problem with English Language Education At the heart of Japan’s international education policy is the teaching of English. The 1989 gakushū shidō yōryō (national course-of-study guidelines) for high schools were revised to include the following goals: To develop students’ basic abilities to understand a foreign language [English in over 99% of cases] and express themselves in it, to foster a positive attitude towards communicating in it, and to deepen interest in language and culture, cultivating basic international understanding.

Consider the following two conversations involving Japanese university students and native-English-speaking teachers conducted about eleven years after the new guidelines were published: Conversation I: a first-year English classroom in a national university Teacher: What did you do last weekend? Student: [silence] Teacher: What did you do last weekend? Student: [silence] 1 The reference to Switzerland comes from Brad Glosserman, director of research at the Center for Strategic Studies (CSIS). See for example his article ‘Reform takes back seat to economic values’, Japan Times, 11 March 2002.



international education policy in japan3

Teacher: Well, one student said she went shopping. Another student said he played tennis. What did you do? Student: [after conferring with two neighbours] shopingu Teacher: Oh, you went shopping too. What did you buy? Student: [silence] Teacher: What kind of things did you buy? Student: [after more conferring] kurozisu Teacher: Oh, you bought some clothes. By the way, be careful how you pronounce the word ‘clothes’. There is no extra ‘es’ sound at the end of the word. Let’s practise this word. Please repeat after me… Conversation II: a conversation between a teacher and a student at a university graduation party (taken from Waring [2000]). Teacher: Satoko: Teacher: Satoko: Teacher: Satoko: Teacher: Satoko: Teacher: Satoko: Teacher: Satoko: Teacher: Satoko:

Teacher: Satoko: Teacher:

Congratulations, Satoko. Thank you very much. You majored in literature I think. Is that right? Yes, American Literature. That’s great. Which author did you enjoy the most? Umm, well we concentrated on Steinbeck. I see. And which of his books did you read? Well, I only read one book… Oh really? Just one book? There were so many difficult words. I had to spend hours looking them up in the dictionary, and my book is covered in translations. But I still couldn’t understand it well. Wow, that sounds like a lot of work. Actually I also read it in Japanese in order to understand it. Well, I had to or else I couldn’t graduate. How long did it take you to read the English version? Well, we started in my junior year and we translated about four or five pages a week so we could understand it in detail. I guess it took about two years, but even then we didn’t finish it. We spent the first six months just on the first chapter. One book in two years! I see. Can you understand it better now after all that work translating it? No, I still can’t say I understand it very well. So now that you’ve graduated and you have a bit more free time, are you going to read more American literature in English?

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introduction

Satoko: No way! It was far too difficult. I’m never going to pick up another English book in my life. I’ll watch the movie instead! Both of the above conversations are taken from real life and will be instantly recognisable to any teacher who has spent any time in a Japanese university. They illustrate some of the profound problems with international education as it is actually practised in contemporary Japan. It should be emphasised that the students in the above examples are success stories of the Japanese education system. They had to study English hard for six years at junior and senior high schools and were able to score well above average in tests in order to get on track to enter a good university. The curricula of their schools must have included elements of the ‘Oral Communication’ syllabus mandated by the 1989 guidelines. The students probably had some English classes that included Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs) who were native speakers of English brought to Japan at great expense by the Japanese government. Furthermore, the students had to take and pass an English language entrance exam in order to be accepted by the university they are now attending. The student in Conversation I may have studied English only because he had to. Most good universities require the student to pass an English entrance exam regardless of their major topic of study. His inability to speak even a simple English sentence is explained by the fact that up until that moment he may never have been called upon to utter one word of a foreign language out loud. The student in Conversation II, however, is able to engage in an English conversation and was interested enough in English at school to select American Literature as her major. However, it is clear from the conversation that after studying this for four years at university, her attitude to the English language is that it is far too difficult for her ever to get to grips with. That the good students that these two cases represent struggle and strive so much with English as it is taught in schools and universities in Japan is not merely a problem for the individual students. Difficulty in communicating in English with the outside world is a threat to Japan’s global standing and to its continued prosperity. In 2002, Jean Pierre Lehmann, professor at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD), wrote the following: The globalization of English is a remarkable development at many levels and one that will continue at an intensified pace thanks to the internet. What I find extraordinary for example, is the speed and fluency with which



international education policy in japan5 the young and middle-aged in the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe have taken to English… It is by now universal wisdom that basic literacy in the global age consists of being able to use a computer and speak English… Universal wisdom that is with the exception of Japan. [It is absurdly difficult] to find Japanese MBA candidates [to study at the IMD] in their early 30s whose standard of English is fluent by international standards. I mention ‘international standards’ because I occasionally interview Japanese candidates in Japan and determine their English is good enough, only afterward realizing that I was judging them by Japanese standards and that once they get into a classroom with some 35 nationalities exchanging views in rapid-fire English, they are quickly lost (Japan Times, 4 February 2002).

Ten years after these words were written, the place of English as the global lingua franca is beyond serious dispute. Yet the problems that otherwise good Japanese students have with communicating in English remain. One of the purposes of this book is to analyse the reasons why Japan’s international education policy at all levels has failed to equip all but a few Japanese people with the skills necessary to interact with the outside world. Some Basic Issues of Applied Linguistics and Practical Language Learning The present volume is not a linguistics textbook; it does not offer a contribution to the heated debate on the best way to help Japanese children and adults learn English as a foreign language in the classroom. I do not take a particular stance on what the best methods for improving English language education may be. The present study of language policy does, however, take the following four points about language teaching and learning as beyond serious doubt. Any policy or teaching technique that ignores any of these four points cannot succeed. 1. For a Japanese-speaking student based in Japan, learning English as a foreign language is an extremely difficult challenge, if the student is expected to approach fluency in all the four language skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening. In spite of what may be written on the covers of some commercially available study aids, there are no short cuts or easy remedies. The students requires: (a) time, (b) motivation, (c) help from qualified teachers who understand and are able to put into practice basic language-teaching methodology, and (d) a supportive environment. If just one of these is absent or highly compromised, an already extremely difficult task will become close to impossible.

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introduction

The easiest of these factors to quantify is time. It has been estimated that for a native English speaker to master Japanese, at least 2,200 hours of study are required.2 It is reasonable to assume that a very similar amount of time is required for a Japanese speaker to learn English. Under the current national curriculum in Japan, JHS students receive a total of 270 hours, and SHS students receive between 470 and 650 hours (depending on the type of school). A student who is not specialising in an English major will also receive about 180 hours of English classes during their first two years of tertiary education. Adding it all up, a twenty-year-old Japanese student will have received between 920 and 1,100 hours of formal education in the English language. This is half or less than half of the minimum number of hours required to master the language. 2. Mastering a written language well will not necessarily help a student learn the spoken language. British public school students in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries who were taught ancient Greek would probably struggle to make themselves understood if they were transported back to Athens in the fifth century bc. Since such an eventuality was impossible, teachers of ancient Greek were content to teach only the written language. For much of Japan’s modern period it was assumed that the vast majority of students who were taught foreign languages would be equally unlikely actually to have to use this language skill in practical conversation. Until comparatively recently only a small elite would actually travel abroad, while the chances of meeting a Western foreigner in daily life for the majority of people inside Japan were close to nil. The school curricula, textbooks and entrance exams were developed at a time when English (and other European languages) was taught as a written language. Changing the national system to one that required the teaching of all four skills of a foreign language would have required a complete overhaul of the system. 3. Moreover, in the case of English pronunciation, the challenges facing Japanese students are formidable. With only a few exceptions, syllables in the Japanese spoken language consist of either a vowel or a consonant followed by a vowel (for example ka ki ku ke ko). People who are monolingual in Japanese will therefore tend to add a vowel to English 2 This figure is provided by The Foreign Service Institute (FSI), the US Govern­ ment’s ­primary training institution for officers and support personnel of the US foreign affairs community, http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language -difficulty.



international education policy in japan7

words that end in a final consonant (two often-heard examples are ‘wind’ being made to sound like ‘window’ and ‘shirt’ coming out as ‘shaatsu’). This problem is compounded by the way that loan words (gairaigo) are imported from English into Japanese via the medium of the katakana syllabic script. Unfortunately the continued widespread practice of writing katakana equivalents next to English words in English language study materials aimed at children only serves to make this problem worse. The complete overhaul of the English language curriculum to include the teaching of spoken English did not happen. Instead, the existing system was tinkered with and ‘Oral Communication’ exercises were latched on to the end of lessons that focused entirely on the grammar of the written language. 4. It is always of benefit to a language learner to spend time in an environment where the target language is the normal language of discourse. This is why students who specialise in modern languages in universities in England, for example, are required to spend one year in a country where their target language is spoken. Most Japanese students in Japanese universities are not required to spend time abroad, and those who do voluntarily spend time abroad are sometimes forced to delay graduation (see chapter 7). ‘Researching Your Own School’ In an important way the content of this book is inspired and informed by my own experiences as an educator in England and Japan. Therefore it will be helpful to the reader to know something about my personal background. After completing an undergraduate degree in modern history and politics at the University of Reading, I studied for a masters degree in political theory at the University of Manchester and then undertook a PGCE (Post Graduate Certificate of Education) at Kingston Polytechnic.3 I then became a teacher in a comprehensive school in Surrey (a county to the South of London) where I worked for four years teaching history, politics and some mathematics.4 In 1989 I came to Japan for the first time as a 3 In 1992 Kingston Polytechnic (in south-west London) became Kingston University. 4 The fact that I taught three different subjects (as well as helping out with PE lessons) comes as a surprise to most Japanese secondary-school teachers. The explanation is as follows: politics was only taught to advanced level (A level) meaning that the school could not justify hiring a teacher solely for teaching politics; and I helped out with mathematics teaching because there is a national shortage of qualified teachers in the subject in England, meaning that anyone who has A level maths like myself is used to teach the subject.

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introduction

participant in the JET programme, which at that point was only two years old. I was slightly older than the average age for JETs and I was also not typical in that I was a qualified and experienced schoolteacher. However in two important ways I was a typical JET ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) in that I had almost no knowledge of Japan or the Japanese language, and no qualifications in TEFL or TESOL. I was placed in two senior high schools (SHS) in Saitama Prefecture where I team taught English with JTEs (Japanese Teachers of English). I shared in the joys and frustrations of JET life and renewed my contract twice. I had no training as an ethnographer, but straight away I found myself comparing Japanese high schools with their equivalent in England. After JET, I returned to England and took a second MA in the study of contemporary Japan at Essex University where I was able to conduct a more formal study of Japanese education and politics. After Essex I spent one year as a teacher in an eikaiwa school in Kushiro, Hokkaido. Then I studied for a doctorate at St Antony’s College Oxford, during which time I did research on the Japan Teachers’ Union (Nikkyōso). Since then I have worked full-time at two national universities in Japan, during which time my duties have included English language teaching, English entrance exam writing and marking, and escorting students on study-abroad trips. I also became a member of JALT and attended their conferences and meetings, during which I could hear the views of language teachers in all kinds of educational institutions the length and breadth of Japan. When I started writing about international education in Japan I made use of my own experiences but was aware of the dangers of doing so. ‘Practitioner Research’ or ‘Action Research’ wherein practising teachers write reports about their classroom activities and experiences is a common form of research in education (Anderson, Herr and Sigrid Nihlen 1994). There are clear benefits to this kind of research: ‘by rigorously researching into their own practice, teachers add to the existing body of knowledge and help to create the future agenda for their own profession’ (Fryer 2004, 175). My own research is not confined to experiences gained at one site, and is not directly concerned with improving classroom teaching practice. However, it shares with practitioner research the fundamental assumption that ‘there is no such thing as practice that is non-theoretical’ (Anderson, Herr and Sigrid Nihlen 1994, 4–5). Fundamentally, the research carried out for this book is based on the premise that national education policy cannot be understood without an analysis of what is actually taking place at the genba or chalk-face, and therefore the everyday classroom experiences of teachers and students need to be analysed as best they can.



international education policy in japan9

In the writing of this book I have included my own experiences in this analysis but I have tried not to make them the main source of data for any of the sites where education is delivered. Even so, I understand that the charges of subjectivity, bias and taking only a partial view of a much larger whole can easily be levelled against someone who is too quick to draw macro conclusions from his or her own narrow, micro experiences. Anthropologist Greg Poole, in his book on the Japanese professoriate which was based on research at his own workplace, a private university in Tokyo, outlines some of the issues he had to face: The difficulty of viewing a familiar social environment in an ‘unfamiliar’ way is not to be underestimated. I grappled with an inner battle to separate my three roles – the persons of Greg the anthropologist, Greg the jokyōju (associate professor) and Greg. A collision of these personas was, alas, inevitable at a few frustrating moments, and during this project more than once I came face to face with my own expectations and prejudices. (Poole 2010, 9)

In a correctly conducted research project the limitations of the project must be made clear to the reader, and so the kind of self-knowledge and reflexivity described by Poole above is essential. The Western Man Studying the Orient My direct experience of Japanese educational institutions is confined to a small number of sites mostly at the secondary and tertiary levels. But I also have another constraint on my experience of Japan, the fact that I have observed Japan through the eyes of a Western, English-speaking, white person. (In fact, it was for these very qualities that I was invited to come to Japan in the first place!) As such a person, am I destined to perceive Japan through an ‘Orientalist’ lens? An important critic of Western scholars of Japanese education is lecturer in comparative education Takayama Keita, who argues that their work is too often premised upon a series of problematic assumptions about the ‘fundamental differences’ between Japan and the ‘West’. He argues that Orientalism affects their work in the following three specific ways: Firstly, they naturalize the identification of a cultural boundary with the political boundary of a nation-state, perpetuating the Orientalist premise that Japan’s culture is a containable whole. In so doing, they constitute ‘the broad generalizations of essentialized Japan’ (Befu 2001, 4) ‘as though all Japanese are uniform in size, shape, behaviour, and thought’ (Mouer and Sugimoto 1986, 10). They ‘abstract “cultural average” or “dominant value orientations” in an effort to define national character as the major independent

10

introduction variable’ (Mouer and Sugimoto 1986, 13) and consequently leave unaddressed unequal power relations in terms of gender, social class, ethnicity, and other socially salient factors. Equally problematically, these studies construct the notion of American nationality – the dialectic counterpart of the Japanese nationality – on the basis of the hegemonic image of Americans (often presented as ‘Westerners’): the middle-class White and, possibly, male (Gupta and Ferguson 1992). Hence, the Japanist studies reinforce the hegemony of dominant social groups in the politics of national identity, silencing the voices and experiences of internal ‘others’, both in Japan and the US who disrupt the identification of a nation-state with a single language, culture, and ‘race’ (Nozaki 2009).  Secondly, Japanist studies’ uncritical use of ‘national culture’ reinforces the ideology of cultural homogeneity that Japanese cultural nationalists assert, hence tacitly contributing to their hegemonic project (Befu 2001; Robertson 1998). Japan’s cultural nationalism, or nihonjinron, is a form of ‘affirmative Orientalism’ (Fox 1996, 152) in that it re-articulates the Westerncentric Orientalist construction of Japan’s ‘differences’ as a source of national pride and uniqueness (Befu 2001). The shift from the wholesale castigation of Japanese traditional values to the positive self-identity emerged in the late 1960s along with Japan’s economic development and the associated national self confidence. The same cultural values and institutions which had been deemed as premodern and feudalistic by the Western-centric gaze were now reframed as the basis for the nation’s economic success (Befu 2001, 139–40). In this re-articulation process, Japanese cultural nationalists appropriated many English-language Japanist studies, and Benedict’s The Chrysanthe­mum and the Sword in particular played an important role in their assertion of Japan’s national and cultural ‘uniqueness’ (Befu 2001, 56–57; Robertson 1998, 305–6; Ryang 2002, 99). The Anglo-American Japanist discourse and the Japanese cultural nationalistic discourse – though driven by different motivations – merge in their essentialist construction of ‘national uniqueness’ and ‘fundamental differences’ in comparative discussion of ‘Western’ and Japanese societies.  Thirdly, in the virtual absence of anthropological studies of Japan by nonWestern scholars, the continuous reproduction of the binary contrasting  between Japan and the ‘West’ effectively naturalizes a ‘partial truth’ of Japanese society as if it were the only truth (Befu 2001; Nakano 2005). While these studies certainly ‘make Japanese society more understandable to Anglo-American readers, whether they help Koreans and Pakistanis to understand it is totally a different question’ (modified from Befu in Kuwayama 2004, 39). By dominating the English-language scholarly representation of Japan, Anglo-American researchers have marginalized alternative representations of Japan attainable when it is examined in different, non-Western academic reference communities (Befu 2001, 6, 66). Lastly, Japanist studies ignore the fact that many countries outside Japan exhibit similar cultural attributes, thus failing to recognize transnational cultural spheres with which ‘unique’ Japanese values and patterns are in constant interaction (Ohnuki-Tierney 2005). (Takayama 2011b, 348–49)



international education policy in japan11

If a study of Japanese education were guilty of the three sets of bias and ideologically-based distortion described above, it would be almost worthless as a piece of scholarship. These three points address real dangers for a Western researcher carrying out work in Japan and need to be taken very seriously. We will address each point in turn.  Point One Scholars who decide to embark on a single-nation study do indeed run the risk of ‘methodological nationalism’, possibly running the additional risk that their work will reinforce the views of cultural nationalists that Japan is a unique, self-contained whole. In an era of globalisation it might even seem perverse to single out one nation for study. Although there are dangers, it is certainly not inevitable, as Takayama alleges (quoting Mouer and Sugimoto [1986]) that the identification of a cultural boundary with a political boundary will certainly lead to all Japanese being caricatured as ‘uniform in size, shape, behaviour, and thought’. One does not have to endorse nihonjinron or culturally nationalist discourse to recognise some basic facts about contemporary Japan. A brief summary of these facts could include the following: 1. Japan is the only nation in the world where Japanese is the official language, and the rules regulating how that language is written are decided centrally in Tokyo. This fact does not deny the existence of wide varieties of spoken dialect, the minority Ainu and Okinawan languages or the languages spoken by minorities like the Chinese, Koreans and South Americans. “Regional dialects do remain but the umbrella use of the standard language facilitates communication” (Gottlieb 2001: 29). It is an objective fact that the language spoken, written and read by the vast majority of people living in Japan is a different language from the languages that prevail in other nations. 2. The Japanese education system is distinct from its near neighbours, reflecting basic political and historical realities surrounding its creation, its development and the way it is administered. This of course does not mean that it is impervious to influences from outside Japan – a theme that will feature in several sections of this book. 3. The overwhelming majority of Japanese students and teachers perceive themselves as ‘Japanese’ – something that marks them out as different from Chinese, Americans, French and the citizens of every other nation state. A person from Tohoku meeting a person from Kyushu for the first time will have some differences in spoken dialect to contend

12

introduction with, but overwhelmingly they will be able to identify each other as sharing the same cultural traits to do with communication, politeness, knowledge of popular culture and so on. They will have been exposed to the same national media including TV stations and newspapers. They will have far more in common with each other than with anyone born and brought up outside the borders of the Japanese nation state. Obviously, this is not to deny any differences of class, status, age or gender which may exist. Nor does it prevent a researcher from carrying out research into those differences. Researchers in the social sciences should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time; they should be capable of studying differences within nations without abandoning the notion of differences between nations. There is a large literature in English on social class and gender issues in Japan.  Point Two

Takayama is wrong at the outset in this part of his critique when he asserts that the use of the concept of ‘national culture’ by Western scholars is uncritical. It is certainly possible to find books written about Japan that uncritically use the concept of ‘Japanese culture’ and he is right that a lot of these books appeared during Japan’s ‘economic miracle’, but they are not the kind that can be classified as serious scholarship. Also, the coming to an end of the miracle and the realisation that the Japanese economy needs to deal with the same problems and issues as the economy of any other advanced, post-industrial state have brought to a close even that genre of ‘Japanist’ literature. In fact, political scientists and sociologists who try to study an aspect of contemporary Japan without dealing with the topic of culture have a difficult task. Those who deny the role of ‘culture’ are usually thinking of a monolithic, unchanging culture which has never existed except in the imaginations of extreme cultural nationalists. This ‘straw-man’ concept of national culture should not be allowed to distract from a proper scholarly analysis of the role of shared norms, values and communication strategies that are indispensible for understanding human behaviour. Political scientists in particular are very cautious about using any factor that smacks of culture in their explanations of political phenomena and causal relationships. The distinguished scholar of Japanese politics, J.A.A. Stockwin is worth quoting at some length on this matter: The idea that politics may be studied without reference to social and cultural norms may be attractive to some hard-nosed political scientists who



international education policy in japan13 believe that political analysis alone can explain cultural outcomes. For the present writer however, it is much too simplistic, both in relation to Japan and in relation to anywhere else. On the other hand, we equally reject the notion that Japanese social norms and behaviour are so different from those found elsewhere that Japanese politics is incapable of being compared with the politics of other countries. Both are self-evidently extreme positions, but it is surprising how often one encounters opinions close to one or other of the two poles. In this book, a middle view is taken, regarding Japanese society and politics as open ended – that is capable of encompassing a variety of behaviour – but at the same time bounded by social norms, as well as habits of social and political interaction, that have their roots in history. If this argument appears trite (since much the same can be said about most countries), we should remember that the image of Japanese society as ‘different’ remains embedded both within Japan and outside it, while by contrast it has become fashionable in some circles to regard Japan as just another bit of the global village. (Stockwin 2008, 28)

Being a former student of Professor Stockwin, it may not be surprising that I concur with this view.  Point Three Takayama begins this part of his critique with a very fair point, but then uses it unfairly to attack scholars from English-speaking countries. He is correct in saying that a large proportion of non-Japanese language scholarship on Japan has been aimed mainly at Anglo-American readers. In fact one of the books that his article is specifically discussing is The Japanese Model of Schooling: Comparisons with the U.S. (Tsuneyoshi 2001). There are many scholarly books that explicitly compare schools in Japan with schools in the USA (LeTendre 2000; DeCoker 2002; Nitta 2008) reflecting not only the interest shown by American scholars in Japanese education, but also the extensive involvement of Americans in the post-war development of Japanese education from the Occupation reforms onwards. It is impossible to disagree with Takayama that scholarship about Japan would be richer if researchers with a greater variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds were involved. Hopefully, the ongoing expansion of higher education in Asia and elsewhere, combined with greater efforts by Japanese universities to accept more foreign researchers will result in a more diverse approach to this and many other areas of research. I am not aware of a Western scholar who would be opposed to such a development. It is also impossible to disagree with Takayama’s final point, that studies of Japanese schools would be richer if they included comparisons with

14

introduction

schools in similar societies like Taiwan, South Korea and so on.5 It is usually not an ideological standpoint but more mundane issues like language skill, research funding and time that limit a researcher to studies in one geographical location. Any person of any nationality is capable of doing productive research about Japanese politics and society. All research is limited, will contain flaws and is open to criticism. Part of that limitation is down to the individual researcher’s own education and background. Research about any society can only be benefited if it is conducted by a combination of people born into that society and people whose origins are from outside. Our collective understanding of Japan (and of any nation or region) is advanced by scholars who read each others’ work in a critical way, and use the work of others in order to build their own research projects that will go beyond the work already done. In the words of one classic textbook on qualitative research, ‘scientific research uses explicit, codified and public methods to generate and analyze data whose reliability can therefore be assessed. … All methods – whether explicit or not – have limitations’ (King, Keohane and Verba 1994, 8). The purpose of the present book is, within limitations, to add to our knowledge about international education in Japan and pave the way for better books to come in the future – ideally written by people of various nationalities. Plan of the Book Chapter 1 starts with a look at the implications of globalisation for education systems in developed countries and then moves on to discuss the particular case of Japan. The risk society paradigm is introduced and its usefulness in analysing the twin processes of globalisation and individualisation on post-industrial societies is assessed. In the case of Japan, the rise of individualisation as a contested concept in the debate on education reform and also as a trend in social reality is discussed. Chapter 2 covers the history of international education policy from the opening of Japan in the 1850s up to the rapid growth economy of the 1960s. Chapter 3 covers English language policy-making at the national level. It examines the

5 By ‘similar’ here I mean they have more in common with Japan in terms of history, language and culture than Western countries.



international education policy in japan15

famous debate between Hiraizumi and Watanabe that took place in the 1970s about what kind of English should be taught, and then looks at the 2003 Action Plan to improve communicative teaching, including the Super English High School (SELHi) initiative. The chapter then takes a critical look at secondary school English textbooks and the introduction  of English to elementary schools that began in 2011. Then English entrance exams and the shadow curriculum that accompanies them are discussed. Finally the introduction of the JET Programme is looked at as an example of a policy that the Ministry of Education (MOE) did not at first support. Chapter 4 looks at the people who are entrusted with putting policy into practice, the teachers. The chapter is composed of two halves. The first half examines the role of Japanese teachers of English (JTEs) and their organisations. Discussion is divided into the following six categories: (1) teacher training for secondary-school teachers, (2) the duties and responsibilities of secondary school English teachers, (3) obstacles in the path of secondary-school teachers introducing communicative language teaching in English classroom, (4) problems and opportunities relating to relationships between Japanese teachers and ALTs, (5) Japanese teachers of English in universities, and (6) organisations representing Japanese teachers of English. The second half is an analysis of the role of native-speaker teachers of foreign languages which is divided into the following subsections: (1) JET Programme ALTs and other public sector direct-hire ALTs, (2) being more than an assistant – the risks involved in developing a career as a foreign teacher of English in Japan, (3) teachers as risk-managers – strategies available for foreign teachers looking for stability, (4) foreign university teachers, and (5) organisations representing foreign teachers of English. Chapter 5 looks at the role of learners of English. After discussing changes in youth culture since the ending of the period of high economic growth, the experiences and opinions of JHS students and then SHS students are examined, followed by a discussion of university students. Then the discussion moves on to minority and bilingual students and the wasted opportunity of ‘internal internationalisation’. Chapter 6 examines the role of the private sector. Firstly, private secondary schools are discussed and then international schools. This is followed by a discussion of the failure of several American branch university campuses that were set up in the 1980s and were mostly closed down in the 1990s. The chapter then looks at private universities in Japan that have good reputations in international

16

introduction

education, followed by an examination of the eikaiwa industry. The next section looks at English language tests operated by private companies, especially the widely used TOEIC exam. Finally, chapter 7 looks at studyabroad policies related to students invited into Japan as well as those who leave Japan to study in foreign countries.

CHAPTER ONE

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS International education policy is made within the broader context of education administration and reform. This chapter will discuss the related concepts of globalisation and risk society theory in relation to how education policy is made at the national level. Risk society theory also provides a useful way of linking trends in globalisation with the increasing ‘individualisation’ of society. The traditional power of the nation state to make policy is being undermined in the post-industrial era by threats from above – the global – and threats from below – the rise of ‘the individual’. We will discuss the ways in which education policymaking in Japan has been analysed in the years since the Occupation reforms, and how these models need to be modified to take account of the drastic economic, social and political changes that have taken place since the late 1980s. Education Policy Making in Japan During the Period of Reconstruction and Rapid Growth Before looking at education policy in the age of globalisation and risk, we will go back to how policymaking was understood in the period of Japan’s post-war ‘economic miracle’. Political scientist Leonard Schoppa’s 1991 account of the politics of educational policymaking in Japan is now a classic in its field (Schoppa 1991). His research was carried out towards the end of a period of Japanese politics known as ‘the 1955 system’, during which the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) ruled unchallenged and presided over prolonged economic growth sometimes referred to as ‘the Japanese miracle’. During this period, efforts by some on the political right to reverse the progressive reforms introduced during the American Occupation (1945–52) were largely unsuccessful, and most conservative politicians and bureaucrats devoted themselves to pragmatic policies mostly connected to economic growth (Stockwin 2008, 60). Schoppa’s book was focused on attempts at education reform in the 1970s and 1980s which he concluded largely resulted in failure. He was especially interested with the reform efforts made by prime minster Nakasone Yasuhiro who created a special education reform panel called

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chapter one

the Ad Hoc Council on Education (Rinkyōshin) in 1984, independent of the Ministry of Education. Schoppa was interested in finding out why a powerful and (in other areas) successful prime minister was unable to achieve the changes he wanted. Building on the work of two influential political scientists, Schoppa created a model of policymaking that he termed the Modified Pempel– Campbell Model,1 which was based upon a division of the political world into a progressive camp (the Japan Socialist Party, public-sector unions and their allies), and a conservative camp (the LDP, the government bureaucracy and business interests) and which divided conflict resolution patterns in Japanese policymaking into three types.2 Since the present study is concerned with international education policy we will focus here on the one that Schoppa connects to policies on international education: ‘Low-conflict disputes which tend to result in incremental change or pressure group pluralism involving “contrived consensus” type decisionmaking.’ In this context ‘contrived consensus’ is a consensus that is brought about by the use of inter-agency project teams, top-level advisory bodies and mediation from above. One of the fruits of this consensus was the establishment of the JET programme, something that will be discussed in more detail in chapter 3. It is clear that international education policy was exceptional in that political actors that were opposed to each other over other areas of policy were in agreement about the main goals of international education, especially improving English language teaching. National Policymaking and Globalisation One of the factors prompting the Japanese government to reform its policies on international education was the rise of globalisation. There are many competing definitions of the word ‘globalisation’. Economists tend to take a different view from sociologists; political scientists see 1 See Pempel (1978) and Campbell (1984). 2 Schoppa’s three types of conflict resolution are as follow: (1) Low-conflict disputes which tend to result in incremental change or pressure group pluralism involving ‘contrived consensus’ type decision-making. Agreement in the 1980s for more ‘internationalisation’ is one example of this; (2) High-conflict disputes involving outside forces resulting in camp conflict and either (a) forced resolution by the government or (b) opposition success in convincing at least some conservatives to back down – thereby creating a situation not unlike category number 3; (3) High-conflict disputes involving primarily conservative camp actors resulting in conflict avoidance and little change. See Schoppa (1991, 20) for the model (259) for summary of historical examples.



theoretical considerations19

things differently from cultural theorists and so on. One very good, working definition of the core essence of globalisation which they would all agree on goes as follows: ‘Globalization refers to processes whereby social relations acquire relatively distance-less and borderless qualities, so that human lives are increasingly played out in the world as a single place’ (Baylis and Smith 1997, 14). Rather than getting involved in a debate over the more complex intricacies of globalisation, the present study will take as its starting point the following position adopted by Hay and Marsh: [O]ur claim is that there are multiple processes of globalization, that these interact in specific and contingent ways, that such processes are unevenly developed over space and time, are complex and often resisted and, moreover, that they are simultaneously social, political and economic. Accord­ ingly, an account which privileges (empirically or worse still causally) one ‘moment’ (whether social, cultural, political or economic) can but only fail to capture the complexity and contingency of contemporary change. (Hay and Marsh 2000, 3).

Any study of educational institutions in particular must bear in mind the absence of any one causal factor on any change – or lack of change – that takes place. Much has been written about the effect of globalisation on national education systems since the end of the Cold War. In particular, attention had been paid to the role of education in aiding (or hindering) a nation’s ability to compete in the global economic market. The commonly held view is that technological revolutions in transport, communications and data processing have transformed the global economy. It is important for the student of educational change to be careful to distinguish ideological claims about change made from a particular political point of view from empirically verifiable change happening at sites, like the classroom or the language lab, where education is actually delivered. Neo-liberals in the USA, the UK and Japan, for example have argued since the 1980s that in order fully to take advantage of global developments, national governments have to step back from the roles they previously played and allow an increasing penetration of market forces in all areas of life, including education. This view holds that one of the key roles of education in advanced economies is to provide people with high-value skills and knowledge that can be sold in the world market, and reforms must take place that recognise that reality. Critics of neo-liberalism, on the other hand, have argued that this kind of stance portrays globalisation as an inexorable process, something beyond political debate, whereas it is – when formulated in the way outlined above – ‘a deliberate ideological project of economic liberalisation’ (quoted in Rizvi and Lingard 2006, 251).

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chapter one

To counter this neo-liberal formulation ‘the term [globalisation] also appears linked to cross-border advocacy networks, and organisa­tions defending human rights, the environment, women’s rights and world peace’ (Guillen 2010, 5). One influential international organisation that stresses the opportunities for development and growth that globalisation offers is the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development). The OECD has become a significant actor in the field of education. It gathers data on the education systems of member states and publishes results in order to encourage countries to borrow successful ideas and methods from each other, and to reform those parts of the system that are ‘underperforming’. It operates on the assumption that ‘a broad consensus exists on many aspects of the policy requirement for a globalizing world economy’ (quoted in Rizvi and Lingard 2006, 251). According to this view, the OECD has ‘largely constituted globalisation in a performative way as neo-liberal ideology applied to the whole globe’ (Rizvi and Lingard 2006, 259). The OECD’s advice has no legally binding power, and so the enthusiasm with which governments and elites in so many different countries embrace its reports, especially its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)3 results, indicate that, at least in recent years, it has been providing fuel for many a domestic agenda each of which has its own dynamics. In particular the notion that educational ‘quality’ and ‘performance’ can be measured and compared across borders has become an OECD orthodoxy that has been picked up globally (Ball 2008, 33–35). This is one part of a wave of ‘neoliberal, neoconservative and managerial impulses [that] can be found throughout the world’ (Apple 2010, 2). The Risk Society Paradigm In analysing the effects of globalisation on educational institutions, the challenge is to understand the ways in which the motives, functions and actions of national actors interact with the experiences, opinions and choices of individual students, both Japanese and non-Japanese. In the words of John Clammer, ‘globalization, it hardly needs to be pointed out,

3 PISA tests were first carried out in 2000, and are conducted every three years. Tests are conducted in reading literacy, mathematics and science. ‘League tables’ are compiled by comparing mean values of test scores for the different nations. In 2009, 75 countries took part.



theoretical considerations21

is a risky business’ (Clammer 2000, 152). But individuals do have a choice, both in how much they want to interact with the global and how risky they want their actions to be. In the case of overseas study, for example, nobody is forced to go and spend part of their student life in a foreign country. On a global scale, millions of individual decisions – to go or not to go abroad to study – are translated into massive waves of voluntary migration each year. This movement of students poses both risks and opportunities to the nations, institutions and individuals concerned. One approach that helps make sense of these trends is the sociological paradigm of ‘risk society’ (Beck 1992) which is of use in analysing the way individuals are, in contemporary post-industrial society, being encouraged to become their own ‘risk managers’, that is calculators of how their actions and choices will affect their own lives. It can be a powerful heuristic tool because it links the choices made by individuals with global trends of an environmental, economic or technological nature. Ulrich Beck developed his theories of risk society primarily by studying German society. He has mapped the post-war history of Germany into three phases – which have clear parallels in the post-war history of Japan. 1. Phase One (immediate post-war reconstruction). The ‘necessity and obviousness of rebuilding a destroyed world meshed together with the fear that what had been achieved might again collapse and consequently classical virtues such as willingness to sacrifice, diligence, selfdenial, subordination and living for others mutually reinforced one another’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2001, 164). 2. Phase Two (1960s–1980s). The creation of wealth came to be something that was taken for granted. Political freedoms developed and radiated into overall society. 3. Phase Three (1990s–2000s). This phase is described by Beck as ‘global risk society’. There is a return to uncertainty and the fear that the prosperity that had been taken for granted could now collapse. Public trust in national institutions is eroded. A recent article by political scientist Glenn Hook discussed the application of the risk society paradigm to present-day Japan. This is welcome, since up until very recently the non-economic application of risk theory has been confined almost exclusively to Western Europe (Hook 2010). The disasters of March 2011 in north-east Japan make an understanding of how risk is perceived in Japan even more important, since they have added an increased dimension to the ‘uncertainty’ and ‘lack of trust in public institutions’ that are part of Beck’s ‘Phase Three’. It is no coincidence that the

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chapter one

starting point for ‘risk society’ theorising in Germany was the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. A major OECD review of education reform in Japan has also noted the value of the risk society paradigm, arguing that the aim of reform must be ‘to strengthen the capacity of individuals to act autonomously and to assume greater individual responsibility for effective lifelong learning in order to succeed in the “risk society” ’ (OECD 2012, 187). In language that is borrowed directly from Beck’s description of ‘Phase Three’ of the development of post-war industrial societies, the OECD report maintains that education reform in Japan must be geared to helping citizens cope with the ‘breakdown of post-war certainties’ like corporate welfare and lifetime employment. The rise of uncertainty is accompanied by the parallel trends of ‘individualisation’ and globalisation, forces that threaten postindustrial society by pulling it in two different directions at once. ‘Individualisation’ and Risk The justification for education reforms that were proposed in the 1990s was the often-made argument that Japan needs a freer educational environment to nurture creative self-starters, a view well summed up in the 1996 Report of the Central Council on Education (Chūkyōshin), the government’s main advisory body on education (MOE 1996). Like other government reports of the 1990s, this was full of references to the need for personal autonomy (jishusei), independent decision-making (shutai-teki handan) and the key concept of individuality (kosei). The Japanese word for ‘individual’, kosei, is similar to the term kokusaika (internationalisation) in the sense that no actor in the political process is openly opposed to it. Similarly, however, there is a huge disagreement about what the word actually means when it is applied to concrete educational reforms. The left often accuse the right of using kosei as a means for introducing neo-liberal market reforms into education, while the right accuse the left of using it to encourage irresponsible attitudes and behaviour among young people. The debate on ‘the individual’ in educational discourse in Japan has a long history. Peter Cave (Cave 2007, 24–30) describes the way that in the early years of the twentieth century the term kosei was linked, in educational journals, with the spread of achievement tests and the concepts of IQ and eugenics. At this time ‘kosei was being used to mean “difference from others”, a difference which could be



theoretical considerations23

positive or negative’ (Cave 2007, 25). The Ministry of Education was also on board: ‘In 1927, the Ministry of Education itself issued a directive stressing the importance of “respect for individuality” and the dangers of uniformity, in terms which bear a striking resemblance to Ministry rhetoric during the 1990s’ (Cave 2007, 26). Critics then and now say that the Ministry is more concerned with ‘aptitude’ rather than ‘individuality’ in the fuller sense of the word. Teachers and schools were encouraged to match children with the appropriate aptitudes to particular educational and training tracks. In other words, the Ministry is mostly concerned to see the labour demands of the economy satisfied by providing workers with appropriate skills. Observers of educational practice in Japan, the ways in which teaching and learning are actively conducted, usually point to the importance placed on group harmony and cooperation (see, e.g. Rohlen and LeTendre 1996). Teachers encourage children from their earliest years to develop into individuals who are aware of the interconnectedness of social relationships. Although Left and Right fought over many ideological issues in the post-Occupation years, this was an area where they actually had much in common, and where their views were supported by non-political teachers. Thus in the 1980s when the extensive raft of reforms proposed by Prime Minister Nakasone’s council on education reform (Rinkyōshin) came to the fore, those parts that were concerned with promoting more choice and flexibility were opposed by people on both sides of the political dividing line. This was frustrating for Nakasone himself who supported the neo-liberal idea that schools should help cultivate more entrepreneurs. However, there are those who argue that resistance to the process of individualisation is futile. Beck, for example holds that the rise of the global risk society is accompanied by an inevitable individualisation regardless of the views of individual or institutional actors: ‘the individual is becoming the basic unit of social reproduction for the first time in history’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2001, xxii). Independent of philosophical or political debates, new social arrangements have brought about changes in Japanese society that can be objectively measured. In 2012, the number of people per household in Tokyo, for example, fell below two for the first time ever. It is now 1.99 people per household compared to 4.09 in 1957 and 2.97 in 1966 (Japan Times, 25 March 2012). In post-industrial Tokyo, the majority of people live alone. There is a positive dimension to this with increases in individual freedom and choice. The negative consequences of

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chapter one

this transformation, however, include increased alienation, selfishness, neglect of the elderly and inequality. Some scholars have made the case that this has led to the transformation of social problems into psychological dispositions which in turn have resulted in record annual suicide rates and what some are calling an ‘era of depression’ (Kawanishi 2009, 141). If young people are unable to find a good job, or middle-aged workers are sacked from theirs, the blame is placed on the individual rather than on global or national shifts in the structures of capitalism (Genda 2005). Young people, especially young men, who do not have the skills to negotiate the new social and economic landscape are increasingly withdrawing completely from society. This has given rise to the phenomenon of hikikomori, wherein large numbers of young people have confined themselves to their rooms and cut all connections with the outside world (Horiguchi 2012). These are people who have not been able to adapt to their role as ‘risk manager’ of their own life. The education system has failed to prepare them for this role because it is stuck in a prior phase of Japan’s post-war development. It is unable to adapt to social and economic transformations at the global and national levels. These social changes mean that ‘the division of labour in the family or workplace can no longer be a “natural” matter of course; like much else besides, it must be negotiated and justified’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2001, xxii). The fact that Japanese people are following patterns of behaviour similar to those described by Beck (although Beck’s research is mostly based on Western Europe) can be shown by the drastic drop in the birth rate over a period that roughly coincides with Japan’s maturing as an industrial democracy and its transition into a post-industrial society. Rather than following patterns of behaviour imposed upon women by every stage of history prior to this, Japanese women of today are behaving like ‘risk managers’ and looking to the future, rather than the past when deciding when or if to have children. The failure of successive governments to come up with serious policies to address the issue of low fertility illustrates a mismatch between the stages of development of the Japanese state apparatus and the population it tries to govern. The extent to which this is also true or not, in the case of international education, is the subject of the present book. According to Beck the rise of ‘individualisation’ is accompanied by the shattering of the historic alliance between capitalism, the welfare state and democracy. At the same time as it is undermined from below – by the rise of the individual – this alliance is simultaneously attacked from above, by the rise of globalisation.



theoretical considerations25 Japanese Responses to Globalisation

Confusion can easily arise from the diverse ways in which the term globalisation is applied to Japan in academic literature4 Confining our scope to education, for the purposes of the present study the approach of sociologists of education Kariya and Rappleye will be used (Kariya and Rappleye 2010). They make a distinction between ‘real’ effects of globalisation in the form of actual changes to cross-national flows in commodities and people, and the ‘imagined’ effects, a term they use to refer to the ‘rhetorical framing’ of what is really happening (Kariya and Rappleye 2010, 22). They also make use of Cowen’s conceptualisation of the new multiple meanings of ‘border’ in a globalised world (Cowen 1997). Borders are no longer simple political lines on a map; they have multiple dimensions – economic, political, social, cultural and so on. A given nation may simultaneously keep some of these borders open while others are closed. Cowen coined the term permiology to mean the study of the various ways borders may be permeable, and its opposite, immunology to analyse the resistance to cross-border flows. I agree with Kariya and Rappleye that these concepts are useful tools for envisaging ‘the unique contextual factors that define and produce the Japanese response to the challenges of globalisation’ (Kariya and Rappleye 2010, 23). We will return to these concepts when we discuss perceptions of risk later in this chapter. In Japan, results of PISA tests and the global ‘league tables’ they give rise to have immense importance. Japan’s disappointing position in the 2003 PISA rankings gave rise to the expression ‘PISA shock’ and was exploited by opponents of MEXT’s policy of yutori kyōiku, which had only become fully implemented in 2002. The pressure was such that, in an unprecedented move, MEXT was forced to abandon the yutori reforms and beef up the content of compulsory education (Takayama 2008a). Nation-state institutions as well as individual citizens are placed in a position where previous certainties and traditional sources of security are under threat. This is why the rise of globalisation is accompanied by the rise of the risk society. The global financial crises that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 have contributed to the trends that Beck and others spotted in the 1990s. Japan was affected by these crises as much as anywhere else. Japanese people found that traditional sources of security – male lifetime employment, secure pensions, established gender roles and so on – were under 4 There is an excellent discussion of this in Holroyd and Coates (2011).

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threat. Added to these internal sources of risk and uncertainty, the Japanese government in its official statements contributes to perceptions that Japan occupies a precarious place in the world. This is nothing new: the Japanese government’s international education policy statement in 1994 described the inherent dangers of the international environment: The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War were expected to bring peace and stability to the world. In actuality, however, there have been numerous outbreaks of economic friction and ethnic conflicts. The international situation surrounding Japan is harsh. [emphasis added] (MOE 1995, 193).

This harshness means that Japan must, at the same time that it is striving for ‘mutual understanding’ with other nations, also ‘make an active international contribution in keeping with its international status’. This phrase is expanded on shortly after by a reference to increased efforts to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of Japan’s Official Development Assistance (ODA). Unstated but clearly implied by this kind of language is the conservative political agenda of promoting Japan as a ‘normal’ country in the world, that is, one that can have a political and diplomatic international role in keeping with its economic power. Promoting such a policy is not normally the business of education bureaucrats, but throughout Japan’s post-war history conservative efforts to encourage patriotism and revive militarism have had an impact on a very broad range of policy areas, including education. If Japanese children read stories of war heroes like Admiral Togo (who commanded the Japanese fleet that defeated the Russians in 1905), then they may be more likely to support a more robust Japanese foreign policy when they grow up. Similarly, if they form an impression, when young, that the world that surrounds Japan is an essentially threatening place, then this may also influence their future views of security and defence. If the outside world is seen as a scary place, then it makes sense to bolster the nation’s defences at every level. The nation’s borders must be defended not only from potential military or terrorist threats. Here we return to Kariya and Rappleye’s terms, permiology and immunology. In Japan, as in other nations, there is a ‘highly selective opening to the “world”; permeability conditioned by and subordinate to internal policy discourses and influence from abroad “framed” according to domestic political proclivities’ (Kariya and Rappleye 2010, 45). The nationalism of Japan’s ruling elites in the political world, bureaucracy and business  caused the dominant response to the challenges of globalisation to be one of defending Japanese national identity rather than embracing



theoretical considerations27

cosmopolitanism. This has been shown in policies that make it compulsory to respect the national flag and anthem in schools, and also policies that promote more patriotic history teaching (Rose 2006). It can also be seen in the nationalist language in the revised Fundamental Law of Education of 2006 (see Takayama 2008b, Roesgaard 2011). Kariya and Rappleye comment on this matter as follows: Rather than ‘imagining’ say, what changes Japanese society would need to undergo to transform itself into a place to welcome immigrants or attract the best and brightest students and scholars worldwide, the discourse on educational reform has been largely dominated by a belief in the need to strengthen Japanese identity and love of country. Operating under the surface usage of the term ‘internationalization’ we find not the anticipated permeability but an immune response along Japan’s cultural-cum-political borders, (Kariya and Rappleye 2010, 45).

In language policy, this emphasis on protecting national identity from foreign contagion is illustrated by the continued use of the Japanese term kokugo (literally ‘national language’) to denote Japanese language as it is used by and taught to Japanese citizens. This is contrasted to nihongo (‘Japanese language’) the term used when the language is taught to foreigners. Katsuragi notes that this is a symbol of the ruling elite’s modernist ideology, which is out of step with what is really happening in Japanese society. He notes that in the government re-organisation of the central bureaucracy in 2001, which included restructuring the agency in charge of language policy, an opportunity to replace kokugo with nihongo was missed (Katsuragi 2011, 212–13). Theories of Risk Perception What kind of a world are Beck’s risk-managing individuals living in, and to what extent does it influence the choices made by those people and their governments? Beck holds that the current stage of global capitalism is genuinely new, and that the nation state is having its power and authority eroded at a time when there is nothing to take its place (Beck 1997). Individuals do not weigh up risks in a vacuum: they perceive external risk through the prism of culture and society. In 1988 researchers from various fields came together to build a theoretical framework that could help our understanding of this kind of phenomenon. The project was called the Social Amplification and Risk Framework (SARF), and it became particularly concerned with how some risks can become the focus of concern in society (risk amplification) while others receive less attention

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(risk attenuation). Based on ten years of research into a variety of case studies, SARF holds the following conclusion to be true: As a key part of [the risk] communication process, risk, risk events and the characteristics of both become portrayed through various risk signals (images, signs and symbols), which in turn interact with a wide range of psychological, social, institutional or cultural processes in ways that intensify or attenuate perceptions of risk and its manageability. (Pidgeon, Kasperson and Slovic 2003, 15)

It follows from this, for example, that how the media report events occurring to Japanese abroad, or relating to foreign students in Japan, will influence perceptions of those who do not have direct experience of the events. Also, attitudes of individuals to foreign language study will be influenced by perceptions of the future consequences of not becoming proficient in English, the global lingua franca. Limitations and Uses of the Risk Society Paradigm In the social sciences the concept of ‘risk’ has recently been used to analyse many diverse phenomena. A reader new to the concept of ‘risk society’ might wonder about the usefulness of the concept since it has been applied in a variety of different contexts. The counter-argument put forward by the most enthusiastic proponents of risk theory like Beck is that the ‘risk society thesis is an attempt to capture the essence of social experience along the paths trodden by Marx, Weber and Habermas’ (Mythen 2004, 6). The present author would argue that the key word in this quotation is ‘attempt’. He would agree with sociologist Gabe Mythen that ‘the risk society perspective is best treated as a heuristic device which allows us to observe and probe the peculiarities and perils of modern life. Of course, the risk society thesis is littered with faults, but these faults have generated the very dialogue through which academic and social knowledge has been advanced’ (Mythen 2004, 184). Jarvis also notes that Beck’s limitations need to be understood if the strengths of his theory are to be exploited: It is obvious that a purely empirical reading of Beck reveals serious shortcomings with the risk society theory. To be fair to Beck, however, is this the correct way to read him? As Dirk Matten notes, ‘Beck’s ideas are more of a provocative and conceptual nature rather than a minute empirical proof of certain social changes’. They are perhaps better understood as a cultural condition of late modernity and of its contradictions that both embody progress but also harm and risk. (Jarvis 2010, 280)



theoretical considerations29

Few who have read Beck would argue with an additional point Jarvis makes: Read … at a time when risk tolerance has been reduced, risk aversion increased, and risk perception sensitised, Beck has undoubtedly captured the collective essence of a global society ill at ease. (Ibid.)

Mythen adds to this a practical point about the usefulness of Beck’s approach for researchers:, that ‘within academia, Beck’s oeuvre has provided a bridge between previously detached disciplines’ (Mythen 2004, 184). The present study links theoretical models designed for the study of national policymaking with research methods designed to explain behaviour in an individual classroom, and so is well suited to this kind of approach. One of the unifying principles is the idea that all actors in the education system base their actions on rationally thought-out views about what will happen in the future. This applies to individual teachers and students as much as to those who have influence over national policymaking. Their behaviour is not bound by tradition as it was for their grandparents. They are forward-looking, and therefore have to think about unknown possible outcomes. This is the essence of being a ‘risk manager’ of one’s own life. As Rasmussen argues, all kinds of actors now have to devise their own strategies to help plan their future life course: [T]he creation of a risk society has led to a proliferation of strategic practices. Businessmen have strategies and countless self-help books suggest strategies for a better life. … The concept of risk as a new guiding principle of strategy makes it possible to connect a number of events, policy initiatives and technological developments, which would otherwise seem random and unconnected. (Rasmussen 2006, 6–7)

With the risk society approach as a backdrop, the researcher can use other methodological tools appropriate for the institutions being studied (individual schools operate in different ways from national ministries) and combine these methods to better understand the workings of a national education system as a whole. Chamges in Education Policy Since 1993 in Japan The 1990s were a period of political upheaval in Japan. The Liberal Democratic Party’s grip on power was ended when it suffered two major electoral defeats, first in the Upper House (1989) and then in the Lower House (1993). In 1994, the first non-LDP government since 1955 passed an

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electoral reform law that transformed the electoral system for the Lower House by replacing multi-member districts (MMDs) with a combination of single-member districts (SMDs) and proportional representation blocks designed to usher in a two-party system.5 These developments signalled the end of the one-party-dominant ‘1955 system’, although it was not immediately clear what kind of arrangement would take its place as new parties and political alliances were formed and dissolved with dizzying speed for most of the remaining years of the decade. Changes in the political regime were inevitably accompanied by changes in the policymaking environment. Scholars claim to have identified significant education reforms in the late 1990s and argue that, taken together, they show that the ‘immobilism’ of the previous period has been overcome. These reforms are related to increasing diversity and individual choice in the school system, and are very similar (in some cases identical) to those proposed by Rinkyōshin during the mid-1980s. The situation this time, it is argued by Nitta in an important 2008 study, is different, due to three changes that have taken place since Nakasone’s time in office: First, as the Japanese economy stagnated in the 1990s, worries about schools’ effect on economic competitiveness became more widespread and pressing. Second, structural and managerial reforms had become accepted as legitimate ideas, regularly championed by business leaders and government reform councils. Finally, the education policy community was fractured by divisions among teachers’ unions and other educational specialists. (Nitta 2008, 104)

Nitta and others argue that Schoppa’s description of ‘immobilism’ might have been appropriate for the 1970s and 1980s but it subsequently ceased to be an accurate portrayal of education policymaking in Japan. Two writers who published their work a few years after Schoppa have argued that the seeds of future change were already being sown at the time of Nakasone’s Rinkyōshin, but that Schoppa missed them by his emphasis on the visible implementation of reform proposals during the period of his research (which ended before 1990). Firstly, Marie Roesgaard argued in a book published in 1998 that at the level of discourse and rhetoric, the Rinkyōshin enterprise was accompanied by significant and lasting shifts concerning how education issues were discussed, especially relating to these four key words or phrases: ‘individuality’, ‘life-long learning’, ‘internationalisation’ and ‘the information society’ (Roesgaard 1998). 5 The theory is that an SMD election system will give rise to a two-party system.



theoretical considerations31

Secondly, Christopher Hood, who published a controversial book in 2001, used the metaphor of a tsunami to describe the way Rinkyōshin’s agenda made a huge impact on education policy, but one that was not clearly visible until the following decade (Hood 2001). Writing more recently, Jeremy Rappleye argues that ‘the benefit of hindsight reveals that the gradual erosion of MOE autonomy indeed began in this period’, and that this allowed greater access of other ministries and private-sector lobbies to education policymaking than they had enjoyed before (Rappleye 2009, 7–12). Nitta adds that during this key moment in the late 1990s, ‘amidst the disarray of education interest groups, several influential policy entrepreneurs jockeyed to shift the focus’ (Nitta 2008, 104). Takayama’s research confirms that government policies of cost-cutting and decentralisation have threat­ ened the authority of the Ministry of Education and that there has been serious tension between economic rationalists and cultural nationalists (Takayama 2011a). These developments confirm a point I made in 2001 when discussing the consequences of a break up of the largest teachers’ union in Japan: Paradoxically the weakening of radical teacher unionism in Japan may result in a serious undermining of the strength and dominance of the MOE. So long as Nikkyōso was strong and united and in the hands of left-wing militants the MOE could portray itself as the defender of Japan’s education from Marxist takeover. The removal of this convenient enemy now leaves the MOE open to attack by those who used to be its allies (i.e. the business community and conservative politicians). (Aspinall 2001, 187–8).

We will now take a closer look at the ministry itself and some of the theoretical literature that has sought to explain its motives and its behaviour. The Ministry of Education Some American and British commentators have been apt to describe the Japanese education system as being overly centralised and dominated by the Education Ministry. American anthropologist, Brian McVeigh, who taught for several years in Japan, sums up this point of view succinctly: The Japanese educational system can be viewed as a three-tiered structure: strategic, intermediate, and tactical levels with the Education Ministry forming the apex of a nationwide organization which implements strategic schooling for elite purposes. (McVeigh 2006, 97)

Elsewhere McVeigh writes that elite ministry bureaucrats have always embodied a “fundamental political philosophy about the role of the state

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in individual intellectual and moral development” (McVeigh 1998, 127). The Ministry of Education remained largely unchanged by the democratic reforms that followed World War II, but the central project of the ministry evolved to the promotion of ‘state-guided economic nationalism’ which can be contrasted to the ‘militaristic, emperor-centred imperialism’ of prewar Japan (McVeigh 2004, 128). The state, according to this view, now required obedient and hard-working economic warriors rather than fearless soldiers and sailors, but the fundamental subordination of the individual to the state would continue. Western writers like McVeigh quote with approval the work of Japanese scholars of education like Horio and Yoneyama who also write about the power of the ministry and its generally malign influence on the education of the majority of Japanese children. Horio, who has been a very influential thinker in progressive educational politics since the 1960s, has written about how the Ministry of Education, and its conservative allies in the LDP and some local boards of education, have systematically undermined the liberal reforms of the Occupation era and tried to turn the clock back to pre-war days when the state had absolute power over education (Horio 1988, 162–65). Yoneyama, who quotes from Horio extensively, endorses the view that since 1951, academic freedom and teachers’ autonomy have been gradually suppressed by an over-mighty Ministry of Education and LDP (Yoneyama 1999, 79–83). Other studies of the politics of education in Japan have challenged this notion of an all-powerful and overbearing Ministry of Education. In this respect, political scientist Len Schoppa’s analysis of education reform in the 1970s and ‘80s has been very influential. In contrast to scholars like McVeigh, Horio and Yoneyama, he declared that he would not take a normative stance on the desirability or otherwise of the education policies he studied and instead was concerned about the nature of power and effectiveness within the educational policymaking process. He concluded that the Education Ministry was conservative but did not attach a value judgment about whether or not that was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for Japanese teachers, schoolchildren and parents. In a very negative review of Schoppa’s approach the American scholar Steven Platzer accused him of failing to understand the true aims of the education ministry and its allies.6 Platzer, who has translated Horio’s work into English, shares Horio’s ideological

6 See Steven Platzer’s review of Len Schoppa’s book (Education Reform in Japan) in the American Journal of Education 103 (November 1994).



theoretical considerations33

standpoint. This criticism raises the twin issues of how best to study the Ministry of Education and what methods are best for determining what is mere rhetoric and what is the actual agenda of the ministry. It is the contention of this book that Schoppa was right to use the methods of political science in order to analyse the aims and behaviour of a large government bureaucracy like the MOE, although this analysis can be improved upon in the case of certain policy areas by the use of institutional theory taken from that grey area where the disciplines of sociology and political science overlap. Approaches that utilise institutional theory help – in the words of Julian Dierkes – by ‘refuting claims that immobility in policymaking obtains only under conditions of political stalemate’ (Dierkes 2005, 272). In two more areas the approach of Schoppa can also be usefully expanded upon: the area of policy implementation (at the genba) and the area of discourse analysis (how policies are framed by the media and academic elites). Schoppa, in the tradition of orthodox political science and building on the work of Campbell and Pempel, showed how it is more useful to see the MOE as one actor within the policymaking process, rather than an institution that is always dominant and all-controlling. Schoppa found that ‘[t]he predominant “attitude” of the MOE, across the whole range of policy issues, has been its desire to maintain existing practices and policies’ (Schoppa 1991, 93). He calls this ‘bureaucratic conservatism’ and argues that it is caused by two main factors. Firstly, the MOE has developed an attachment to the status quo over its many years of supervising the existing education system. Secondly, Schoppa argues that MOE bureaucrats, because they deal on a daily basis with educational administrators closer to the ‘actual site’ (genba) at which education is being delivered, are more inclined to resist measures that will cause disruption in schools (Schoppa 1991, 94). Dierkes adds to these two factors a third: nostalgia among MOE bureaucrats for the pre-1945 powers enjoyed by the ministry. He notes that ‘seniority promotion implies that Monbushō [MOE] was governed into the 1970s by bureaucrats who were socialized into the bureaucratic habitus before 1945’, and then ‘self-selection brought cohorts of relatively conservative bureaucrats into the post-war Ministry who were particularly susceptible to some of the nostalgia among older bureaucrats.’7 It can be 7 Dierkes (2005, 124). This view of the continuities of the types of people who become MOE bureaucrats is not shared by all scholars. Stockwin, for example writes that the MOE has become ‘more moderate in recent years reflecting the growing pluralism and sophistication of the populace’ (Stockwin 2008, 151).

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added that self-selection combined with seniority promotion (which means that one will be promoted automatically so long as one does not cause trouble or make waves) will result in a workforce that are risk averse. The practice of following precedent and arriving at decisions through consensus are also likely to nurture a risk-averse outlook among bureaucrats.8 Elsewhere I have criticised Schoppa’s explanation of bureaucratic behaviour as being based on the historical experiences of the main individuals within the bureaucracy, and which will, by necessity, vary over time with the turnover of personnel (Aspinall 2001, chapter 4). I argued that this could be improved upon by stressing the importance of the place the bureaucracy occupies in the policymaking process and then analysing the actions of that bureaucracy from the point of view of ‘bureaucratic rationality’, that is, an assumption that bureaucrats will follow courses of action that rationally advance their own organisation’s strategic interests (Aspinall 2001, 98–110). The foremost proponent of this theory is Katō Junko, who applied ‘bureaucratic rationality’ to the case of the Ministry of Finance’s campaign to introduce a very unpopular Consumption Tax during the 1970s and 1980s (Kato 1994). Bureaucrats in Japan often claim political neutrality and a devotion to serving the interests of the nation. Katō, however, argues that ‘a bureaucratic policy decision is closely related to organisational interests in a certain political context, and is thus in no way based on any “objective” standard like “effectiveness” of policies or maximisation of a simple utility function’ (Kato 1994, 8). Bureaucrats propose policies that make the promotion of their organisational influence compatible with technocratic considerations. In this way, they can always claim that they are selflessly promoting the interests of the nation, while at the same time looking after their own organisational interests. During the period of the economic miracle, the general rise in living standards of the whole population meant that even if this theory of bureaucratic 8 In his memoir Straitjacket Society, former MOHW bureaucrat Miyamoto Masao relates the tale of how he became so frustrated by the insistence that precedent always be followed that he set fire to all the old documents he had at his desk. He hoped this would allow decisions to be made without having to refer to what was done in the past. Although he made his superiors very angry he was still ‘proud of having burned those papers. After all, in so doing I gave many people the gift of being able to make their own judgements without concern for precedent – a real rarity in a bureaucracy’ (Miyamoto 1995: 88–89). Miyamoto also apparently enjoyed driving his Porsche around the busy streets of Tokyo in a rather adventurous fashion. In other words he was the opposite of the risk-averse personality that normally works in a ministry. Not surprisingly he was only at the ministry – in the capacity of a medical expert – for three years.



theoretical considerations35

self-interest were true, it was not turned into a major political issue. With the slowing down of economic growth, however, this began to change, and bureaucrats started to come under intense scrutiny. Katō’s theory, not being one based mainly on historical factors, is designed to apply to the bureaucracy under any historical epoch. Conclusion This chapter has looked at education policymaking at the national level in an era of increasing globalisation and ‘individualisation’. Actors within national policymaking regimes will respond in different ways to the challenges and opportunities of global change. In the field of education, many national ministries or departments of education, Japan’s included, have responded to global league tables (like PISA) by stressing the need to improve ‘quality’ and ‘performance’. Japan’s perceived decline in the global rankings since 2003 prompted criticism of reforms that had been aimed at making schooling less stressful. But in the middle of a prolonged and painful recession, Japanese bureaucrats struggled to come up with effective policies that involved more than just going back to conservative ideals of discipline, hard work and patriotism. This uncertainty and lack of direction is not surprising if contemporary Japan is placed in Beck’s ‘Phase Three’ of post-war development, that is, the phase of ‘global risk society’. Although Beck’s related theories of ‘risk society’ and ‘global risk society’ have many limitations, they do provide useful heuristic models of postindustrial society that can help our understanding of how policy is made and also how individuals respond to policy as they try to make sense of a rapidly changing world. An understanding of Japan’s place in the world, how it moved on from the ‘catch-up’ phase of industrial development that characterised the first three decades after World War II to its current state of affairs, helps us understand the confusion of bureaucrats trying to make policy for a world they do not understand. Katō’s theory of bureaucratic rationality was based upon bureaucratic experts and technocrats being able to understand what was best for their own ministry’s interests and then being able to express that in ways that matched the ‘national interest’. This theory comes up against two snags when applied to the Ministry of Education from the 1980s onwards: firstly the ministry’s lack of control over implementation, and secondly the confusion and discord within the ministry about the best direction in which to take education reform.

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The way that national policy is made in the area of international education is the subject of chapter three. This phase, of course, is only the first part of the process: national policy is worthless if it cannot be implemented in schools and other educational institutions. The ways in which teachers and students influence the implementation of policy will be examined in chapters four and five. Before moving on to that discussion, we need first to examine the historical background. The next chapter will discuss the role played by international education in helping Japan emerge from a long period of isolation into the modern world of empires and great nations. We will see how some of the problems of that period have been carried forward to the present day.

CHAPTER TWO

THE HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION POLICY FROM THE OPENING OF JAPAN TO THE 1960S This chapter will discuss the evolution of Japan’s international education policy in the century that followed the opening of Japan to the outside world in the 1850s. Much has been written about the rapid modernisation of Japan and its emergence as the first non-Western ‘Great Power’. This process required a drastic change on the part of Japan’s elites from a stance of voluntary isolation to a willingness to engage with outside nations. As well as building a modern education system, Japan’s leaders also needed to establish mechanisms quickly by which advanced knowledge from the West could be transferred to Japan and exploited. The methods used to achieve this, at the national level, the local level and in the private sector, established institutional patterns of behaviour that have lasted down to the present day. Learning from the West While Maintaining National Independence Japan’s modern education policymaking institutions came into being under the same circumstances as its other engines of national statebuilding, that is, during a period of external threat and internal turmoil. The policy of the Tokugawa regime (1603–1868) had been to keep Japan closed from contact with foreigners. Small numbers of missionaries, traders and sailors had come from Portugal, Spain, Holland and England via their Asian outposts and colonies during the sixteenth century. These ‘southern barbarians’ (so called because they arrived in Japan from the south) had been able to gain access to Japan at first but the success of the Europeans in winning Christian converts, especially in the domains of Kyushu, caused concern to the newly established Tokugawa regime. The bakufu (Shogunal government) wanted to unite the previously divided domains under one central authority in Edo, and this required all samurai and daimyo (lords of the domains) to have no greater loyalty to any overlord but the Shogun. Between 1609 and 1639 a series of decrees effectively closed Japan to contact with the outside world except for controlled trade

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that was conducted exclusively through the port of Nagasaki. This isolationist posture came to be known as sakoku or ‘closed country’ policy. By the early nineteenth century, however, the ships of the southern barbarians started to make increased unauthorised incursions into Japanese waters. They were joined by the ships of other Western nations, most notably the Russians, whose empire had now expanded across Siberia to the shores of the Pacific, and the Americans whose whalers were extending their hunting to the North Pacific and wanted to use the Japanese islands for provisioning. In response the bakufu tried to redouble its efforts at keeping the foreigners away from Japan’s shores. In 1825 the following edict was issued: All Southern Barbarians and Westerners … worship Christianity, that wicked cult prohibited in our land. Henceforth, whenever a foreign ship is sighted approaching any point on our coast, all persons on hand should fire on and drive it off. … If the foreigners force their way ashore, you may capture and incarcerate them, and if their mother ship approaches you may destroy it as circumstances dictate. (Quoted in Jansen 2000, 266)

In 1853 the Americans effectively called the bakufu’s bluff when Com­ modore Perry sailed into Edo bay and demanded that the Japanese government sign a treaty which would open more ports to trade. The clear technical superiority of Perry’s ‘black ships’ was there for all to see.1 The bakufu was humiliated and its authority was broken; it had no choice but to agree to all the US government terms. To those Japanese who wanted to preserve the status quo this proved their worst fears: the Western world now threatened the very autonomy of the Japanese nation. But from the point of view of the elite samurai who would go on to build the new Meiji state, the West also offered great opportunities. It was clear to them that if Japan could learn from the Western empires the secrets of their power, then it could protect itself from their influence. The exact nature of how Japan should learn from and copy the West was open to intense debate, but the urgent necessity for drastic action was recognised by all modernisers regardless of their own political or ideological persuasions. The arguments of those that refused to see this reality and who wanted to continue to have nothing to do with the outside world were silenced by the guns of Western warships at Kagoshima and Shimonoseki in 1863–64 where the 1 The metaphor of the ‘black ships’ is often used by commentators inside Japan and out when discussing Japan’s internationalisation if it involves unwanted, or only reluctantly accepted interference from foreigners (for example, with reference to the JET Programme; see McConnell [2000, 188]).



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complete supremacy of modern, western military technology was displayed for all to see.2 In the words of Erica Benner: However sharply they differed in their other ideological commitments, a wide cross-section of scholars, educators and policymakers and publicists can be defined as ‘national’ thinkers in at least one sense. All argued that a primary goal of modern politics should be to preserve Japan’s independence, in the minimal sense of avoiding control by foreigners. (Benner 2006, 9)

Learning the Languages of the Barbarians There was clearly no alternative to interacting more with these foreigners. This could not be done without learning their languages as quickly and efficiently as possible. Meeting this requirement posed serious practical problems for the modernisers. Due to the Tokugawa regime’s policy of sakoku, there were initially only a handful of Japanese people who could converse in any Western language, almost exclusively Dutch, and there were only a very limited number of ‘Dutch academies’ that specialised in the study of Western knowledge.3 In 1856 the Tokugawa regime set up the Bansho Shirabesho, literally the ‘Office for the Investigation of Barbarian Books’, in order to translate Western books into Japanese.4 At first this office concentrated on translating books in Dutch, especially those related to military matters. Because the ships that had forced the opening of Japan came from the USA and not from the Netherlands, English came to replace Dutch as the main language focused on at the Bansho Shirabesho. Since there were almost no Japanese people who could understand English this had to be done at first through the judicious use of English–Dutch dictionaries.5 As knowledge about the West slowly increased, it became clear that 2 The Satsuma castle town of Kagoshima was bombarded by British warships in order to force the payment of compensation for the murder of British merchant Charles Richardson in 1862 and the punishment of the Satsuma samurai who had carried out the murder (Barr 1967, 158–66). The Choshu forts guarding the straits of Shimonoseki unilaterally carried out an imperial order to expel foreigners and shelled foreign ships sailing through the straits in 1862. The gun batteries were easily destroyed by a flotilla of British, French, Dutch and American warships the following year (Jansen 2000, 303). 3 Expert knowledge of Dutch was restricted to the oranda tsuuji (Dutch interpreters), hereditary interpreter families living mostly in Nagasaki, the only port during the sakoku period that was permitted to trade with the West (Stanlaw 2004, 47). 4 See Duke (2009, 19) and Stanlaw (2004, 51). In 1862 the Shogunate dropped the reference to ‘barbarians’ and renamed the office the ‘Institute for the Investigation of Western Books’ (Yōsho Shirabesho). 5 Before 1810 there were probably no Japanese people who could speak or understand English. However, an incursion into Nagasaki harbour by a British warship in 1808 forced

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mastery of the French and German languages would also be necessary in order to learn as much as possible about European science, technology and the institutions of the modern state. This did not prevent English retaining its status as the dominant foreign language by the time the Meiji restoration got under way. This dominance is shown by the fact that in the early 1860s out of a total of approximately one hundred students enrolled in Bansho Shirabesho about eighty of them were studying books in English (Duke 2009, 19). The graduates of this elite institution went on to form Japan’s first corps of Western specialists or yōgakusha. In addition to the officially sanctioned Bansho Shirabesho there were several unofficial private initiatives to find out more about the West and spread that knowledge through Japan’s elite. One of the most influential of these was the private school Keio Shijuku (later Keio Gijuku) founded in Edo by the leading intellectual and educator Fukuzawa Yukichi in 1858. Partly due to the reputation of its founder, this school attracted young ambitious samurai men from many diverse parts of Tokugawa Japan. Many of them went on to be leaders of the Meiji state. Fukuzawa himself had studied Western knowledge at first through the medium of Dutch and then, after learning of the power of the USA and the British Empire, he quickly taught himself English. During travels to the USA (in 1860 and 1867) and the UK (1862) Fukuzawa acquired large quantities of books in English for use in this school.6 He had to face the serious problem, however, of how to make best use of these books and the vital knowledge that was locked within them in an institution that lacked any English teachers. Due to the influence it had on subsequent English teaching, the solution that Fukuzawa came up with is worth noting. Fukuzawa himself had been brought up in the traditional sodoku method of learning that had its the Shogun to order six oranda tsuuji to learn English under the tutelage of an Englishspeaking Dutch trader at Dejima. The first English grammars were written there in 1810 and 1811, and in 1814 the first English–Japanese dictionary was compiled with 6,000 entries. The first native-speaker English teacher the Japanese ever had was probably the American adventurer Ranald MacDonald who persuaded a whaling ship to take him to just off the coast of Hokkaido in 1848 and set him adrift in a small boat so that he could claim to be shipwrecked. For a year he helped fourteen oranda tsuuji to improve their English. Two of his students went on to act as interpreters during Commodore Perry’s second visit in 1854, and another was an interpreter for the first Japanese delegation to the USA in 1860 (Stanlaw 2004, 49–50). 6 It was Fukuzawa’s private purchase of English books that motivated the Tokugawa Shogunate to make its own first bulk order of foreign books for government-run schools. In 1867 they ordered ten tons of books from the USA, including 13,000 copies of elementary readers, grammars and mathematics books, and 2,500 copies of Webster’s Dictionary (Duke 2009, 64).



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origins in ancient China where the teacher reads a passage and then the students repeat it in unison. This was the method that dominated schools in pre-Meiji Japan and so it was understandable that Fukuzawa, who was unfamiliar with teaching methodology in the West, adapted it for use in the study of English and other European languages. Historian of Japanese education, Benjamin Duke, describes the programme of study at Keio Gijuku which lasted for fifteen months in total: After the first three months practicing the ABCs with English pronunciation drills, the students then began the study of subject matter through a mixture of Japanese and English textbooks. … Following the ancient approach to learning in China, the teacher read aloud a passage and the student repeated it until the material was memorized, often without understanding the meaning. The second stage involved the teacher explaining the meaning of each sentence. (Duke 2009, 23)

The irony of this situation, wherein Japan’s most famous proponent of modernisation and learning from the West is forced to use traditional methods of teaching derived from practices in classical China, is not lost on Duke: ‘The subject matter in his classroom had been drastically transformed from Confucian studies to modern western studies. But the method of teaching and learning based on repetition and rote memorization had not.’ Because of the influence and importance of Keio Gijuku and its founder, graduates went on to play leading roles in the modernisation of late nineteenth-century Japan. The lack of many alternative methods of learning Western languages meant that some graduates went on to become teachers at schools all over Japan, taking the Keio method of teaching and learning English with them (Duke 2009, 24). This helped to institutionalise the practice of studying English through a close analysis of written texts. During the opening of Japan, the people best placed to learn foreign languages to an advanced level were the small number of samurai who actually had the opportunity to study in Western countries. During the 1860s the bakufu modified slightly its policy of strict isolation and sent a few students to the West to study military matters, mostly connected to the bakufu’s desire to build a modern navy that could stand up to the power of the ‘black ships’. Although they were forbidden to do so, the daimyo of the Chōshū and Satsuma domains also clandestinely sent a select few to study in the West (Cobbing 1998; 2000). Although small in number, these students went on to have a great impact on the future direction of Japan. To cite just two examples, Ito Hirobumi, one of the ‘Chōshū five’, became the first prime minister of Japan under the Meiji constitution, and Mori Arinori, one of the Satsuma students, went on to become

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Meiji Japan’s first ambassador to the United States and later its first Minister of Education. The only known case of a non-samurai travelling abroad, learning a foreign language and then using that knowledge to help Japan’s opening to the world is the remarkable story of John Manjiro, a shipwrecked fisherman who was rescued and then taken by ship to the United States where he learned English (Benfrey 2003, chapter 1). In 1851 he took the risk of returning to Japan where his value as an interpreter was recognised and he was made a hatamoto (a samurai in direct service to the Shogun). At the time of the Meiji restoration, therefore, only a few young men (and a handful of women) who had the opportunity to travel abroad or to attend elite schools had any access to Western languages. The vast majority of the population was kept in total ignorance of foreign languages, and if they did come into contact with foreigners they had to make do as best they could. At the expanding foreign settlements at Nagasaki and Yokohama, traders, shopkeepers and entertainment workers had to communicate in order to do business. This led to the development of a kind of pidginised version of Japanese English that became known as the ‘Yokohama Dialect’ (Stanlaw 2004, 56–59). This dialect did not survive the development of an official foreign language curriculum and died out in the twentieth century. The Creation of the Ministry of Education and a National Education System After the Meiji Restoration in 1868 had swept away the Tokugawa regime, urgent action was taken to set up the institutions necessary for a modern state. The Gakkō Torishirabe Goyōgakari (the Committee to Investigate Schools) was established to prepare for a new national education system. Many of the elite samurai who made up this committee had experience of or connections with the West. In effect this committee served as a preparatory office for the Ministry of Education (MOE) since many of its members became officials of the ministry when it opened in 1871. The architects of the MOE took as their model the French system of educational administration founded by Napoleon, which at that time was the only Western education system of a large state that placed control of the nation’s schools in the hands of one central body. Ambitious plans for the creation of a modern unified education system, however, were quickly brought down to earth by a negative response from the new Ministry of Finance to the MOE’s first budget proposal (Duke 2009, 71). This meant that while



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regulations and curricula for the new schools would be decided in Tokyo, the entire burden of paying for buildings, books and teachers would be borne by local communities. The first blueprint for a national schools system, the Fundamental Code or Gakusei was released by the MOE in the following year. This is now remembered as the starting point of modern Japan’s national education system, but, in the words of historian Brian Platt, it could have merely turned out as ‘an ambitious, but unrealized statement of intent by the new government’ if it had not been for the constructive response of local elites all over the country (Platt 2004, 183). Building on the strong foundations of the existing pre-modern network of schools (Dore 1965), local groups of samurai and elite commoners mostly proved to be eager to join in a campaign for public service. Based on a study of Nagano and Chikuma (a separate prefecture for a short time before being absorbed into Nagano prefecture), Platt arrives at the following conclusion: Ironically, as local activists worked through the practical aspects of their movement – establishing schools, encouraging attendance, collecting funds, disseminating curricular regulations – they drove the process of bureaucratization and administrative centralization from below. In doing so however, they were able to influence the formation of central policy on education and set in motion a dynamic in which localities could negotiate the terms of their integration into the state. (Platt 2004, 184)

The success of Meiji modernisation in education as in other areas was built upon this support from local elites all over Japan, and yet their contribution can often be overlooked by an overemphasis on central organs of the state like the Ministry of Education. It is important to note that the very foundation of the MOE as a national policymaking body was only made possible due to the cooperation of local elites. This fact helps to explain the caution with which the MOE often approached any policy innovation. If at all possible it would try to build (or follow) a consensus in the localities when making policy, and it would always do its best to avoid actions that would cause disruption at the local level. The Development of Early International Education Policy The localities were able to provide much of the infrastructure of the new education system as well as much of its human resources. However, due to the isolationist policies that preceded Meiji, there was one vital area where they were entirely dependent on help from the central government: the teaching of European languages. In 1873, the MOE responded to this need

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by issuing a plan entitled ‘Rules on Foreign Language Schools’, in which seven foreign language schools with foreign instructors would be established.7 Unfortunately, due to lack of funding all of these schools were closed down by 1877 with the sole exception of the Tokyo Foreign Language School. A chronic shortage of funds hampered the development of many nascent education programmes during the period of the Meiji reforms, not only the language schools mentioned above. Two other government schemes for learning from the West, however, were given generous amounts of funding. One was the study-abroad programme, in which 174 students were sent abroad at the expense of the new Meiji government between 1868 and 1870 alone (Marshall 1994, 36). This programme had to overcome objections that were not confined to financial considerations. Many in the government were worried that if young Japanese people spent too long abroad they might succumb to too much Westernisation and return to Japan effectively as agents of foreign influence. To ameliorate these objections somewhat, new regulations introduced in 1868 included a specific prohibition against conversion to foreign religions. This was almost certainly an effort to reassure the traditionalists that the government was aware of the danger of Japanese people being ‘infected with Christianity’ when abroad, and that something was being done to guard against this risk (Marshall 1994, 37). Financial and other problems not withstanding, by 1880 over 900 young people had studied abroad (Marshall 1994, 38). Almost all of them entered government service on their return to Japan, either in the central bureaucracy or in the newly established Tokyo University. The second expensive but unavoidable central government programme to improve knowledge about the West was the logical flip side to the studyabroad programme discussed above: it was the inviting to Japan of thousands of Western scholars, scientists and other experts. These visiting scholars were known as oyatori gaikokujin and provided expertise in areas like law, economics, military technology, natural science, mathematics, engineering and even Western art and music. The foreign experts were well paid, but most contracts lasted only three years, and in principle foreigners would only be used until Japanese experts had been adequately trained. McConnell sums up the effectiveness of the programme: 7 In the event, six language Schools were actually established. Five schools were set up in Aichi, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Osaka and Tokyo, and a school was also established within the Sapporo School of Agriculture.



the history of international education policy45 While this treatment [having limits put on their contracts] clearly frustrated some of the oyatori themselves, it provides important insights into how Japanese approach learning from abroad. Japan’s intense preoccupation with borrowing seems to be matched only by its drive for mastering what has been appropriated. In the early Meiji period the heavy reliance on cultural adoption and foreign teachers and technicians did not lead to permanent dependence on foreign sources. A combination of humility and willingness to be placed in the position of learner, on the one hand, and national pride and purpose, on the other, proved astonishingly effective in the push for modernization. (McConnell 2000, 12)

A genuine fear of colonisation, whether by direct occupation or by more subtle permeation of foreign ideas, informed the modernisation policies of the early Meiji regime, and this helps to explain the tight controls that were placed on foreigners coming into Japan, or Japanese going out. With hindsight we can concur with McConnell that the Meiji approach to modernisation was ‘astonishingly effective’ in bringing practical skills and know-how from the West while keeping the Japanese population safe from more pernicious foreign influences. This could only be achieved, however, by keeping almost all contact with the West at the elite level. Unless they lived in one of the few harbour towns that hosted Western ships (where communication was often in pidgin anyway), ordinary Japanese people remained isolated from contact with foreigners, and therefore had no opportunity to develop the linguistic skills necessary for communication with non-Japanese. Western languages were also not on the curriculum of the new elementary schools which made up the entire formal education of the majority of non-elite Japanese. Protecting Japanese People from Foreign Influences From the point of view of conservatives, the creation of an elementary curriculum for the needs of a modern nation was fraught with dangers whether or not it included formal foreign language study. As the institutions of the Meiji state became more established and secure, the fear of colonisation by a Western power receded. Christianity became less of a danger compared to secular doctrines imported from abroad like individualism, liberalism and humanitarianism which could potentially undermine the authority of the emperor and his state (Lincicome 2009, 11–12). In 1879 Motoda Eifu, a Confucian scholar and the Meiji emperor’s personal tutor, wrote on behalf of the emperor about concerns over the new elementary curriculum that followed the emperor’s visit to some schools in the Tōkai and Hokuriku regions during the previous year:

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chapter two While making a tour of schools and closely observing the pupils studying last autumn, it was noted that farmers’ and merchants’ sons were advocating high-sounding ideas and empty theories and that many of the commonly used foreign words could not be translated into our own language. Such people would not be able to carry on their own occupations … and with their high-sounding ideas they would make useless civil servants. Moreover, many of them brag about their knowledge, slight their elders and disturb prefectural officers. All these evil effects come from an education that is off its proper course. It is hoped, therefore, that the educational system will be less high flown and more practical. (Quoted in de Barry, Gluck and Tiedemann 2006, 97)

Motoda charged that Western knowledge could never substitute for tradition because it was devoid of ethical principles (Marshall 1994, 55). He and his ideological allies led what Tokyo University professor of educational thought, Horio Teruhisa, calls a ‘Confucian counter-attack’ (Horio 1988, 46) against the promoters of Western ideas. Historians point to the Imperial Rescript of Education of 1890 and its strongly Confucian language of filial piety as proof of the success of this counter-attack. This version of Confucian thinking was popular with many in the elite because it connected teachings on individual ethics with the encouragement of loyalty to the imperial state. While it is true that the leaders of the Meiji state tried to separate the study of Western science and technology from the study of Western politics and morals, they soon found that a complete separation was impossible to achieve. At the level of practical school policy, the approach to foreign people and their languages in Meiji Japan was often pragmatic. The government championed a curriculum devoted to ‘practical learning’ (jitsugaku) in subjects like the physical sciences. Foreign people had knowledge that Japan needed if it was going to modernise successfully, and so at the elite level Japanese administrators, scientists, engineers and doctors interacted with experts from Europe and the USA. As Marshall succinctly puts it, ‘the Japanese elite had committed itself to eclectic borrowing from abroad while preserving cultural traits deemed essential’ (Marshall 1994, 88). He goes on to quote Tokyo University philosophy professor Inoue Tetsurō, who made the following contribution to the debate concerning whether or not to replace the writing system of Japanese with a Western script: Script accompanies the development of the human mind and has a close connection with the history of the development of a people’s spirit. It is therefore different from other foreign imports such as railways and steamships. Suddenly to abolish the script which has grown along with the development of ideas since our ancestors’ times and replace it with the entirely



the history of international education policy47 different rōmaji would be to destroy the inner foundation stone of the nation and do violence to the people’s feelings. (Quoted in Marshall 1994, 88)

The view expressed here is that foreign languages are means to an end, but they need to be handled with care if they are not to undermine or endanger the national language, which acts as ‘the inner foundation stone of the nation’. Sociolinguist Suzuki Takao argues that, as a result of the priorities of Meiji modernisation, ‘it is no exaggeration to say that the sole priority of foreign language education in institutions of higher education was the reading of original texts [in European languages]’ (Suzuki 1999, 102). Knowledge was taken from foreign sources, translated into Japanese and then applied to the particular needs of national modernisation. Foreignlanguage departments in the first universities were created in order to aid this process. This one-way process of knowledge transfer continued well into the twentieth century. Imperialism Internationalism and International Education between the Wars Victories in the Sino-Japanese war (1894–95) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) helped raise the new Japanese state to Great Power status. However, Japan was still looked down upon by Europeans and Americans. This attitude could be seen in the unequal treaties forced on Japan and in US intervention, after Japan’s defeat of Russia, in the Treaty of Portsmouth, which took away some of Japan’s conquests in Manchuria. There was also the refusal of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference to agree to add a clause sponsored by Japan to the League of Nations Covenant upholding ‘the principle of the equality of nations and the just treatment of their nationals’. This clause was blocked by Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes, who was afraid it would interfere with his country’s whites-only immigration policy. The British and French did not intervene to override Hughes’s veto since racism against Africans and Asians was a fundamental aspect of their imperial outlook. It should not be forgotten, therefore, that modern Japan’s first international education policies had to be formulated in a global environment where Western racism towards Asians had to be taken as given. With hindsight we now know that Japan’s efforts to stand up to the Western imperial powers led to confrontation, conflict and finally the horrors of total war. At home, Japan’s imperial effort was supported by education policies that were characterised as emphasising total loyalty to the emperor and fear of

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foreigners. However, this monolithic narrative hides from view alternative discourses on education and Japan’s place in the world. We will not consider here anarchist, revolutionary socialist and communist alternative discourses since they were crushed by the state before they could achieve any influence in the school system or the policymaking apparatus.8 Instead we will consider some ideas and policies put forward that can be classified as liberal internationalist, that is, those policies that adhered to the principle of the equality of nations and their citizens that the Japanese delegation had tried to have accepted in Paris. Educational discourses that related to international matters cannot be isolated from political trends and events at national and global level. Historian Ian Nish writes about a small group of Japanese politicians and diplomats who can be described as ‘internationalists’, which had ‘greater influence than its actual numbers would have warranted’ during the 1920s (Nish 2000, 8). In spite of the racist snub over the equality clause, they believed that Japan should use the League of Nations to work for ‘the maintenance of peaceful relations with the rest of the world’. Those are the words of Nitobe Inazō, who served as one of the Under-SecretariesGeneral of the League upon its establishment in Geneva in 1920. Nitobe can be regarded as a paragon of the elite internationalism that existed in Japan in the early twentieth century.9 Born into a samurai family in Morioka in 1862, he was baptized as a Christian in 1877. He studied in Sapporo Agricultural College, Tokyo Imperial University and John Hopkins University before going to Halle University in Germany where he obtained a doctorate in agricultural economics (see Takeda Cho 1989). While in Baltimore he became a member of the Society of Friends (the Quakers), and there can be no question about the sincerity of his desire for Japan’s peaceful relations with other world powers and its contribution to a stable international order. In addition to his service in the League of Nations, Nitobe’s career also included work as a colonial administrator in Taiwan, headmaster of the elite first higher school in Tokyo, professor of colonial policy in Tokyo Imperial University and the first president of Tokyo Women’s Christian University. Sadly for Nitobe and his vision of peaceful

8 New teachers were shielded from these ‘dangerous’ ideas by a combination of state censorship and rigorous control of the teacher-training curriculum in the newly created system of normal schools. After the passing of the Peace Preservation Law in 1925, teachers with radical ideas could also be arrested (Marshall 1994, 116). 9 As a mark of the esteem in which he was held in post-war Japan, Nitobe’s portrait appeared on the ¥5000 banknote from 1984 until 2004.



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international relations, officers in Japan’s Kwantung army stationed in Manchuria staged a bombing of the South Manchuria Railway on 18 September 1931 and used this as a pretext to occupy most of the towns of central and southern Manchuria. Nish describes this as ‘a severe jolt from which [Nitobe] never recovered’ (2000, 9). The incident paved the way for the complete occupation of Manchuria followed by more incursions into northern China. It destroyed the idealistic hopes of Nitobe and other internationalists. Nitobe’s views were shared by liberal internationally-minded educators in many countries although they often struggled to have their voices heard. Some of them assembled at the first World Conference on Education held in San Francisco in the summer of 1923. Fifty nations were represented at the conference, among them Japan. The International Education Society of Japan (Kokusai Kyōiku Kyōkai), established the previous year, played an active part and one of its leaders, Sawayanagi Masatarō, emerged from this conference as ‘the chief spokesperson for international education in Japan’ (Lincicome 2009, 65). He went on to promote peace, humanitarianism and internationalism at other international events and conferences until his sudden death in 1927 (see Mizuuchi 1989). Given subsequent events, some historians have looked on the liberal international activities of Sawayanagi as mere window dressing, attempts to cover what the Japanese state was really up to. Historian Mark Lincicome, however, mounts a convincing defence of Sawayanagi by analyzing the sometimes subtle revisions he made to a series of middle school ethics textbooks that he authored between 1909 and 1923.10 Lincicome concludes that the internationalist message of these books echoed the speeches and papers delivered by Sawayanagi to an international audience. So the charge that Sawayanagi was giving one message to the outside world and a different one to Japanese schoolchildren is refuted. In his recent book, Lincicome coined a new phrase to describe Japan’s official doctrine at the time of aggressive imperialist expansion: ‘Japanese imperial internationalism’. This doctrine was not a total break from its liberal predecessor and in some ways resembled the doctrines of ‘liberal’ powers like Britain and America. Like them it advocated a program of educational and cultural enlightenment, designed by the most advanced

10 Sawayanagi authored a series of textbooks called Middle School Ethics (Chūgaku shūshinsho) that went through four major revisions and nine printings between 1909 and 1923.

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countries and imposed upon the least advanced. It parted company with the West, however, in rejecting notions of international law in favour of Japan’s own divinely sanctioned ‘Imperial Way’. The leading Japanese internationalist educators mentioned above modified their views according to the new doctrine. Lincicome, however, rejects the view that this amounted to a dramatic ‘conversion’ (tenkō) from liberalism to fascism. Instead, he argues that contradictions between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘imperialist’ parts of their thought had always been there. During the Taishō democracy period they may had argued against excessive militarism and statism, but they never challenged the notion that sovereignty rested with the emperor. Once the Asia–Pacific War was underway they argued that the war was a historic necessity that could achieve the aims that they had lobbied for, without success, during the brief peace that followed World War I. They blamed the racist and imperialist Western powers for the failure of that peace. At a time of national emergency they supported their nation’s war effort in the same way that liberals in the West did. Harold Palmer and an Effort to Professionalise English Language Teaching in Japan In spite of the vital role of foreign languages in knowledge transfer from the West to Japan, one of the areas of professional expertise the Meiji oligarchs did not turn to the West for help with during the early years of modernisation was professional foreign language education. This was not because expertise and experience were unavailable. By 1900 most academic secondary schools in the West offered courses in one or more modern European language as well as ‘the classics’ of Latin and ancient Greek. Initially schools had taught these languages mostly as academic subjects forming part of the preparation of cultured ‘gentlemen’. The second half of the nineteenth century, however saw a growing emphasis on language learning in schools for utilitarian purposes (Howatt 1984, 129– 30). In spite of this, almost none of the oyatori gaikokujin brought over during the Meiji period had any expertise in language teaching per se. They communicated with Japanese students through interpreters where they were available and through a combination of persistence, improvisation and the use of dictionaries and gestures where they were not. In 1922, Sawayanagi Masatarō made up for this earlier neglect of language teaching by inviting Harold E. Palmer, one of the world’s leading experts in this new field, to Japan where he was appointed linguistic



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advisor to the MOE.11 In 1923 Palmer was also appointed Director of a specialised Institute for Research in English Teaching (IRET), recently established by Sawayanagi. This appointment may, however, have been a deliberate attempt by MOE bureaucrats to distance the ministry from Palmer’s research and make it easier to reject or amend his proposals (Howatt 1984, 233). Palmer’s methods were ahead of their time since they called for oral drills and exercises in the classroom. The emphasis was on listening to and assimilating speech patterns, imitating them, practising them in structured conversational drills and finally composing new sentences by analogy with those learned (Moore and Lamie 1996, 76). He cowrote English Through Actions (1925) with his daughter Dorothée, who had been experimenting with her father’s oral method in a school in Osaka.12 The frustrations Palmer and his assistants experienced in trying to introduce oral communicative English activities in Japanese classrooms would have looked very familiar to a time-travelling ALT or gaikokujin kyōshi from the twenty-first century. This is historian of English language teaching A.P.R. Howatt’s judgement of why Palmer failed to make a lasting impact on classroom English teaching: [H]is enthusiasm for oral methods did not always suit the established patterns of relationships in Japanese classrooms. To work properly, oral activities require both linguistic self-confidence and a certain amount of histrionic gusto. As a native speaker, Palmer did not have to worry about the former, and as a keen amateur actor he no doubt exhibited plenty of the latter. His Japanese customers, however, preferred reading and felt that the oral method was valid only when a native speaker conducted the class. (Howatt 1984, 233)

Although Palmer stayed in Japan until 1936, he failed to have an impact on classroom English, which remained rooted in the study of written documents. As noted above, Palmer and his helpers clearly failed to overcome the obstacles presented in the culture of the Japanese classroom. The lack 11 Palmer is credited with being one of the key figures who laid the intellectual foundations for the creation of the teaching of English as a foreign language as an autonomous profession. Before going to Japan in 1922 he worked in the Department of Phonetics at University College London. Sawayanagi on a visit to England in 1921 was impressed by Palmer’s teaching and decided to invite him to Japan. The invitation would probably not have been possible, however, without the financial support of Matsukata Kojiro, a wealthy businessman who was disturbed by the commercial implications of poor standards of spoken English among his compatriots (Howatt 1984, 232). 12 This particular textbook stood the test of time and was published again in 1959 with only minor revisions.

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of motivation of the students to speak English, since it did not seem directly relevant to their daily lives, was also recognised as a serious problem (Henrichsen 1989, 124). Finally, the MOE were clearly worried about Palmer from the start in case he advocated anything too drastic or ‘upset too many important apple carts’ (Ibid.) and were content to keep him in an ‘advisory role’ in the IRET where he would have little direct influence. This is an early instance of the MOE avoiding disruption in schools and classrooms by ensuring that radical ideas about teaching were carefully contained. Rising Militarism and World War II Harold Palmer left Japan at a time when increasing militarism was having a very detrimental effect on international education in that country. Henrichsen summarises what happened in the case of English: ‘Japanese militarism and nationalism, which became strong in the 1930s and culminated in war in the Pacific had a devastating effect on the study of English by the Japanese’ (Henrichsen 1989, 124). Students who were abroad came home, English language classes were cut back in schools and nativeEnglish-speaking teachers or missionaries were repatriated or put in detention. The study of English where it was not controlled by the military became a possible sign of disloyalty. In place of international education, children were taught that their nation was threatened by the alien ideas of individualism and materialism. The 1937 Fundamentals of Our National Polity declared the following: The various ideological and social evils of present day Japan are … due to the fact that since the days of Meiji so many aspects of European and American culture, systems and learning have been imported, and that, too rapidly. (Quoted in Marshall 1994, 134)

Militarism, extreme nationalism and emperor-worship dominated the school curriculum until the defeat in 1945. These values were the polar opposites of the values of internationalism, individualism and pacifism. However, liberal values and ideas were not destroyed during the period 1931–45, they were just suppressed. When the power of the militarists was removed these ideas could once again flourish. This was as true in education as it was in other fields of public policy. In the words of Nitobe’s biographer, ‘The postwar democratic reforms in education were certainly not all imported from America, but rather reflected to a very significant degree the prewar movements in Japan in which Nitobe played a major role’ (Takeda Cho 1989, 121).



the history of international education policy53 The Post-War Occupation

Under the American Occupation, 1945–52, reforms of the education system were far-reaching. On 30 October 1945, SCAP (Supreme Command for the Allied Powers), in one of its first actions, ordered the removal of all teachers ‘known to be militaristic, ultranationalistic, or antagonistic to the objectives and policies of the Occupation’ (quoted in Duke 1973, 31). As a result almost 120,000 teachers and education officials left their jobs (Kobayashi 1978, 188). This presented a clear opportunity to the Left to organise teachers into unions, which they did with alacrity, organising 98 per cent of elementary-school teachers into unions by the end of the Occupation (Aspinall 2001, 47). The purge of right-wing teachers and the unionisation of most remaining teachers did not, however, mean an end to nationalism in Japan’s schools: it just meant a change in the nature of the dominant discourse on nationalism among educators. The militaristic ultranationalism of wartime Japan was one extreme form of Japanese nationalism. Its defeat in 1945 opened the door for those who advocated different forms of nationalism. An influential Christian Socialist, Kagawa Toyohiko, said that the aim now should be to ‘accomplish educational reform without violating the cultural pattern of Japan’ (quoted in Duke 1973, 34). The first Minister of Education after Japan’s defeat, Maeda Tamon (one of Nitobe’s former students) declared that ‘without any military power we will go forward with culture. As the truly ethical Japanese nation, we shall contribute to progress of the world as a whole’ (quoted in Saito 2011, 131). The American-written 1947 Constitution removed the Meiji Consti­ tution’s emphasis on the kokutai (nation state) and replaced it with an emphasis on the kokumin (national citizens). This people-centred nationalism also incorporated a Japanese version of pacifism which was given legal force by article nine of the Constitution, the article that forbade the use of armed conflict to settle disputes between nations. It can be convincingly argued that support for article nine came from the widelyheld notion that the Japanese people are a peaceful people because they are a homogenous ethnic nation, and always have been (McVeigh 2004, 206–7).13 Many Japanese, therefore, believed that Japan should be able to

13 This presumed connection between Japan’s homogenous society with its peaceful nature has led many commentators, including senior politicians to remark that Japan is fortunate to avoid the kind of ethnic conflict that has been seen in places like the former Yugoslavia.

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make a strong contribution to world peace precisely because it would be rebuilt as an independent nation which must preserve its unique culture. Enacted in the same year as the new Constitution, the Fundamental Law of Education (kyouiku kihon hō) also reflected the values of American liberalism and the importance of world peace. Its preamble goes as follows: Having established the Constitution of Japan, we have shown our resolution to contribute to the peace of the world and welfare of humanity by building a democratic and cultural state. The realization of this ideal shall depend fundamentally on the power of education.

Japan’s post-war experience illustrates the fact that liberal ideas of democracy, equality and pacifism do not have to be linked with an internationalist outlook at the expense of a firm defence of the independent nation. The homogenous and unique nature of Japanese society continued to be a self-evident truth for educators and policymakers regardless of their political views. As well as continuity in nation-centredness there was also institutional continuity between wartime and post-war Japan. The SCAP bureaucracy’s Civil Information and Education Section oversaw reform but for practical reasons the work of implementation was left to Japanese bureaucrats. An early American study of the problem of lack of democracy in Japan’s education system had proposed a drastic reduction in the powers of the MOE, but for practical reasons these proposals were put on the shelf and the pre-war MOE bureaucracy was maintained largely intact. During the postOccupation ‘reverse course’ the MOE and conservative allies in national and local politics attempted – and often succeeded – to reverse many of the democratic reforms of the Occupation regime in the field of education. One key area where the MOE and the unions clashed was the area of moral education. Moral education in its pre-war guise (shūshin) had been banned by the Occupation authorities, who saw it as a form of ultranationalist indoctrination. The MOE reintroduced it to the curriculum with a new name (dōtoku) in 1958, but were forced by pressure from the unions to allow teachers and schools to devise their own content for dōtoku lessons (Aspinall 2001, 40–41). Union opposition was based on a fear that the MOE were trying to use moral education as a way of returning to pre-war chauvinistic nationalism. The result in this particular fight was victory for neither side, but ideological and political conflict between Left and Right over the meaning of ‘nationalism’ and ‘democratic education’ would continue down to the present day. This struggle had clear implications for international education policymaking and implementation.



the history of international education policy55 Reform of Language Teaching Under the Occupation

The new Constitution extended compulsory education for boys and girls to the age of fifteen, and the new 6–3–3 education system introduced a uni­ form system of junior high schools (JHS) for children aged twelve to fifteen following the compulsory six years of elementary schooling (where there were no foreign languages taught) and followed by a non-compulsory  senior high school (SHS) system. The JHS curriculum required the teaching of foreign languages to all Japanese children for the first time. The task facing teachers and administrators would have been immense even without the desperate shortages that were rife in late 1940s Japan.14 Several decisions were made that were to have long-term consequences for foreign-language teaching in the decades that followed World War II. Firstly, although the designation on the course-of-study guidelines was ‘foreign languages’, in practice English was completely dominant due to the fact that America was the dominant occupying power. Secondly, in a bid to break away from pre-war elitism, all junior high schools in the new Japan were to offer identical curricula to all Japanese children, and that was to include foreign languages. The egalitarian ideals of Nikkyōso led it to insist that all children should receive the same academic curriculum (Okada 2012, 75). The MOE also wanted a uniform national curriculum, and so this powerful consensus between political rivals meant that all children for all three years of JHS had to be taught English regardless of ability or motivation. Thirdly, the pre-war system of normal schools (the official name for teacher-training institutions) was to be replaced by university education for future teachers.15 Future teachers now had to study for four years at the university level before being allowed to apply for a teaching licence. In the austere circumstances of Occupation Japan, it was impossible for any JHS language teachers or trainee teachers to travel abroad. The American soldiers and those of allied nations that made up 14 Historian John Dower in a chapter entitled ‘Kyodatsu: Exhaustion and Despair’ paints a vivid picture of the desperate poverty of Japan in the years immediately following the defeat (Dower 1999, chapter 3). 15 In practice the old normal schools were transformed into education faculties of the new national universities. Shiga Normal School, for example, became the Education Faculty of Shiga University in 1949, and following this the existing Normal School campus was modernised and expanded. This was part of a process whereby 250 institutions of higher learning were turned into 68 national universities in 1949 with at least one national university established in each of Japan’s 46 prefectures (the University of the Ryukyus could not be counted in this total until 1972 when Okinawa was returned to Japanese sovereignty, becoming the 47th prefecture).

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the occupation force provided an informal source of language practice for a while (Suzuki 1999, 102). However, the fact remains that a large body of teachers had to be trained to teach English with virtually no access to native speakers. It was unavoidable, therefore, that the post-war secondary foreign language curriculum would evolve in such a way as to promote the teaching of English as a written language. This tendency was in harmony with the pre-war traditions of language teaching and learning discussed above, and so it is unremarkable that the culture of foreign language education in the post-war secondary school classroom should emphasise the translation of foreign texts into Japanese and a highly academic analysis of the grammar of foreign languages. Textbooks, when they did start to become available, reflected this reality. There was another very serious flaw in the design of post-war foreign language education policy. The use of the US Junior High School as the model for compulsory secondary education in Japan meant that the design of the secondary curriculum was also influenced by contem­ porary American practice. Just as in the America states, the Japanese JHS timetable dedicated three or four hours per week to the subject of ‘foreign language’. However, in the case of the American school, the ‘foreign language’ would usually be Spanish, French or German – languages that are not so difficult to learn for a native English speaker compared to Japanese. The US Foreign Service Institute estimates that Spanish or French should take from 575 to 600 hours of study, while German should take about 750 hours. As noted in the introduction, the same source estimated that the time required to learn Japanese is at least 2,200 hours. Thus the modelling of the Japanese secondary school curriculum on American (and West European) systems was flawed in this very fundamental way. The design of the foreign language component of the curriculum was based upon a system that was involved in teaching (comparatively) easy languages, yet in the Japanese case the foreign languages to be taught were at the opposite end of the language learning scale in terms of difficulty. Japan was the first non-Western nation state to industrialise and become an imperial power. It was also the first non-Western nation to introduce a compulsory secondary education system for all its people. In the transferring of educational institutions and practices from the West, some elements were more problematic than others. In the case of secondary-school-level foreign language education, many difficulties were set to arise from the fact that curricula that were designed to teach ‘easy’ foreign languages in Western countries were ill suited to the teaching of ‘difficult’ foreign languages.



the history of international education policy57 American Help with English Language Teaching Reform in the 1950s and 1960s

Although it was true that ordinary Japanese schoolteachers were unable to travel abroad to learn English, efforts were made in the 1950s by some influential Americans to bring practical help to them. American philanthropist John D. Rockefeller III had an interest in Japan and had visited the country several times before World War II. In late 1950 he accompanied US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles on a trip to Occupied Japan. From his observations and discussions with Japanese leaders, he became convinced that as Japan recovered from defeat it would need to learn to communicate with the world better than it had done in the past. He became determined to help make English language education in Japan ‘more effective’ than it had been before the war (Henrichsen 1989, 23). Due to Rockefeller’s urging, William Cullen Bryant Jr, head of the American Language Center (for foreign students) of Columbia University, was sent to Japan in the autumn and winter of 1954–55 to carry out extensive research. Determined not to repeat the mistakes made by Palmer in the 1920s and 1930s, Bryant, in his report, emphasized the importance of understanding the background of the Japanese ELT situation and of going through proper channels in any attempt to modify it (Henrichsen 1989, 24). Unfortunately for the cause of English language education in Japan, Bryant’s advice was ignored by Rockefeller and the American educators who tried to introduce reform to Japan over the subsequent decade. The fruit of Rockefeller’s labours, the English Language Exploratory Committee (ELEC) held its inaugural meeting on 28 July 1956. The ‘First Meeting of the Central Committee of ELEC’ consisted of an elite group of prestigious and powerful Japanese including the Governor of the Bank of Japan and many distinguished professors. Its primary aim was ‘to change English teaching methods in Japan’ (quoted in Henrichsen 1989, 34). Experts advising ELEC recommended that Japan adopt the oral approach to language teaching that was being pioneered by Charles C. Fries at the University of Michigan (Howatt 1984, 265–69). In order to bring about this revolutionary change ELEC devoted itself to training teachers and producing educational materials for their use. Both of these strategies, however, failed to have more than a marginal impact on English language teaching in Japan. We will examine the publication of textbooks first. In 1960, ELEC published three textbooks for JHS use called New Approach to English. The MOE’s textbook screening process approved these books with some modifications that watered down the oral approach

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somewhat. However the textbook was not adopted by most Boards of Education; in 1961 the book sold only 76,000 copies, only about one percent of the potential audience. Reasons given for this disappointing result included that the books were ‘too revolutionary’ and ‘too progressive’ for most teachers to handle in 1961 (quoted in Henrichsen 1989, 44). Revisions were made in subsequent editions in an attempt to make it more userfriendly for the average JHS teacher. However, sales never advanced much beyond the 1961 figure and publication of the New Approach to English series of books was discontinued in 1972. The books did help to spread the doctrine of the oral approach in Japan and the effort was certainly not an entire failure. But the fact that the ELEC textbooks were not used by more than a tiny fraction of classroom English teachers was a major disappointment for those who were trying to promote practical communicative English teaching in Japan. The second part of ELEC’s strategy, the training of teachers, also had only limited influence on the improvement of English teaching in Japan. A series of summer programmes for schoolteachers was held starting in 1957. The intensive programme lasting fifteen days employed nativespeaker teachers using the latest methods in language teaching. The course received very favourable reviews and the number of participants grew each year until it reached its peak of 1,169 teachers in 1962. After that the numbers declined until flattening out in the late 1960s at about 400 teachers per year. Even at its peak, the programme only reached about one percent of foreign-language teachers in secondary schools in Japan (Henrichsen 1989, 46). As funding was withdrawn by American backers ELEC evolved into a commercial language-teaching enterprise. Its original revolutionary goals were quietly dropped. Henrichsen gives one of the main reasons for the failure: There was a fundamental conflict between the desire, on the part of some of ELEC’s Japanese leaders for stability and continuity and the desire on the part of the American funding organizations for innovation and change. (Henrichsen 1989, 52).

At the start both Japanese and American leaders of the ELEC programme had agreed that a slow, gradual change was desirable if lasting improvement to English language teaching in Japan were to be achieved. Events proved that the Americans and Japanese had different understandings of the notions of ‘slow’ and ‘gradual’. Critics might say that this was one more example of Japanese bureaucratic innovation where a ‘slow but sure’ approach came to mean ‘too little too late’ (Rohlen 2002, 181).



the history of international education policy59 Conclusion

Japan’s rapid modernisation in the years following the Meiji restoration would have been impossible without an ability to learn from the West. Most of the important transfer of knowledge was carried out at the elite level and involved only a small proportion of the Japanese population. One of the main functions of the few who learned foreign languages was to translate documents into Japanese. Knowledge garnered this way could be used to train engineers, doctors, sailors and soldiers. Most of the members of the elites during this period were worried to a greater or lesser extent about the dangerous influence of outside ideas on ordinary Japanese people. An education system was built which stressed loyalty to country and emperor, and efforts were made to shield the people from ideas that were considered subversive or dangerous. Some liberals like Nitobe and Sawayanagi worked hard to promote more liberal, internationalist ideals (although always within the context of the imperial nation state). Their efforts came to nothing in the 1930s due to the expansionist ambitions of the military, but their ideas did not die and found a new life during the liberal reforms of the Occupation period. The new, post-war education system included a massive expansion of English language education. English would now be taught to everybody, not just the elite. However, the pre-war practice of concentrating mainly on the study of written documents, combined with practical limitations that prevented the majority of teachers from ever getting a chance actually to speak English in an authentic situation, meant that the new English curriculum became restricted to the study of grammar and translation (yakudoku) only. Efforts were made to help introduce the new oral approach of English teaching, but in spite of the best efforts of the wouldbe reformers only about one percent of teachers and students were reached by the textbooks and training programmes provided by ELEC. English as a written language was now taught widely, but English for oral communication remained confined to a small elite, just as it had been before the war. Since the vast majority of Japanese people went about their daily lives without ever meeting a Western foreigner, their lack of ability to speak English was not regarded as a problem. Even if many people felt no need for English, the egalitarian idealism of the Left combined with a desire by the Right for a uniform national curriculum meant that everybody had to take classes in English throughout their secondaryschool years.

CHAPTER THREE

ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION POLICY MAKING AT THE NATIONAL LEVEL The Ministry of Education is well aware of the severe criticism English language education in Japan has received for many years for its failure to equip enough Japanese people with the English skills that are considered necessary for economic and political success in an increas­ingly  globalised international environment. International comparative studies including PISA have continuously ranked Japanese students  among the best in Mathematics and Science education. Similar comparisons, however, usually place Japanese students among the worst in English language aptitude.1 These results are in accord with anecdotal evidence from international meetings and conferences where it is often the Japanese participants who have the most trouble communicating with people from other nations without the help of interpreters. Japanese diplomats abroad suffer from the ‘3-S’ stereotype – silent sleeping and smiling (McConnell 2000: 38). The global dominance of English meant that by the end of the twentieth century, the decision about whether or not to prioritise the study of English language in educational curricula was one that had been effectively taken out of the hands of national governments worldwide. In the words of Sue Wright, ‘the choice of language is dictated by forces outside the control of national policymakers’ (Wright 2004, 177). This chapter will examine the failure of national policymaking adequately to address the problem of inadequate English teaching and learning in the case of Japan. We will see how, when changes in global and national circumstances demanded reform, inertia in the policymaking system proved too difficult to overcome. This chapter will focus on the great debate on English education reform which took place on the national stage in the 1970s, the SELHi reforms of the 2000s, the introduction of English into elementary schools, 1 See Asahi Evening News, 1 March 2000, for a report about comparative TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) results that continuously place Japan at or near the bottom of a list of the English language ability of Asian nations. See also Haffner et al. (2009)55–6 for more comparative data on the poor English of Japanese people compared to other Asians.

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the ‘shadow school curriculum’ dictated by entrance exams and the problematic nature of the exams themselves and the introduction of the JET programme. We will consider what these episodes tell us about the state of national policymaking with regards to English language teaching reform. English in the Official Post-War School Curriculum In the immediate post-war period, children were assumed to have no prior knowledge of English when they entered junior high school at the age of twelve. Thus the official gakushū shidō yōryō (course-of-study guidelines) for JHS began with the alphabet and some basic vocabulary. From day one English was taught as a written language, with the emphasis on understanding English words and phrases and being able to translate them into Japanese. There is a direct line between this method of education and the nineteenth-century policy of bringing knowledge from abroad into Japan and then translating it into Japanese for domestic use (Marshall 1994, chapter 2). It is also a ‘natural’ method of language study for communities of teachers and learners who have (and expect to have) almost no contact with people who are not Japanese. Senior high schools continued with this focus on the written language and the grammar–translation (yakudoku) method of foreign language instruction. The 1970s: The Great Debate on What Type of English to Teach The yakudoku method of teaching continued with little dissent until the middle 1970s. Between 1974 and 1975, however, a debate took place over the future of English language education that was to have major consequences in dividing opinion into two camps for subsequent years. Without any prompting, this debate was cited by four of my Japanese informants as being highly influential on the course of English language teaching policy (Interviews G, K, L and M). The debate was begun in April 1974, when an LDP Diet member and former diplomat called Hiraizumi Wataru submitted a report to his party that was critical of the status quo in English teaching. He pointed out that almost all young people when they leave the education system have poor skills at reading and writing English and nonexistent skills in speaking or listening (Terauchi 1995). He argued that the reasons for these low standards were lack of motivation to study, the university entrance exam system and poor teaching methodology. Hiraizumi wrote a list of proposals to remedy these problems that included making



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English an elective subject after the first year of JHS, selecting students with a talent for foreign language learning, and removing English completely from the entrance exam system. He justified this idea of selection with the belief that only about 5 per cent of the Japanese population really needed to possess practical skills in English. The difficulty of the English language for Japanese students made it necessary for this 5 per cent to focus all their attention on English and not waste their time on, for example, other foreign languages. Hiraizumi’s proposals were radical. His idea of selecting, at the age of thirteen, a small group of students who had a talent for English language learning offended two of the most important norms of learning in Japan: the belief that success at any subject or task is due to effort, not innate ability; and the egalitarian ideal that all children should study the exact same curriculum at least until the age of fifteen. Opposition to Hiraizumi’s proposals was given voice to by Professor Watanabe Shoichi of Sophia University. He argued that it was difficult for JHS teachers to judge students’ potential language-learning ability. He agreed with Hiraizumi that English was of no practical use in the daily lives of the majority of Japanese people (something self-evident to anybody in Japan in the 1970s), but used this fact to argue for the teaching of English outside school, for example on study trips abroad. He argued that all Japanese children should be taught a background knowledge of English, in the traditional yakudoku way. Students who wanted to master practical English or advanced English would do so in the upper stages of the education system (post-eighteen) or outside the education system all together. He shared with many Japanese educators the belief that the study of the written language in early secondary years could later be built on with communicative strategies and practical skills if necessary. It should be noted here that Watanabe was not qualified in applied linguistics or a related field, and his views were not based on scientific research on foreign language learning. The debate between Hiraizumi and Watanabe was to have a lasting impact on the theoretical debate over the optimum way English should be taught in Japan. In terms of practical impact, however, it was not an even struggle. Watanabe’s views chimed not only with most education bureaucrats and members of the LDP ‘education tribe’, they also suited the ethos of the school system and fitted very well with the training most English teachers had received (this is further discussed in the next chapter). In other words Watanabe was providing a rationale for the continuance of the existing system. As we have already seen (chapter 1 in this book) theories of bureaucratic inertia as well as risk avoidance help explain how a

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system, once it is set up, tends to continue on a path that is most comfortable and comprehensible for the members of that system. Pupils continued to share a common curriculum with an almost total absence of selection or ability-grouping, and teachers continued to teach English they way that they had been taught it, and the way that best fitted the expectations of pupils and parents. Another way in which Watanabe’s view of English teaching has prevailed by default is the way in which those individuals who did want to acquire practical skills in the English language were forced to go outside of the mainstream public education system. The 1980s and 1990s: The Need for Better Communication The new course-of-study guidelines of 1989 included a section on Communicative English. This included an optional subject of English for Debate. National policymakers included this subject after criticism from many sources that Japanese people and institutions were punching below their weight given the great wealth that Japan had accumulated by this time. The inclusion of this topic in the 1989 guidelines was mostly for cosmetic purposes, although it may have been hoped that a small number of institutions might have been able to make something of it. The cosmetic nature of this reform is shown by the absence of debating skills from the kokugo (Japanese language for native speakers) study guidelines from the same period. As can be confirmed by anyone who has taught debate in secondary school, students who have no experience or training in debating in their own language will have almost no chance of mastering those skills in a difficult foreign language. It was hardly surprising therefore that almost no schools opted for this subject. Instead, most secondary schools opted for improving listening skills. The increased use of universities of listening exams in the 1990s gave added impetus to this trend. Once again, it was the nature of the entrance exams that gave most motivation to innovation in secondary-school English teaching, not changes to the official curriculum. The 2000s: The New Action Plan and the Selhi Experiment By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the stubborn refusal of Japan’s economy to emerge from the doldrums, combined with the intensification of economic globalisation made it increasingly difficult for critics to argue that Japan did not need more people with communicative



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competence in foreign languages, especially English. In spite of acrossthe-board cuts in government spending brought about by Japan’s increasing fiscal crisis, the Ministry of Education was able to secure increased budgets for programmes designed to improve practical English language skills. In 2003 it published an ambitious ‘Action Plan to Cultivate “Japanese with English Abilities” ’. The plan had the following goals: On graduation from a junior high school, students can conduct basic communication with regard to areas such as greeting, responses, or topics relating to daily life. (Graduates should be at the third level of Eiken.)  On graduation from a senior high school, students can conduct normal communication with regard to topics, for example relating to daily life. (Graduates should be at the second level of Eiken.) (MEXT 2003, 1)

These are extremely ambitious goals. Some boards of education were already using the Eiken as a school-leaving exam, and in the year before the plan was published the results were as follows: Table 1. Pass Rates for JHS and SHS Students Taking the Eiken Test, 2002 Eiken level 3

Eiken level pre-2

Eiken level 2

JHS taking test JHS passing  % pass rate JHS

500,053 267,320 53%

115,739 40,145 35%

14,745 2,945 20%

SHS taking test SHS passing  % pass rate  SHS

188,587 68,286 36%

399,935 118,709 30%

222,467 43,385 20%

Source: Nippon Eigo Kentei Kyōkai (2003)

From this chart it can be seen that the best pass-rate is for JHS students taking level 3, but even this result if only just above half, implying that MEXT must do something to improve English language standards for almost half the JHS students in the country. At SHS level, where there is more diversity, the picture is worse with a pass-rate of only one-fifth for the level that the ministry says must be reached by all students. MEXT has not published any research that would indicate the Eiken exam to be a suitable exam for evaluating the English language abilities of JHS and SHS students. It is highly likely that, as Hato Yumi suggests, the

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ministry was rushed before it was ready into devising a national plan that had clear targets: [It looks like] MEXT’s first priority in forming the Action Plan was to respond to the Government’s ‘Basic Policies for Economic and Fiscal Management and Structural Reform 2002’ which explicitly required MEXT to establish by the end of the 2002 fiscal year an action plan for improving English education. Thus the injudicious reliance on readily available external tests reflects the makeshift nature of the educational plan that was drawn up as part of economic policy. (Hato 2005, 37)

This approach to education reform – driven by economic imperatives, and imposing standard benchmarks for student achievements in different subjects – fits in with the ‘New Public Management’ approach to the provision of education and other public services that rose to prominence in Japan, the USA, the UK and other countries in the 1990s (Nitta 2008, 11–13). The disconnect between the stated goals of the Action Plan and the present reality of student performance, combined with an absence of concrete plans to overcome some of the serious obstacles (such as the lack of time) that stand in the way of serious improvement of English teaching and learning, mark out the Plan as a political or ideological document rather than a genuine effort to improve performances. The Action Plan has been criticised because it ‘sets an identical goal for … students who are studying English under such varied conditions’ (Hato 2005, 40). However, this very unrealistic plan was accompanied by much more pragmatic programmes to improve English teaching in certain parts of the school system. The Super English Language High School (SELHi) programme organised and sponsored by MEXT stands as an example of what can be achieved by practical change as well as the problems that lie in wait for those trying to improve communicative language teaching. The plan established 161 such schools (111 public and 50 private). There was an initial three-year pilot programme started in 2002 that involved eighteen schools (fifteen public and three private). These schools were given extra resources from MEXT in return for conducting action research into the improvements in English teaching that they were undertaking. Most of these schools decided to focus their efforts on a select group of students. This means that some students are allowed to follow a special course where more time is devoted to English language study. Private high schools have always been able to do this. It is only through policies of ‘flexibilisation’ introduced during the 1990s that public high schools have been allowed to follow suit (Cave 2001). However, a backlash against these reforms fuelled by fears that academic standards are falling has brought



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about a policy U-turn (Tsuneyoshi 2004b). A return to rigid high school curricula represents an obstacle to efforts to improve English language teaching in public schools. Speaking at a 2007 JACET conference, Professor Ozasa Toshiaki rejected this return to ‘single track’ education and called for the introduction of a ‘multiple track’ system which would include English and which would allow for differing abilities and motivations among the students (Daily Yomiuri, 17 September 2007). It is a tribute to the overwhelming inertia of the public school system that experts in 2007 were still calling for the kinds of changes advocated by Hiraizumi Wataru in 1974, and doing so without much success. In Japan as elsewhere, the private sector is available for those dissatisfied with public provision. Parents who want their children to develop good English skill can choose private high schools that specialise in this area if they can afford it. Mejiro Gakuen High School in Tokyo is an example of a successful English language programme offered by a private high school. Students who take the special English course at this school do nine hours of English per week in their first year, ten hours in their second, and twelve hours in their third. Students who take this course must also participate on a twelve-day study tour in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK, that includes an eight-day home stay. As well as the authentic experience of an English-speaking country, students on this kind of programme are receiving roughly double the amount of classroom hours devoted to English compared to students at regular high schools. Clearly, public schools cannot include expensive foreign trips as part of the required language programme. Those high schools that offer special courses in English language allow selected students who take those courses to concentrate on English and reduce the number of class hours spent on other subjects such as mathematics and science. This practice overcomes the twin obstacles of mixedability classes and shortage of time spent on the task that bedevil English language programmes at most high schools. It is also a practice that comes up against the egalitarian norm that is one of the common characteristics of learning in Japan. For that reason schools that have adopted this kind of programme have encountered problems in breaking with tradition. For example the principal of Kanto International High School described how there was some resentment from teachers and staff in the school against those who were involved in the special English language programme.2 2 Japan Association for Language Teaching Annual Conference, Nara, 20 November 2004.

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In this case the process of breaking with long-established norms about the ‘correct’ approach to learning was a painful one, but one that was successfully achieved. This kind of battle will have to be fought and won by more schools if English teaching is to be improved across the nation. One of the biggest problems with the existing curricula in all public junior high schools and most senior high schools is the lack of class time devoted to English (Hato 2005). It can be anticipated that this process of change in turn, if successful, could play a part in undermining the egalitarian norm as a national characteristic of education in Japan. This underlines the interconnectedness of education and social values that exists in every society. Secondary School English Textbooks Teachers in Japan are legally obliged to use approved textbooks in their classrooms (although they are also free to add their own supplementary materials). The content and structure of textbooks therefore have an important influence on English language lessons, as they do for all other subjects. Unlike some other OECD countries where new technology, for example smart whiteboards, have been placed at the disposal of many schoolteachers, teachers in Japan mostly are still limited to a blackboard and the textbook. New gakushū shidō yōryō guidelines are laid down by the Ministry of Education every ten years. Textbooks for use in state schools have to be drawn up in compliance with these guidelines and are therefore also rewritten every ten years. At least five different sets of textbooks for JHS and as many as thirty for SHS by different publishers are approved for each academic subject and then local boards of education are free to choose which one their schools will use. There are various ways in which boards of education select textbooks but there is evidence that the role of teachers in making these decisions has been reduced since 2001.3 In the case of JHS, textbooks are purchased by the local authority and given to the students. In the case of SHS, students are told which books to buy and they must purchase them themselves. In both cases, therefore, books need to be inexpensive, and this limits them in their size and design. In the case of English language texts, the yakudoku tradition 3 Before 2001, some boards of education allowed research groups of teachers to prepare comparisons of textbook content which would be used to narrow the number of books under consideration. A survey conducted by the Asahi Shimbun in 2001 found that fourteen prefectures had eliminated or curtailed that process (Asahi Shimbun, 2 May 2001).



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of language teaching requires detailed explanations of the grammar of the target language, and these are always given in Japanese. Because of the large amount of grammar that is required to be taught by the national guidelines, this results in the books being written almost entirely in Japanese with English words, phrases and sentences being used to illustrate the various grammar points. I briefly had the job of doing a ‘nativespeaker’ check on some draft textbooks in 1999 and 2000. My job was to check the English words and phrases for any mistakes or ‘unnatural English’. It was quite an easy job because there was so little English contained in the books. I found only a very small number of areas for concern, but other studies of JHS textbooks have shown that the English sentences used as examples are often clearly translations into English of Japanese sentences. This can sometimes result in errors and ‘unnatural English’ being used.4 In contrast to this over-use of the L1 language in Japanese textbooks, secondary school English language textbooks in other Asian countries, for example Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, are written almost entirely in English. At the SHS level there are separate textbooks for the ‘Oral Com­ munication’ part of the English curriculum, but an expert evaluation of ten of them by Fleur Ogura in 2008 found that ‘despite being OC [Oral Communication] textbooks, [they] do not appear to adequately provide opportunities for students in developing communicative competence’ (Ogura 2008, 8). In contrast to commercially-sold conversation textbooks there were almost no exercises that allowed students to be creative in their conversation practice. Instead about 30 per cent of the exercises were classified by Ogura as ‘non-communicative’, that is, exercises that required students to select a missing word from a list of possible choices. 4 An example of the use of sentences translated from Japanese to English can be found in the New Horizon JHS English textbook published in 2005. On page 69 the following sample dialogue appears: Mike: Do you see that tall man? That’s Hideki. Judy: Do you know him? Mike: Yes, he’s a baseball player. In this conversation Hideki is actually the famous baseball player Matsui Hideki. In correct English, Mike would say ‘I know of him’ since to say ‘I know him’ is to imply a friendship which in this case does not exist. However, in Japanese it is correct to use the unmodified verb shiru (to know) in the case of knowing who a famous person is. Almost certainly this conversation was written by a native Japanese speaker who was not aware of the difference between ‘to know’ and ‘to know of’ in English (Frost 2010). Each JHS textbook is proofread by at least two native speakers working for MEXT, so it is not clear why this mistake made it through the proofreading process.

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Further­more, an additional 40 percent of the exercises were classified as ‘pre-communicative language practice’, that is, exercises that required the reading out of practice dialogues where only one or two words are added by the student (e.g.: I’d like to try ~ on). A further 25 per cent were ‘information gap’ exercises that required one student to tell a partner some information that the partner did not have. As was the case with the non-OC textbooks, all of the instructions to the student are written in Japanese. The Introduction of English in Elementary Schools For many years the extension of formal English language study to primary schools has been suggested as a practical way to improve English language competences among the general population. Following years of experimentation and pilot projects, some that began in 1996,5 English language classes were finally introduced, firstly at the discretion of individual schools as part of integrated studies (sōgōteki na gakushū no jikan) in 2002, and then as a compulsory course for fifth- and sixth-graders from April 2011. However, continued vocal resistance from language experts (inside Japan) and other interested parties, combined with widespread dissatisfaction among teachers with the lack of training offered to them, show that in this area of policymaking too, the Ministry has failed to gain a consensus in favour of reform. For many, the case for compulsory English in elementary schools is compelling. There is clearly the simple but important fact of the increased time available to children to study English over the course of their school careers. The received wisdom among researchers is generally favourable. In the words of applied linguist David Singleton, ‘[f]ew L2 researchers challenge the proposition that those L2 acquirers whose exposure to the L2 begins early in life for the most part attain higher levels of proficiency that those whose exposure begins in adolescence or adulthood’ (Singleton 2001, 85). Reasons given for this include: decreasing cerebral plasticity as the child gets older; lack of fully formed linguistic or cultural identities among prepubescent children; and the lack of ‘transfer errors’ made by young learners.6 5 For example, Umemoto Ryuta, a specialised teacher of English in Osaka prefecture, taught more than 5,000 English lessons between 1996 and 2008 in pilot projects in two elementary schools. He then gave talks to officials from boards of education from around the country (Daily Yomiuri, 13 November 2008). 6 ‘Transfer errors’ are the kind of errors made when a learner applies the rules of L1 to L2. These are contrasted to ‘developmental errors’ that all children make when they learn their L1: for example ‘he goed to the shop.’ (Pearson 2008, chapter 3).



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Survey data also show that the majority of people are in favour of the policy. In December 2010 a survey conducted by the Japan Public Survey Association of 1,924 adults found that 87 per cent were in favour of compulsory English education for fifth- and sixth-graders (Japan Times, 26 February 2011). In their research into attitudes to language learning in a rural town, Kubota and McKay found support for teaching English at an early age voiced in a 2005 survey conducted among the town’s Japanese residents (Kubota and McKay 2009). Parents are not simply expressing this preference in opinion surveys. As in many other cases related to foreign language education policy, they are voting with their feet (and their wallets) and sending their children to schools in the private sector that offer practical English teaching. In addition there is the simple fact that most elementary schools already included English language education as part of their ‘integrated study’ periods before 2011. A 2003 survey found that of 22,000 schools, 88 per cent of them were already offering some form of English lessons (Daily Yomiuri, 1 February 2005). English language teaching expert, Professor Yoshida Kensaku has said quite simply that ‘we cannot turn back’ (Ibid.). MEXT curriculum guidelines for ‘Foreign Language Activities’ for grades five and six stipulate the following content. 1. Instruction should be given on the following items in order to help pupils actively engage in communication in a foreign language: (1) To experience the joy of communication in a foreign language (2) To actively listen to and speak in the foreign language (3) To learn the importance of verbal communication 2. Instruction should be given on the following items in order to deepen the experiential understanding of the languages and cultures of Japan and foreign countries: (1) To become familiar with the sounds and rhythms of the foreign language, to learn its differences from the Japanese language and to be aware of the interesting aspects of language and its richness (2) To learn the differences in ways of living, customs and events between Japan and foreign countries and to be aware of various points of view and ways of thinking (3) To experience communication with people of different cultures and to deepen the understanding of culture (MEXT 2008, 9) This content is consistent with what has been in foreign language courseof-study guidelines for JHS and SHS since the introduction of ‘Oral Communication’ in 1989. The emphasis is on practical activities and

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the development of communication skills for use in real situations (for conversations with real foreigners). It is a long way from dry yakudoku activities involving rows of silent, passive pupils, and clearly represents a constructive response to the criticism that MEXT has received for so long about the yakudoku model. However, the road from nice ministry words on a page to practical application in the classroom is littered with obstacles. Firstly, the official MEXT enthusiasm for exposing Japanese children to English at a younger age is not shared by everyone. In his best-seller Kokka no hinkaku (Dignity of the nation), mathematician turned social commentator, Fujiwara Masahiko wrote in typically hyperbolic fashion ‘teaching English in elementary school is in my opinion the surest way to ruin the country’ (Fujiwara 2005, 39). He believes, with many, that elementary school should focus on basic skills, and devoting time to English will just get in the way of what needs to be taught.7 During the run-up to the introduction of compulsory elementary school English, opponents were very active in using the media to spread their message. One of the most outspoken critics of the government plan was (and is) Moteki Hiromichi, president of a publishing company and author of many books on the subject. He argues that since the elimination of Saturday school in 2002, the elementary school curriculum is packed enough as it is, and does not require students and teachers being burdened with the addition of an extra compulsory subject (Moteki 2001). He also believes that MEXT’s prescribed content, which involves an emphasis on conversation right from the start, is fundamentally flawed. He argues, as many Japanese educators do, that children must have a grounding in grammar and reading before they go on to speaking. He claims that conversation-oriented English education at the primary-school level would only lead to ‘miserable results’

7 The Dignity of the Nation sold over two million copies and was beaten to the top of the bestseller lists in 2006 only by the latest Harry Potter book. Fujiwara is not, and does not claim to be an expert in applied linguistics, but this does not stop him writing with great confidence about the certain danger of teaching English to elementary-school children. In a similar fashion and in the same volume, his lack of qualifications as a historian do not prevent him from writing with great confidence an account of twentieth-century Western history that is riddled with errors and misunderstandings. It is sometimes hard to know how seriously he wants to be taken. He writes at the start: ‘according to my wife, who has more opportunities to observe me than anyone else, half of what I say is wrong and based on misapprehension, while the other half is braggadocio and exaggeration’ (Fujiwara 2005, 11–12). It is impossible to know how many of Fujiwara’s two-million-plus readers saw the funny side and how many took him seriously.



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(quoted in Daily Yomiuri, 18 January 2005). Instead, he argues that English should be more intensively taught at the JHS level, and teaching methodology there (where it is taught by specialist teachers) should be improved. Tokyo University Associate Professor Saito Yoshifumi is also a critic of the policy. His main concern, shared by many, is that foreign language learning will distract children from getting a thorough grounding in their national language. This is especially worrying due to evidence of a decline in reading comprehension ability shown by an OECD survey published in 2004 (Daily Yomiuri, 18 January 2005). Saito also expressed the commonly held opinion that one hour a week of English is unlikely to make a significant impact on English learning anyway. Other critics argue that if elementary level English teaching is not done properly, it could alienate many children from English at an even younger age than is currently the case (Otsu and Torikai 2002). Keio University Professor and psycholinguist, Otsu Yukio, believes that MEXT focuses too much on a small number of success stories, and has ignored clear evidence from pilot projects that early introduction of English has caused children to dislike English (Daily Yomiuri, 25 May 2006). He added that MEXT was just indulging in a kneejerk reaction by copying what neighbouring countries were doing without thinking through the consequences (quoted in Yamagami and Tollefson 2011, 33). Veteran journalist Ochiai Nobuhiko writing in the news and opinion magazine Sapio in 2006 added that if young children are taught by unqualified teachers they may pick up bad English which will stay with them for life (Sapio, 24 May 2006). MEXT could not even rely on its own ministers for support. Ibuki Bunmei, who was Education Minister 2006–7, complained that the introduction on English at elementary school would erode valuable time needed to achieve first-language literacy (Gottlieb 2011, 50). There are other obstacles related to practical policy implementation. MEXT has placed the burden of teaching English at elementary school on the shoulders of existing generalist teachers who are already required to teach on average 26.5 hours per week in addition to supervising recesses, lunchtimes, school cleaning sessions and other activities (Okano and Tsuchiya 1999, 151). The vast majority of these teachers are not proficient at English and may not have uttered an English word or read an English sentence for many years. During the policy review process that accompanied MEXT’s deliberations on English language policy for elementary schools, appeals were made for proper teaching to be provided (Kizuka 2009). MEXT’s limited budget, however, has led it to deal with this problem using a type of ‘cascade’ training. The plan is to teach officials at the prefectural .

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level how to proceed with lessons. Those officials will then train representatives of each school, who will, in turn, help individual teachers. As is often the case with ‘cascades’ of this nature, however, ‘the cascade is more often reduced to a trickle by the time it reaches the classroom teacher’ (Hayes 2000, abstract). Under this scheme, teachers were supposed to have received thirty hours of training over two years, but a survey carried out at the start of 2011 (just before the introduction of compulsory English to elementary schools) found that teachers had received only an average of 6.8 hours of training (Japan Times, 26 February 2011). This lack of training stands in stark contrast to the implementation of English teaching at primary schools in some of Japan’s Asian competitors. In Taiwan, for example, which began teaching English at primary school exactly ten years before Japan, new specialist teachers who received 240 hours of training in English language skills and 120 hours of training to improve teaching skills were hired (Daily Yomiuri, 1 February 2005). In the face of inadequate preparation and training, it is hardly surprising to find that another Japanese survey (carried out in July and August 2010 on 4,709 elementary-school teachers nationwide) revealed that 68 per cent of teachers were either ‘not confident at all’ or ‘not so confident’ about their ability to teach English (Nihon keizai shimbun, 15 February 2011). Some boards of education have responded to this problem by introducing additional English components to their teacher recruitment exams for elementaryschool teachers in the hope that at least new entrants to the profession will have more confidence in their ability to teach English.8 In the absence of thorough training, elementary-school teachers may look to teaching materials approved by the ministry for help. According to many critics, however, they will find serious flaws in these materials. The first approved text for use in English classes at the primary level was Eigo nōto (English notebook). This was criticised for containing very little printed text and a lot of repetition of simple exercises. For untrained Japanese teachers on their own, there are numerous possible pitfalls. For example, Lesson 4 in the fifth-grade workbook focuses on ‘Do you like.…?’,

8 According to a survey by MEXT, 27 out of 65 boards of education at the prefectural or ordinance-designated city level (i.e. the level where exams for new entrants to the profession are set) had set English tests as part of the teacher employment exams for the 2010 academic year. Those boards that have not introduced English tests complained that it was difficult to add to the number of existing tests (for example in music) due to the large number of applicants that had to be processed (Yomiuri Shimbun 28 June 2010).



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but then mixes countable and uncountable nouns (banana, ice cream etc.) together. An untrained teacher can easily cause confusion in the minds of the children or even teach them mistaken grammar (‘I like some banana’) which will have to be corrected by a future teacher. In those classes where native-speaker ALTs are available, problems arise from the fact that all of the advice for teachers on how to use the text was written in Japanese and may not be accessible by the ALT. Not only were the instructions written in Japanese, some critics have argued that far too much Japanese appears in the textbook itself: why is it called Eigo nōto and not ‘English Notebook’?9 In 2009 Eigo nōto was abolished by MEXT. This was not brought about by the criticism noted above, but by the new government’s budgetary screening process aimed at cutting wasteful spending. Less than three years later MEXT published a new textbook for elementary school English entitled Hi Friends! Initial impressions from teachers are that it has some small improvements including an English title rather than one in Japanese. Professional English teachers at the elementary level will continue to design and use their own materials. At the time of writing, only a few months have passed since the official introduction of English into elementary schools. However, in spite of some heroic individual efforts, the obstacles that stand in the way of the achievement of good communicative language teaching practice at this level on a national scale are severe. The Problem of the ‘Shadow School Curriculum’ At the centre of national policymaking in education is, of course the Ministry of Education. The power that the ministry has to influence teaching and learning in schools is, however, limited. Although it does control the regularly reviewed course-of-study guidelines gakushū shidō yōryō for elementary and secondary schools, it has much less influence over entrance examinations for secondary schools, colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, problems arise when the requirements of entrance exam preparation deviate from what is stipulated in the official course-of-study guidelines. Traditionally students and their parents have dealt with this

9 Helene J. Uchida, a director of a private teacher-training company in Fukuoka wrote a list of problems with Eigo nōto in an advice column she writes for primary-school teachers in the Daily Yomiuri (Daily Yomiuri, 21 April 2009).

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problem by making use of juku classes that are much more focused on entrance exam preparation and have no obligation to follow government directives. However, from the 1990s onwards large-scale changes in the make-up of the entrance exam regime offered many students much more choice about what to specialise in than had previously been the case. The refusal of the official gakushū shidō yōryō to offer similar choices meant that what was required for exam study and what was required for graduation drifted further and further apart. To cope with this situation and to prevent students spending even more time and money at juku, some schools surreptitiously began teaching for exam preparation while pretending to teach the official curriculum. This practice was exposed by the press in 2006. The Yomiuri Shimbun found that nearly 250 senior high schools in 35 prefectures had only pretended to teach all the compulsory subjects required for graduation and instead had devoted more time to preparing students for university entrance exams. In the geography–history category, for example, under MEXT’s guidelines world history and either Japanese history or geography must be taught as compulsory subjects, but only one of them is required in the annual university Centre Exam. Therefore to make the most efficient use of time, some high schools pretended to teach all three of these subjects but were only actually teaching one or two. Most of the high schools involved were higher-end academic schools that were trying to help as many of their students as possible get into good universities and colleges. (Yomiuri Shimbun, 27 October 2006). Some prefectural schools were under pressure because they were teaching classes five days per week but had to compete with private schools, many of which were teaching six days a week (Japan Times, 1 November 2006). In one high school in Morioka the teachers drew up two curricula, one to be officially submitted to the prefectural education board and the other one to be put into actual practice (Asahi Shimbun, 27 October 2006). The scandal shocked the nation and had tragic consequences when the principal in one of the involved schools hanged himself (Yomiuri Shimbun, 31 October 2006). Many in the media claimed to be shocked by this double-curriculum scandal, but given the dysfunctional nature of the entrance exam system why were they surprised? What did they expect rational actors who were aware of the rules of the system to do? Parents want their sons and daughters to get into as good a university as possible, and principals and teachers want the school they work at to get as many of their pupils into good universities as possible. Some in the media wrote about the duty of



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high schools to focus their education on more than just entrance exam preparation (e.g. Asahi Shimbun, 29 November 2006). But given the stakes involved in getting into a good university, students and their teachers can be forgiven for just paying lip-service to such a notion. The Problem of English Entrance Exams As the modern university system emerged in post-war Japan, difficult English language entrance exams became increasingly important for two reasons. Firstly, students who were considering advanced education whether in the sciences or the arts required the ability to read foreign academic texts and research papers. They needed to display this aptitude before entering university so that no time would be lost once they embarked on a course of higher study. This situation was not unique to Japan: students choosing to study Physics or Chemistry in the UK in the 1950s, for example, were required to be able to read German so that they could have access to the latest research. The second reason for the adoption of difficult English exams by elite Japanese universities was provided by the very difficulty of the subject. The hours of study required to pass these exams ensured the universities of the dedication, intelligence and ambition of the students who were successful. This function is a direct product of the historical influence of both classical China and nineteenthcentury Prussia upon the Meiji reformers who created the modern Japa­ nese exam system (Zeng 1999, chapter two). Those who tried and failed were simply not equipped with the ‘right stuff’ to be a member of the elite. Ronald Dore has written about the practical function of the very difficult entrance exams in sorting ‘the sheep from the goats’ (Dore 1976, 50). The first of these functions of difficult English entrance exams came to fade away over time. The expansion of the Japanese economy from the 1960s through to the 1980s was accompanied by a massive increase in the production of books and other publications. These included translations of a great variety of books and academic papers from overseas. By the 1980s, curious students who wanted to find out more about American literature or British History or many other subjects could find an abundant source of information in Japanese. Unless they had a particular reason for reading books in English, successful new entrants to elite universities found that once the entrance exam was behind them they had no need to read a word of English ever again (except for a few annoying compulsory

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English subjects that had to be taken in the first two years of university). The realisation that they would not need to continue the struggle with English language study came as a source of relief to many. With the practical function of enabling students to read foreign language books largely removed, only one other function remained: English exams would continue to operate as a method for separating ‘the sheep from the goats’. This explains the persistence of difficult grammar and obscure vocabulary in many exams. It also explains why universities in general do not bother to check the validity of the questions in their exams. When one professor in a highly ranked university did, on his own initiative, analyse past English entrance exams, he found that only 36 per cent of the questions in the vocabulary and grammar sections met international ID (index-of-discrimination) standards, i.e. only 36 per cent of the questions in those key sections were good questions, able to evaluate accurately the English skills of the test-takers (Kitakai 2006, 12). The other 64 per cent of the questions were effectively random ones that would reward only those with very good memories, or those who were very lucky guessers. They were of no practical use in helping learners master the English language. This disappointing result was found at a university that has a national reputation as being very good at foreign language education. If the exams set by this university have poor validity, then it can be presumed that the same is true for the vast majority of exams set by other universities. It is impossible to be certain of this, since no universities undertake tests of validity like the one described above. The fact that no universities consider it worthwhile to do these validity tests speaks volumes about what the real functions of the tests are. The secrecy that surrounds the setting and marking of exams combined with the defensive  ways in which universities and departments guard their autonomy mean that there is usually no external checking of validity (Aspinall 2005, 206–7). When surveys by language-teaching professionals are conducted the results are usually far from reassuring. In 1998, for example, a fourmonth-long survey of exams set by 200 different universities found that ‘the applicants were often asked to read and comprehend excessively long and complex English passages and that some true-or-false statements were so ambiguous that there were no correct answers’ (Daily Yomiuri, 11 January 1999). Most of the questions in English-language university entrance exams are concerned with grammar, vocabulary and reading ability. This emphasis on reading has been criticised for a long time for neglecting the other



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three skills normally taught in courses on modern foreign languages: writing, listening and speaking. In an effort to address this problem some universities have introduced essay writing, while listening components have been introduced by more and more individual universities since the start of the 1990s, and by the national Centre Exam system in 2006. As far as testing speaking is concerned, some universities do have interviews for courses that only involve a few applicants but the problems connected to interviewing tens of thousands of candidates clearly make individual oral tests for the Centre Exam an impossibility. (This may change if reliable computer software can be developed that can evaluate a candidate’s speaking ability.) A different strategy was devised in response to changes in the SHS curriculum that called for more oral communication. This involved the testing of pronunciation through new kinds of question that were introduced in English Centre Exams from the late 1980s onwards. However, the structure of the questions related to the pronunciation and stress of English words was seriously flawed. The following typical kinds of question have been taken from the English Centre Exam of January 2007 (similar questions occur every year). Problem Number One, Part A: Choose the word which has an underlined part that is pronounced differently from the underlined parts in the other words. 1. 2. 3.

assure abroad ghost

classic approach graphic

efficient coast phrase

social throat tough

[The correct answers are ‘classic’, ‘abroad’, and ‘ghost’.]

It can be reasonably argued that the difference in pronunciation in the case of question 2 is a very fine one (and one which will vary according to regional accents of actual spoken English). Also, knowledge of the pronunciation of isolated, individual words is of little use in helping students with practical conversation. Even if there were no ambiguity, teachers preparing students for this kind of question are still teaching them about the language, rather than getting them immersed in it. A diligent candidate who has memorised the ‘correct’ pronunciation of a large number of words could score well on this question but be unable actually to speak the words accurately when they occur in the sentences and phrases used in a real conversation.

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chapter three Problem Number One, Part B: In the following two questions choose the list of three words where one word has the most-stressed syllable in a different position from the other two. 1.

1. en-ve-lope fur-ni-ture 2. ma-te-ri-al psy-chol-o-gy 3. ef-fec-tive in-ter-view 4. em-bar-rass-ment li-brar-i-an [The correct answer is number 3.]

hor-ri-ble re-mark-a-ble rec-og-nize phi-los-o-phy

2.

i-so-la-tion in-stru-ment i-den-ti-fy op-po-site

1. gram-mat-i-cal in-tel-li-gent 2. beau-ti-ful bi-cy-cle 3. ca-pac-i-ty en-vi-ron-ment 4. ben-e-fit in-di-cate [The correct answer is number 1.]

It is very hard to imagine what the practical purpose of questions like this might be. Once again, this question reflects the established practice of English language teaching in Japan – that it is teaching about the language. The teacher and students are talking about some remote body of knowledge that has no relevance to their daily lives. In this context the discussion of how the words are broken up into different syllables and the stress of the syllable will vary from word to word makes sense. However, as a tool of practical English communication, the above exercise is a criminal waste of the language learner’s time. The effect of entrance exams on secondary school students will be discussed in more detail in chapter 5. The Jet Programme One programme that must be examined when discussing national-level policy aimed at improving English is the JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) programme which since 1987 has brought thousands of native English speakers into Japanese school classrooms each year. Although bringing foreign native-speakers into language classrooms is self-evidently a positive way of helping children learn foreign languages (especially if in their normal daily life they have very limited or non-existent opportu­ nities to talk to non-Japanese people), research conducted by David McConnell has shown that the Ministry of Education was, at first, a very reluctant partner to efforts to bring this about on a national scale.



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New foreign teachers (whether they are on the JET programme or not) are often surprised to learn that the Ministry of Education was such a reluctant partner in the birth of the JET programme. Theoretical approaches, whether they are derived from bureaucratic rationality or institutionalism, aid an understanding of this reluctance. These approaches help us to see that the MOE was not behaving in an irrational way by resisting the JET programme when it was initially proposed. The original idea for the JET programme in fact came not from the Ministry of Education but from the Ministry of Home Affairs (MOHA). This is the ministry which was responsible for local administration and which had to respond in the 1980s to an increasing number of international initiatives being made by cities and prefectures throughout Japan. When these local bodies came to the ministry for advice on international matters or with questions relating to improving the foreign language skills of staff, MOHA found that it could not adequately respond. Tsuchiya Yoshiteru, a former vice-minister of home affairs, described it in this way: When I was in the Ministry of Home Affairs, the government as a whole was making great efforts to encourage international relations, and local governments were beginning to expand the initiatives begun at the national level … But the main barrier to local governments opening their doors to foreigners was English deficiency and that made us realize the necessity of introducing real English over and above the foreign language education provided by the Ministry of Education. (Quoted in McConnell 2000, 33)

This quote shows that by the mid-1980s, local governments had joined business organisations and individual parents and students in voicing their dissatisfaction in the English language education provided by the official curriculum. The fact that Tsuchiya, like so many others, does not consider it to be ‘real English’ is revealing. Tsuchiya, and others who wanted to set up a language programme that could help local government officials, had to face two serious obstacles in their path. Firstly, as with any new ministerial programme, there was the problem of getting adequate funding. In the case of JET, this did not turn out to be a serious difficulty since the costs of the programme were shared among three different ministries, the localities and private charitable organisations. Potentially far more serious was the second factor, the problem of ministerial turf: that is, the fact that foreign language education was not within the jurisdiction of MOHA. Members of this ministry who were enthusiastic about a foreign language programme involving invited foreign teachers were at first told that this could not be done because ‘such a programme would be a clear violation of the Ministry of Education’s jurisdiction’ (McConnell 2000, 34)

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Such jealous guarding of ministerial turf is common to all of Japan’s ministries and has been a factor throughout their history (Hayao 1993, 144). This has lead to an institutional culture where Japanese civil servants are extremely wary about treading on the toes of colleagues in a different ministry. In this, as in other areas, ministerial employees absorb the institutional culture of their ministry as they rise through its ranks (Kato 1994, 8–10). The jealous guarding of ministerial turf does not prevent two or more ministries from collaborating on policy that will be beneficial to all concerned actors, and such collaboration occurs all the time. So the next question that needs to be addressed is why MOHA enthusiasm for a local English language programme was not initially shared by Monbushō (MOE). McConnell’s research found that the Ministry of Education was mostly opposed to bringing large numbers of foreign teachers into Japanese schools because of the potential disruption that would be caused. There were already two small programmes in existence – the Monbushō English Fellow (MEF) programme and the British English Teaching (BET) scheme – which together brought about 200 British and American young people to Japan to help with English language teaching. But MOE officials could only see the negative side of significant expansion beyond these modest numbers. Efforts to teach English conversation had always been peripheral to exam oriented English instruction, and Ministry of Education officials were understandably worried that there would be considerable resistance among Japanese teachers if the number of foreign participants increased dramatically. The proposal forced the ministry to confront the result of decades of relative inflexibility in foreign language education policy and the complete lack of major reforms in the system since the 1950s. (McConnell 2000, 43)

MOE concerns about the reluctance to receive foreign teachers turned out to be well founded in more than a few cases (see next chapter). The ministry was also concerned about losing control over the programme to rival ministries or agencies (Ibid.). Given this MOE opposition, it is probable that without the intervention of external events and the presence of a sympathetic and powerful prime minister, MOHA would have been unable to establish the kind of programme it wanted to help local governments with their English language needs. External events took the form of heavy American pressure on Japan to do something concrete about its 50 billion dollar annual trade surplus in the mid-1980s. In response, Prime Minister Nakasone formed the Maekawa committee to address the problem. The Ministry of Home



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Affairs is not normally involved in issues of foreign policy but because the brief given to the Maekawa committee required it to look at what local government could do, MOHA officials were included in committee deliberations. One of these officials was Nose Kuniyuki, who put forward the following proposal. [L]ocal governments must open their doors and let [American and other foreign] people come and see the truth [about what Japan is really like] directly – not just any people but those with college degrees and under the age of 35 since people start to lose flexibility after that age. (Quoted in McConnell 2000, 35)

The idea was that this would be a better way of influencing hearts and minds in America and other countries than just importing more material goods. When this plan was put to Nose’s counterpart on the Maekawa committee from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), he approved it without hesitation (McConnell 2000, 37). MOFA could immediately see the diplomatic potential of the proposed programme since they were having trouble coming up with constructive proposals to deal with the ‘Japan bashing’ that accompanied the huge trade deficits. The JET programme would in the short term give Japan something to offer in tough trade negotiations – especially with America. In the long term it would also help provide an antidote to Japan’s ‘misunderstood’ image in foreign countries by giving large numbers of foreign young people a chance to see the country for themselves at first hand. Finally, the plan was taken to the prime minister himself for approval. Here, too, the timing of the proposal was extremely fortuitous, for the JET programme plan found a very willing supporter in the shape of Nakasone Yasuhiro, a leader who had already placed ‘internationalisation’ at the centre of his own personal ideology. Nakasone was also determined to develop a strong relationship with fellow conservative Ronald Reagan and was able to use the JET idea as a goodwill gesture in the 1985 summit meeting between the two leaders. With MOFA and the Prime Minister’s Office on its side, MOHA was able to overcome opposition from the Ministry of Education. However, the MOE was still able to negotiate some terms relating to the JET programme that would alleviate some of its main worries. These mainly centred on the agreement to bring mostly unqualified young people to Japan, that is, those who would not have their own preconceived ideas about languageteaching methodologies, and that their role would be restricted to that of assistants, that is, they would be at all times under the control of a properly qualified Japanese teacher of English. MOFA was happy to go along

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with this and invite young graduates who were not qualified teachers, since its hope was that at least some of these people would spend one or two years in Japan and then return to their country to pursue a career that would take them into influential positions in politics or business. It was fortunate, from MOE’s point of view, that MOFA shared the same aim in relation to the desirable characteristics of JET programme participants, since MOFA became responsible for recruitment using its network of embassies and consulates abroad. To MOE’s great relief, MOFA made sure that very few of each year’s JET programme intake had any substantial qualifications or experience in teaching English as a foreign language. The success enjoyed by MOE and MOFA in making sure that mostly young unqualified (in terms of language teaching) and inexperienced people came to Japan on the JET programme, however, has opened up a new line of criticism within the country: that the foreign participants are overpaid, and therefore a waste of scarce resources that could be put to better use elsewhere. To many outside observers it seemed irrational for so much money to be spent on bringing people who were not teachers to Japan to help with the teaching of foreign languages. However, an understanding of the priorities of the education ministry, the foreign ministry and the prime minster’s office show that the programme was anything but irrational. It only seems irrational to those who make the mistake of assuming that its main purpose is to improve communicative competence of Japanese school students in foreign languages. The decision-making process in the run-up to the introduction of the JET programme in 1987 shows the MOE resisting and then adapting to a policy change it did not want. It rationally adapted to the new policy once it had become a fait accompli, and it quickly set about devising materials and advice that would help Japanese teachers of English work with the visiting native-speakers through various kinds of team teaching in which the foreigner would play the role of an assistant. It is clear from the MOE’s failure to change other parts of the national curriculum that this kind of teaching was always intended to be a supplement to the main education of Japanese school students. A common complaint from many JET participants, especially in the early days, was that the schools they were assigned to did not seem to know what to do with them.10 Other participants who 10 Many boards of education, especially in geographically isolated areas, were also not sure what they were supposed to do with the ALT when he or she arrived. It is clear, however, that town or city mayors were putting pressure on their BOEs to agree to accept an ALT in order not to ‘miss out’ on the kokusaika boom (see for example Ertl 2008, 91).



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had very fulfilling experience on the JET programme mostly talk about helping out in clubs or student societies, in other words activities that are outside the central academic curriculum.11 There are also stories of JET participants being allowed to take over and teach entire lessons: something which, if the MOE had known about it, would have been stopped. This marginalisation of JET participants should not be surprising given that MOE never considered these assistant teachers to be a major part of its own education reform agenda. Katō’s two-step process by which bureaucratic organisations influence other political actors (the first step is to define the problem so that the policy proposed by the ministry will be a good solution and the second step is get recognised policy experts to support this solution), does not apply to the case of the JET programme because the Ministry of Education failed to prevent other actors (MOFA, MOHA, the PM’s office) from defining the lack of Japan’s positive international image (especially vis-à-vis the USA) as being a major problem that had to solved partly in the schools and local authorities. The sending of native-speaker teachers into classrooms was therefore not supported by the recruitment of policy experts who would argue that this was an essential step to be taken for the future of foreign language education in Japan. In fact there was considerable disagreement and confusion among experts (see later), and this contributed to the marginalisation of JET programme participants and communicative language education in general. Thus the JET case can be useful for developing the model of bureaucratic rationality by showing what happens when a ministry is unable to set the agenda and has to deal with an imposed policy that it does not want. This is not the only example of the Ministry of Education losing the initiative to other actors, as will be seen in chapter 6 when we look at the case of the introduction of the TOEIC test as a national standard of English ability. The Proposal to Teach SHS English Classes in English from 2013 In December 2008 it was announced by MEXT that from start of the 2013 academic year all English classes in senior high schools should be taught ‘only in English as a rule’ (Asahi Shimbun, 23 December 2008). It is hard to imagine that MEXT announced this policy with a straight face given that 11 Some examples of these extra-curricular activities are given in chapter four.

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its own survey conducted in 2005 found that only 1.1 per cent of JTEs in public senior high schools conducted English classes mostly in English (Miyazato 2009, 41). The Asahi Shimbun spoke for many when it said in an editorial that ‘by abruptly telling English teachers to start giving lessons only in English, the education ministry is creating confusion and consternation’ (Ibid.) Actually the 2003 Action Plan had already stated that ‘the majority of an English class will be conducted in English’ (MEXT 2003, 3), but this had been ignored by most teachers at the genba. Almost all SHS teachers quoted by the media in the days following the 2008 announcement said that it would be impossible to explain complex grammar points in English. Since the announcement from the ministry was not connected to any additional changes in university entrance exams, teachers in academic high schools said that they would have to continue to teach using Japanese if they wanted to prepare students properly for those exams. Teachers in other schools said they were dealing with some students who could not tell the difference between ‘b’ and ‘d’ and they would not be able to understand classes conducted in even simple English. The ministry’s blanket announcement that all SHS classes would start to use English at the same time betrayed a lack of understanding of the sheer complexity and diversity of the SHS system in Japan. It also betrays an inability to listen to its own advisory panels. The ministry panel that first proposed teaching English in English, in December 2000, also suggested that English teaching should be split into two levels, one aimed at instilling a basic command of English, the other aimed at a level of English needed by those who will go on to play active international roles (Yomiuri Shimbun, 8 December 2000). Unable or unwilling to overcome the egalitarian norms that demand a uniform English curriculum, the ministry has not tried to implement this recommendation. Conclusion During the immediate post-war period the yakudoku method of teaching English became established as the norm in public secondary schools in Japan. Future teachers would grow up and be trained, knowing nothing but this method of teaching. Administrators and school managers also came to accept this as the status quo of a highly uniform system. Since the early 1980s, however, calls for the Ministry of Education to improve the nation’s English-language teaching curriculum and make it more focused on practical communication skills have been growing with each passing



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year. Most foreign language education experts agree that the results of MOE’s efforts in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s have been disappointing to say the least. Small improvements have been made and a few changes have taken place around the periphery, but the orthodoxy of yakudoku remains intact in most secondary school classrooms. In spite of MOE’s image as an all-powerful ministry, failure to achieve significant lasting change has resulted from weaknesses rather than strengths. The ministry does not have the power to order individual universities to alter their entrance exams in ways that would encourage senior high schools to place more emphasis on practical English communication. It also does not have the power to alter norms of uniformity and egalitarianism within schools that deter English departments from setting classes according to ability and intimidate individual students who may have greater prowess at English than their peers. As in other areas of education policy, the ministry is wary of changes that might cause disruption or unease in schools or local authorities. This makes it wary of involving foreigners into the English education process except in ways that ensure their influence can be contained and controlled. Fear of disruption to established routines, as well as limited budgets, also explain the half-hearted way in which English language education has been introduced to elementary schools. (Japanese national policy stands in stark contrast to some of its neighbours in this respect.) From the point of view of many who are pressing for more communicative English education, the SELHi reforms, the JET programme and the introduction of English into primary schools stand as missed opportunities. On the other hand, those who support the traditional yakudoku method should be happy that the system introduced in the 1950s still stands fifty years later with only minor changes. English language policy is currently ill suited to helping Japan cope with the uncertainties and intense crossborder communication and movement that are the characteristics of ‘global risk society’.

CHAPTER FOUR

PUTTING ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION POLICY INTO PRACTICE: THE ROLE OF TEACHERS Reforms written by education bureaucrats are meaningless if they can­ not  be implemented in the classroom by hard-working, qualified and motivated teachers. In this chapter we will examine the role of foreignlanguage teachers in the secondary and tertiary sectors and we will discuss the various obstacles that stand in the way of their delivering a better foreign language curriculum to their pupils and students. The chapter will be divided into two main sections on Japanese nationals and foreign nationals working within the formal Japanese education system. Japanese English Teachers We will divide the analysis of the role of Japanese teachers of English (JTEs) and their organizations into the following six categories: (1) teacher training for secondary-school teachers, (2) the duties and responsibilities of secondary school English teachers, (3) obstacles in the path of secondaryschool teachers introducing communicative language teaching in English classrooms, (4) problems and opportunities relating to relation­ ships between Japanese teachers and ALTs, (5) Japanese teachers of English in universities; and (6) organisations representing Japanese teach­ ers of English. 1. The Training of Secondary School English Teachers The ‘heavy lifting’ of delivering the foreign language education curriculum must be done by teachers of English and other languages in the junior high and senior high schools. To do their job successfully they must not only be skilled language teachers, they must also be good classroom man­ agers, and able to counsel and motivate individual students from a large variety of backgrounds. In order to become a teacher in a state school in Japan, one must be a Japanese national and have a minimum of a bach­ elor’s degree as well as a teaching certificate issued by a prefectural board of education. Passing a test of oral English competence is not usually required in order to become a specialist English teacher (although some

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prefectures have recently started to change this). English teachers have performed poorly when tested to international standards. In 2005, a sur­ vey conducted by MEXT found that only 8.3 per cent of JTEs in JHS and 16.3 per cent in SHS had a TOEIC score of 730 (equivalent to a TOEFL score of 550) or more (Miyazato 2009, 41). This score is the minimum required by most universities in English-speaking countries for international stu­ dents to begin undergraduate study. In-service training is available but limited. The Board of Education provides several days of training for teachers after five and ten years’ experience. Oral communication is only one part of the syllabus a new teacher needs to learn, and research has found that most teachers, even those trained after 1989, have not been adequately taught communicative lan­ guage teaching (CLT) methods. Naoko Taguchi of Carnegie Mellon Univer­ sity carried out research in senior high schools in one Japanese prefecture in 2002 and found that ‘[JTE’s] lack of expertise and experience in design­ ing communicative activities were also [i.e. in addition to the effect of university entrance exams] principal obstacles in implementing OC [Oral Communication] classes’ (Taguchi 2005, 10). Also, research carried out in 2006 by Nishino Takako based on a survey of 139 SHS English teachers found that although they wanted to make their lessons more communica­ tive, they did not have the confidence to put this desire into practice (Nishino 2011). One problem cited by teachers in this survey is the fact that they did not experience communicative teaching when they were students. In an earlier ethnographic study of the socialisation of new teachers, Shimahara noted that ‘Japanese beginning teachers maintained a significant degree of continuity by retaining the image of teaching that they formed from their actual childhood experience of schooling’ (Shimahara 2002a, 131). Without proper help during their period of initial teacher training it is difficult for teachers to break away from habits they learned when they were pupils themselves, whatever the subject area. I can illustrate this point by relating my own personal experience as a new teacher in England in the 1980s. In the academic year 1984–85 I studied for a Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) at Kingston Polytechnic in London. I was training to become a secondary school history teacher and I was deter­ mined to teach history differently from the way I had been taught it as a schoolboy in the 1970s. Basically, I wanted to shift from lessons based on writing down and then memorising lists of historical facts to a pedagogical model based on finding out about the past using investigative and analytic techniques. I was also concerned to help students build empathy with



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people who lived in past societies very different from their own. Fortunately my desire to teach this way coincided with a general shift in the history curriculum in England and Wales and a reform of the exam system which replaced the fact-based O level with the skill-based GCSE in 1988. Without a change in the whole curriculum as well as the exam system, it is hard to see how I could have put my desire for a new kind of history teaching into practice in the classroom. I therefore sympathise with Japanese teachers of English who are being given very mixed signals concerning the adop­ tion of communicative English teaching practices that if implemented fully would represent a complete break with past teaching practice. Efforts to introduce some communicative teaching to English classes have proved to be very difficult to implement in practice. Adding a limited amount of oral English almost as an afterthought has not helped teachers in their task of teaching children to speak English. In the words of Taguchi: The fact that current teacher training programs do not cover foundation theories and methods of communicative teaching and assessment seems to imply that incorporating a few oral activities into the OC [Oral Commu­ nication] classes is considered to be sufficient. This oversight permits indi­ vidual teachers to draw their own conclusions as to what is important in the class, resulting in the formulation of an unstated philosophy that ‘OC instruction should not interfere with entrance exam preparation.’ (Taguchi 2005, 7)

2. The Duties and Responsibilities of Secondary School English Teachers If teaching communicative oral English takes up only a small part of the English curriculum in JHS and SHS, then English teaching itself is only one of the various responsibilities shouldered by busy JTEs. In addition to being specialist subject teachers, these teachers must, like their colleagues in other departments, devote time and energy to a myriad of tasks and responsibilities necessary for the successful functioning of a modern sec­ ondary school (Rohlen 1983, 172–78). There are small differences from pre­ fecture to prefecture but surveys have shown that on average JHS teachers of all subjects spend about twenty hours per week in the classroom while their colleagues in SHS spend about seventeen hours (Okano and Tsuchiya 1999, 151).1 Outside the classroom, teachers are busy with class preparation

1 This data represents teachers’ workloads before the yutori kyōiku reforms were fully implemented. However the recent move away from yutori kyōiku means that if teachers

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and marking, club supervision, the counselling of individual students and various administrative chores. Research has found that enthusiastic devotion to these activities is often more highly valued than innovative classroom teaching (Lokon 2005, 9; Shimahara 2002b, 113). Most teachers will also have the role of home-room teacher (or ‘form tutor’, as the role is known in British English) which means they are responsible for the personal and social development – as well as the academic progress – of between 30 and 40 teenagers. It is normal for secondary-school teachers in Japan to see education of the ‘whole person’ as a fundamental part of their job (Shimahara 2002a, 16–17; Lewis 2011, 233–35; Whitman 2000, 65, Cave 2011). Few aspire to the fictional perfection of the most famous JHS homeroom teacher of them all, TV icon Kinpachi Sensei, star of the long-running drama San-nen B-gumi [Class B of the third year], but most share the notion that a good teacher is concerned with far more about a pupil than the grades they get at the end of term.2 In addition, some teachers have extra responsibilities connected to career guidance, discipline and curriculum development. Unsurprisingly, surveys have found that teachers need to be in school for far more time than just lesson-teaching time. Surveys conducted in 1991 and 1992 found that teachers spent an average of 10 hours, 39 minutes a day at school (Okano and Tsuchiya 1999, 151).3 In other OECD countries where teach­ ers  have a similarly tough workload during term time they can at least look forward to relaxing and enjoying some free time during the long sum­ mer vacation. In Japan, however, a combination of peer pressures and administrative or club-related tasks means that 44 per cent of teachers spend less than ten free days at home during the forty-day summer holi­ days  (Ibid.). Thus a visit to a typical Japanese secondary school during the sweltering heat of August will reveal many of the teachers at work at did enjoy a lessening of their workload for a few years, this was only a temporary phenomenon. 2 Seven series of this popular TV drama have been broadcast since its inception in 1979. Each series stars Takeda Tetsuya as the eponymous JHS third-year home-room teacher of ‘Class B’ who is faced at the start with a new class of adolescents coping with a variety of social, personal and academic problems, some of which are linked to issues current in the media of the time. The final episode of each series always encompasses graduation day and involves each member of the class bidding a tearful farewell to Kinpachi Sensei. See Cave (2007, 57–59) for a discussion of the representation of teachers in Japanese popular TV drama. 3 In research carried out in 2002 – at the height of the yutori kyōiku reforms, O’Donnell found that the two SHS JTEs he was studying taught between 15 and 18 classes per week and ‘the teaching of English seems to take up far less than half of all work-related responsibili­ ties’ (O’Donnell 2004, 227).



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their desks.4 The same is true for the shorter vacations in spring and win­ ter. Starting in 2002, high-school teachers in Saitama prefecture were ordered to write a detailed plan for their activities for each day of each vacation and then write and submit a full report at the end of the vacation. The teacher who told me this (Interview G) had to write a plan and report concerning the interview she gave me since it took place on a weekday during the spring vacation. Keeping teachers at their desks during vaca­ tions is counterproductive for another reason: it makes it much more dif­ ficult for foreign-language teachers to spend time in a country where the language they teach is spoken. In the case of the UK, by contrast, it is con­ sidered normal for a French teacher to spend part of their vacation time in France combining the pleasure and relaxation of a vacation with a chance to brush up their language knowledge and skill. I have met more than one high school English teacher in Japan who had to lie to their superiors in order to sneak out of the country during the summer in order to go abroad and improve their English (entirely at their own expense). Another burden for teachers is that they are periodically moved to a different school within their prefecture or city. This creates two kinds of problem. Firstly, for teachers working in a geographically large prefecture it is possible that they may be moved far from their home, resulting in a long commute at either end of a busy day. Secondly, the fact that a teacher is required to teach during their career at a variety of different schools means they must repeatedly change their approach to the children they teach. There is also some evidence that the job of the teacher has been made more difficult recently by the emergence of the ‘monster parent’, i.e. a type of parent who continuously complains to the school about the way their child is being treated. This is a break with the traditional norm that parents should always show respect to their child’s teacher (Tsuneyoshi 2011a, 268). The overall picture that emerges of teachers within contempo­ rary Japan is that they are under enormous stress (Lewis 2011, 242). Moreover, this stress is increasingly resulting in cases of mental illness. The number of teachers taking time off due to clinical depression or related ailments doubled between the years 2000 and 2010. Figures for the state sector show that 5,407 teachers, or 0.6 per cent of the nation’s total, took time off work for these reasons in the academic year 2010–11 (Yomiuri Shimbun, 14 May 2012).

4 One improvement since my time working in senior high schools (1989–92) is that now most teachers’ rooms are at least equipped with air conditioning.

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From the above it can be seen that for foreign-language teachers, the spending of time and effort on developing new pedagogical techniques for communicative language teaching amounts to an extra burden on an already busy schedule. Often there is simply not the time available for the careful planning required to make that kind of lesson a success. SHS teach­ ers in O’Donnell’s study said ‘they often relied on using grammar transla­ tion when they did not have time to prepare lessons for class’ (O’Donnell 2004, 227). If a teacher is too busy to prepare supplementary materials for the class, he or she must fall back on the textbook, and the textbooks for both JHS and SHS English are poor tools for use in a communicative teach­ ing classroom. 3. More Obstacles in the Path of Secondary-School Teachers Introducing Communicative Language Teaching in English Classrooms In addition to the problem of the extra workload, there other significant obstacles standing in the way of secondary school English teachers who try to introduce more practical communicative English language teaching into the lessons they teach. All teachers have a certain degree of leeway to introduce new teaching methods into their classrooms, and, indeed, are often encouraged to do so by directives from MEXT and from their local Board of Education. However, there are powerful forces at work to main­ tain the status quo. I have written elsewhere about the way in which norms of teaching and learning in Japanese society make it difficult for teachers and children to adopt the methods required for successful communicative language learning (Aspinall 2006). I concluded that there are four main ways in which these norms acted as obstacles to improved teaching: 1. The norm of deference to the authority of the teacher means that usu­ ally Japanese learners passively follow the instructions they are given. In the communicative foreign language classroom this attitude is an obstacle to those instructors who want to encourage students to exper­ iment, stretch themselves intellectually and develop their own learn­ ing strategies. 2. The emphasis on humility means that students who have progressed further with the acquisition of English communication skills than oth­ ers in their class are self-conscious about displaying their skills in front of their peers. There are cases of returnee students with excellent English skills who pretend to be poor at English in order to blend in to the group. English teachers can also be inhibited in displaying their skills in front of colleagues who have limited abilities. I have heard of



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cases where younger high school English teachers were told not to speak English in the teacher’s room because it was causing more senior English teachers who had poor speaking skills to lose face. 3. The idea that there is one ‘correct’ answer or way of doing things also causes problems in the English classroom. Teachers who orally ask a student a question in English as part of a class activity often have to wait while the student sits in silence, racking his or her brain for the one correct answer. The student has not been told that in many cases there may be a variety of equally good answers to the same question. The student is also afraid of making mistakes in front of the teacher and the other class members – a handicap that inhibits the develop­ ment of good oral competence in a foreign language. 4. The egalitarian nature of education in Japan means that (at least in the formal education system) English is usually taught to mixed-ability groups. Given the fact that class size is usually large, this means that the more-able students are held back. Students who have specific learning difficulties with languages are also disadvantaged by this system. The ‘you-can-do-it-if-you-try’ (gambareba deikiru) attitude leads these stu­ dents and their parents and peers to believe that their lack of success at language learning is due to lack of effort. This can lead to misery for students who struggle with dyslexia and other problems related to lan­ guage learning. In addition to these problems, there are other factors at the micro level that help account for the nationwide failure to introduce communicative language learning to secondary schools. Although the individual teacher is alone in the classroom during the typical lesson their performance as a teacher is heavily influenced by the collective ‘small culture’ of the group of teachers that make up the school.5 Shimahara has described two central assumptions that underlie the culture of the collectivity of teachers in a typical secondary school: the assumption that ‘teaching is a collaborative process’ reinforced by the fact that all the desks of the teachers of a par­ ticular department are clustered together in the teachers’ room, and the related assumption that ‘peer planning is a critical aspect of teaching’ (Shimahara 2002b, 112–13). This collaborative nature of teaching makes it difficult for a new teacher to adopt a very different style of classroom 5 See Holliday (1999) for more on the concept of ‘small cultures’ with reference to lan­ guage learners and teachers and Aspinall 2006 for my application of that paradigm to the case of English teaching in Japan.

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teaching from their colleagues. If the new JTE is also clearly proficient at English, he or she may come under particular scrutiny from colleagues to conform since in some schools the view that mastery of English must be accompanied by an overexposure to the western traits of ‘individualism and independence’ is also prevalent (McVeigh 2000, 75–76). The pressure to teach in the same style as one’s peers can often have a very practical dimension. Communicative language teaching by its very nature involves the students speaking and making noise. If this noise carries into a col­ league’s classroom, and the norm of the school is that a well-ordered class is one where the children are silent, then that can make life very difficult for the one teacher who is going against the grain. On the other hand, if a significantly large group of teachers in one school successfully develops new methods of teaching communicative English, this would become the ‘new normal’ for that department, and new teachers could be socialised into this method of teaching. There is evidence that this has already happened in some SELHi schools (see chap­ ter 3), and there is no question that if substantive improvement is to be achieved on a large scale then this particular ‘obstacle’ needs to be turned on its head and turned into a facilitator of positive change. Researchers have used a variety of sociolinguistic or sociocultural paradigms to exam­ ine the problems inherent in implementing communicative language learning on a wide scale in Japanese secondary schools, but they all agree with LoCastro’s conclusion that there is ‘a gross mismatch between the supposed aims [of foreign-language teaching reform] and the sociocul­ tural context’ (LoCastro 1996, 45). 4. Problems and Opportunities Relating to Relationships between Japanese Teachers and ALTs It is unsurprising to find that many secondary school English teachers, already labouring under the stressful workload described above, were less than enthusiastic to find after 1987 that they would also have to play host to a foreign assistant teacher (ALT). In the case of a SHS that has been allocated as a ‘base school’ for a new ALT, the teacher or teachers who have been chosen to take care of the foreign newcomer have quite a responsi­ bility, for they must not only introduce the ALT to the rules and routines of the school, they also have to help the ALT in all aspects of their domestic life: arranging accommodation, helping them to open a bank account, tell­ ing them how to use the trains and buses etc. Most JET programme ALTs have little or no Japanese language ability on their arrival and usually have



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never been to Japan before.6 They therefore need help in almost every aspect of daily life. I was twenty-seven years old when I arrived in Japan on the JET Programme, but being unable to read any signs or talk to anyone, I was temporarily reduced to the helplessness of a six-year-old. Fortunately a very kind English teacher from my base school and a very kind homestay family looked after my needs in the early days. Many SHS JETs had similar experiences to this. For Junior High School ALTs, however, the situation is different, for it is the responsibility of their City Board of Education to take care of domestic arrangements. Thus JHS JTEs did not have to bear the same burden in this regard as their SHS colleagues at base schools. In addition to helping foreign assistant teachers with mundane but time-consuming tasks like learning how to do the laundry and post an air­ mail parcel, Japanese English teachers were often faced with the more intangible burdens that come with being responsible for the only foreigner in a Japanese institution. A common conundrum was how to deal with the delicate issue of those English teachers on the staff who could not actually speak a word of English. A SHS JTE from Nagano describes the situation in this way: [T]here are older JTEs who virtually fear the presence of an ALT because they themselves have great difficulty speaking English. Since a significant number of these have not been exposed to spoken English at all and have only been teaching English from the grammar-based textbook, many of them have the very basic problem of not being able to aurally comprehend English spoken by an ALT or orally respond to them. This fact could be a source of fear and resentment of the presence of ALTs because they could threaten their meaning of existence and source of authority. (Miyashita 1999, 72)

Some of the JTEs described in this way solved the problem by avoiding all contact with the ALT and refusing to team-teach with them. ALTs inter­ viewed by McConnell told him that they did not find out that certain Japanese staff were English teachers until months into their school visits (McConnell 2000, 218). Others, on the other hand, including one senior English teacher at my base school, selflessly cooperated fully with the new ALT programme, even though they knew it could cause potential embar­ rassment in front of the pupils they taught. One of the features of Japanese school culture least understood by new Western ALTs is the way in which poor or inappropriate behaviour on the 6 One requirement for recruitment to the JET programme is that the person has not worked in Japan before.

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part of the ALT can directly tarnish the reputation of the JTEs who are responsible for them. The JTE must act as a go-between, between the ALT and the school. In the words of one JHS JTE: ‘As the caretaker of ALTs in my school, sometimes I stand between the Japanese staff and the ALT and try to solve problems or dispel misunderstandings’ (Sakai 1999, 57). In the case of extreme cultural insensitivity or rudeness on the part of the ALT, McConnell found that the attitude of the staff would often be one of endurance, knowing that the time-limited nature of the ALT contract would mean that the source of irritation would eventually be gone (McConnell 2000, 219). There are few JTEs who have not had their working lives affected in some way or other by the massive expansion of the number of ALTs in ordinary Japanese secondary schools since 1987. Publications soon became available to help them in their tasks (for example Nagae 1988). In many ways the results have been very positive, but it remains the case that the obstacles and problems described above prevent ALTs being used to their full potential to assist Japanese young people in learning practical com­ munication skills in foreign languages. 5. Japanese Teachers of English in Universities Professors and lecturers in higher education share one important thing in common with their counterparts in secondary schools: like them, they spend a much larger part of their working lives outside the language class­ room than in it. Another significant similarity is that good university teachers also feel they are responsible for moulding the ‘whole person’, not just imparting dry academic knowledge (Poole 2010). Unlike schoolteach­ ers, however, university professors and lecturers are not bound by a national curriculum, or required to use MEXT-approved textbooks. The question arises, then, as to why more professors have not used this free­ dom to teach more communicative English, or other kinds of useful English that can be used when students graduate and enter the world of work. The question thus posed assumes that Japanese professors who teach English language lessons in university see it as part of their job to prepare students for the use of English in practical situations. A brief perusal of the English lessons taught in almost any Japanese uni­ versity and the people who teach them will soon reveal that that is simply not the case. Every university student in Japan must take a certain number of credits in English and usually another foreign language. This means that



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foreign-language teaching takes up a large proportion of any university timetable, and requires a lot of people to teach it. A certain number of these classes will be taught by part-time teachers from outside, but for now we will focus on those who teach English and have tenure at the uni­ versity where it is taught. As in any other university system, Japanese aca­ demic faculty gain employment and tenure due to their standing as scholars in a particular academic field. This academic, scholarly outlook, however, can have negative repercussions when a professor is called on to teach a more practical subject like communicative English. The following passage, written by a Japanese and foreign professor in collaboration, makes the point well. In Japan, to an even greater degree than in the West, scholarship is regarded as expertise on a narrowly defined subject, especially subjects associated with intelligentsia, philosophy, classical literature, anthropology or linguis­ tics. The more classical and specialized the area of research, the greater pres­ tige, for though it is generally assumed that ‘anyone’ can become competent in a foreign language; not just ‘anyone’ can comprehend Wordsworth or Shakespeare. (Kelly and Adachi 1993, 161)

One of my university informants with long experience in the Japanese higher education system told me about a Japanese professor of linguistics who devoted his entire career to the study of the English word ‘with’ (Interview C). Even allowing for a certain degree of hyperbole here, it remains the case that Japanese professors regard highly specialised research into narrow academic topics as the most important part of their work. Problems arise, as many of my informants pointed out, from the fact that communicative foreign-language teaching is looked down upon as an academic pursuit by professors who hold this view. One British professor with experience of various universities in Japan said that the self-image of Japanese professors as serious academics lead them to deliver lectures on their area of expertise (my informant gave the examples of William Faulkner and Thomas Hardy) even when they were supposed to be teach­ ing ‘English’ (Interview B). Not only were they not concerned with the lack of practical application of their lectures, they were actually proud, since the highly specialised, academic nature of their classes made them dis­ tinct from eikaiwa or senmon gakko classes. The well-known expert on language education, Yoshida Kensaku, told me (Interview L) that when another professor observed his class and saw that students were involved in group discussions, he told Yoshida that ‘you are not doing your job!’ The more traditional idea articulated here was that it was the job of the professor to lecture the students and control every aspect of the learning

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process. Yoshida also said that professors like this are the old breed, and younger ones are more flexible in their teaching, especially if they have had part of their higher education in the West. This is another reminder that the obstacles in the way of communicative language teaching in Japan’s educational institutions are not insurmountable. Indeed, many Japanese professors and university administrators currently have to deal with the conundrum summarised below by Poole following his analysis of discussions going on within the small university that was the subject of his ethnographic study: Given that the goals of English instruction at university are often advertised as being to offer employability and credentialization, should not universities be concerned with training and hiring English professors with backgrounds in language teaching, business communication, and applied linguistics rather than literature, cultural studies and theoretical linguistics? (Poole 2010, 72)

It still remains the case, however, that the majority of Japanese tenured professors who are teaching the subject marked as ‘English’ on the time­ table are members of the latter group, not the former. If the transforma­ tion discussed above did take place, the bulk of university jobs for British, American or Irish Literature graduates in Japan would disappear. This fact alone is a major cause of inertia since Japanese professors are expected to find university appointments for the doctoral students they supervise. It would be unfair to accuse all literature specialists of failing to engage with the needs of their students for good and relevant English language education. An increasing number certainly prepare and teach good com­ municative English classes and are happy to separate the teaching part of the job from the research part. But even when this happens, most Japanese universities still fail to teach a useful English curriculum to their students because of the lack of coordination that goes on in the majority of English curricula. It is not uncommon, to cite just one example from many, to find the same student sitting in an ‘English Writ­ing I’ class and an ‘English writing III’ class during the same semester, even though normal curriculum design would require the completion of one stage before proceeding to the next. American Anthropologist John Mock, who has a long experience in Japanese universities, argues that this results from a confused application of the concepts ‘academic freedom’ and ‘faculty autonomy’.7 In Japan it is common to find the attitude among university 7 John Mock, ‘Thoughts of a Wandering Scholar’ (paper given at the Second Annual Doshisha G30 Workshop, 21 January 2012).



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professors, especially senior ones, that what they do in their classroom or lecture theatre is their own private business and that it is only natural that each professor should want to teach their own specialty in their class regardless of what their colleagues are doing in theirs (Venema 2007). The same applies to the syllabus they write for each course. A professor will only receive a response related to their syllabus from the educational affairs office if they have neglected to write something in one of the ‘required’ sections of the syllabus form, or if they have gone over the word limit for a particular section. The actual content of the syllabus is also con­ sidered to be their own private realm and cannot be criticised. It has been argued that Japanese modes of politeness and status make it extremely difficult for one professor to criticise the teaching of another (Suzuki 1978, 138–39). Since tenured professors are chosen based on their research record, not their teaching experience, it is highly unlikely that the group of individual professors responsible for teaching English will happen by chance to teach a balanced and coordinated curriculum. Also, efforts to introduce meaningful class evaluations have in most cases been success­ fully resisted, meaning that even if curricula became more coordinated there is no mechanism for evaluating how they are delivered in practice. The large number of classes that are taught by part-timers in many private universities is also an obstacle in the way of curriculum reform, as is the preponderance of short-term contracts for many foreign-language teach­ ers (Kirk 2001). In this atmosphere it is extremely difficult to organise a coherent curriculum involving all English classes and it is understandable that no serious effort is usually made. However, the fact must be added that in some universities coordinated curricula have been successfully introduced. One example of this is in Ehime University (a national univer­ sity) where an English Education Centre (EEC) was set up to coordinate English teaching across the university (Blight 2003). In this case opposi­ tion from English teaching faculty who saw their autonomy threatened was overcome. It is another reminder that the obstacles outlined in this chapter are not insurmountable. 6. Organisations Representing Japanese Teachers of English For secondary-school teachers who want to discuss best practice with col­ leagues outside their schools or board-of-education areas, there are a number of options. Those teachers who are members of a prefectural or city teachers’ union that is affiliated with the two largest national organ­ isations, Nikkyōso or Zenkyō, will have the option of attending the annual

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National Conference on Educational Research, which always includes seminars and symposia on English language teaching (interviews P and Q, Aspinall 2011: 129–30). Local branches of the unions have also been active in supporting the increased participation of native-speaker English teach­ ers (see for example Saikōkyo 1992). Another association that one of my informants was a member of (interview G) is ELEC Friends Association (ELEC dōyūkai eigo kyōiku gakkai). The same informant is a member of the Institute for Research in English Teaching (the organisation that had Harold Palmer as its first director in 1923). Both of these organisations con­ tinue to support teachers who use the oral approach to communicative language teaching in the classroom. For University and college educators the largest national organisation is JACET (the Japan Association for College English teachers, Daigaku eigo kyōiku gakkai) which was founded in 1962 and currently has about 3,000 members. It has seven regional chapters and each chapter organises a number of SIGs (Special Interest Groups) in areas like Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), bilingual education and materials writing. JACET holds an annual national convention as well as smaller seminars. Experts on language education from foreign universities are routinely invited to speak at these events. JACET and its SIGs sponsor a number of research projects some of which have been successful in obtaining finan­ cial support from MEXT. One of these projects (Jimbo, Hisamura and Yoffe 2009) was a detailed study of ways of improving training for secondaryschool teachers of English. It is interesting to note that JACET is composed of over 80 per cent Japanese teachers of English, while JALT, an organisa­ tion with a very similarly sized membership, is composed of foreign teach­ ers based in Japan, most of whom work in institutions of higher education. (JALT will be covered in more detail below.) JACET and JALT do actively cooperate in some areas (see Brooks 2001). Foreign English Teachers in Japan We will divide the analysis of the role of native-speaker teachers of foreign languages into the following subsections: (1) JET Programme ALTs and other public sector direct-hire ALTs, (2) being more than an assistant: the risks involved in developing a career as a foreign teacher of English in Japan, (3) teachers as risk managers: strategies available for foreign teach­ ers looking for stability, (4) foreign university teachers, and (5) organisa­ tions representing foreign teachers of English.



the role of teachers103 1. Jet Programme ALTs and Other Public Sector Direct-Hire ALTs

An account of the creation of the JET programme was given in chapter 3. The present section will examine the role of JET Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs) within the formal education system. After interviewing sixty-five participants in the early days of the programme, David McConnell came up with the following five types of JET-programme ALT. These cate­ gories can equally be applied to direct-hire ALTs, that is, teachers who are employed directly by boards of education and who work under conditions similar to JET participants. Category 1: The Aloof This type is not particularly interested in Japanese language or culture, and therefore they would largely ignore Japanese cultural expectations. In the words of one British ALT ‘if they want someone to act Japanese it’s a bit of a waste of time hiring me!’ (quoted in McConnell 2000, 193). Category 2: The Cynics Individuals in this group would usually stay only one year in their ALT job, and sometimes not even that. Cynicism often rose when very highly quali­ fied and ambitious young people (i.e. types preferred by MOFA, the minis­ try responsible for recruiting JET participants) found themselves doing simple repetitive tasks (e.g. being used as ‘human tape-recorders’) that could have been performed by far less qualified people. One of McConnell’s informants summed up their frustration in the following quotation: [The Japanese Teacher of English] gave me a cardboard watch, told me to set the hands and then ask the students what time was showing. This trivial use of my talents seemed the embodiment of everything I hated about my job. I held up the watch and asked ‘What is this?’ I said it sarcastically and meant my job, the school, the town I was living in, the whole JET experience. Several arms went up and I picked a girl sitting near the front. She stood and smiling with a smile as big as Asia said ‘It’s a Crock Mr. Hicks.’ I couldn’t have agreed more. (Quoted in McConnell 2000, 198)

Cynics differ in their attitude to teaching as a career. Some were never interested in teaching and came to Japan for other reasons: teaching was just a means to an end. Others are serious in their attitude to teaching but frustrated by the lack of opportunity to develop their teaching skills inher­ ent in being an assistant language teacher. The second category would often leave their job as an ALT to find a job where they have more scope to develop their skills as a professional teacher.

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Category 3: The Missionaries and Sensitive Change Agents McConnell found that this was the largest group of JET participants (twenty-two of the sixty-five interviewed). They saw their task as helping Japanese schools improve both language teaching and education for cul­ tural awareness. Compared to the group of cynics, they were more sympa­ thetic to the problems most Japanese teachers and children had in being confronted (often for the first time) with people from very different cul­ tural backgrounds. They faced the same limitations imposed by rigid class­ room routines and an inflexible curriculum, but instead of giving up, they responded by organising activities outside the classroom. Another way of overcoming the frustrations that are part of every ALT job was to cultivate relationships with a select group of students and teachers who were more interested in learning foreign languages and exploring foreign cultures (McConnell 2000, 201). This factor is another illustration of one of the recurring themes of this book: successful incidents of intercultural com­ munication and communicative language learning usually happen outside the official class time. Many ALTs shared the experience of this JHS teacher in Nagano, writing in another book that charts the early years of the JET programme: [T]he truly rewarding part [of the job] tends to be in other areas – the out­ side activities with the kids, the friendships and the relationships with peo­ ple; the priceless memories and the goofy occurrences that made it into your letters to the folks back home. These precious moments usually overshadow and outnumber memories of the endless self-introductions, the ‘human tape recorder’ role, the interminable sessions of drinking tea with a Principal who didn’t speak a shred of English, and other things which can cause ALTs to gnash their teeth. (Marck 1999, 48)

Research conducted in 2005, eighteen years after the start of the pro­ gramme, suggests that this problem persists: Exchanges like the JET programme have the potential to generate meaning­ ful intercultural experiences for the teachers, students and communities involved. As we have seen in this study, such exchange is happening, but not within the confines of the programme. (Breckenridge and Erling 2011, 98)

Sometimes the line between a ‘category 2’ ALT and a ‘category 3’ one can be fine. In fact it is not uncommon for the same individual to move from one category to the other during the time of their ALT contract. As indi­ cated by the teacher from Nagano, taking a positive attitude to the job of the ALT often involved suppressing the frustrations almost always found



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in classroom English activities in the vast majority of state-sector second­ ary schools. Category 4: The Careerists This category refers to ALTs who were interested in non-teaching careers in Japan or relating to Japan. They usually did the minimum amount of work required in their schools, and spent as much time as they could developing Japanese language skills, and other skills that could be of use in Japan-related careers such as journalism, tourism, government service etc. (McConnell 2000, 201). As discussed in chapter 3, the presence of JET programme participants such as these would be regarded positively by MOFA, since they would potentially go on in their future career to improve business or governmental relations between Japan and the West. Full-time teachers and others involved in educational objectives at the local level, however, might be more inclined to see ALTs such as these as being a drain on scarce resources that should be devoted wholly to educational purposes. Category 5: The Nipponophiles This was the smallest group in McConnell’s sample (eight out of sixtyfive), and consisted of those who viewed their time in Japanese schools as ‘a golden opportunity to discover an alternative cultural worldview and to expand personal horizons’ (McConnell 2000, 202). They devoted them­ selves to the study of Japanese language and traditional Japanese arts, and avoided other foreigners as much as possible. This type could fit very well into the everyday routines of a Japanese school, for example mealtimes and club activities. Their fluency in Japanese language, however, could cause problems for teachers and others who hoped to use the ALT for English conversation practice. The reluctance of this type to speak English except in formal classroom settings could create problems that are the opposite of the monolingual ‘aloof’ type (‘category 1’) discussed above. There are reported cases of ALTs being discouraged from learning Japanese beyond a very basic level since this would undermine their role as a mono­ lingual native English speaker (Breckenridge and Erling 2011, 89). McConnell wrote his study of JET programme ALTs during the early days of the programme. Subsequent expansion brought criticism from some that the quality of the incoming ALTs was in decline. In 2002, Kan Masataka, the head of in-service teacher training for Osaka prefecture,

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remarked that the quality of ALTs had clearly gone down following a rise in quantity. He said that there were ‘many’ cases of ALTs who did not know simple English grammar, and even some cases of ALTs who used violent language against pupils (Hirata et al. 2002, 16). Kan and the educa­ tors with whom he was having a discussion in the magazine article quoted above pondered the idea of giving more training to ALTs and allowing them to stay longer than the currently existing limits of the contract, but at the time of writing there were no signs that this would be put into practice. One of the reasons for bringing foreign ALTs into the classroom was to help motivate the students to learn English. The ALTs were happy to be a part of this, but some felt belittled by being ‘put on show’ for the benefit of the students. One Canadian ALT interviewed in 2005 said that the stu­ dents were expected to observe her rather than interact with her since their English level was so low (Breckenridge and Erling 2011, 92). The JET programme eventually comes to an end for all participants and then they either return home or try to pursue a career in Japan. The next section is about those who stay in Japan and continue in their role as English teacher. 2. Being More than an Assistant: The Risks Involved in Developing a Career as a Foreign Teacher of English in Japan Most of those foreigners who stayed in Japan beyond the three-year limit of the JET programme, or the limits of other teaching contracts that help bring foreigners to Japan, fall into McConnell’s category 3 above: ‘the Missionaries and Sensitive Change Agents’. That is to say they are aware of the problems inherent in language teaching in Japan, but are still determined to do their bit to make modest improvements. In general, deciding to follow the career path of a native-speaker language teacher is a risky choice for a middle-class graduate of an affluent country to make: he or she could easily find that they have entered into employment that is less secure, less well paid and of lower status than similarly quali­ fied graduates who pursue different professions. This is not only a risk for teachers who choose to work in Japan. In fact the very status of English Language Teaching (ELT) as a profession is often questioned wherever it is found. [English Language Teaching] does not appear to share any of the relevant characteristics of the accepted ‘professions’ such as medicine, law or accoun­ tancy for example: high social status, rich rewards, job security and firm prospects. Any claim to professionalism is in a second ‘less rigorous’ sense, that of a skilled commitment to a job well done. (Neilsen 2009, 41)



the role of teachers107

The author of the above quotation, Roderick Neilson, has conducted research into a number of expat teachers of English who often relish the risky nature of the ELT profession and are prepared to put up with the downside in order to take advantage of the global range of experiences that are open to an ELT teacher (Neilson 2009). Although English teaching abroad is mostly a low-paid job compared with other professions, there are some exceptions. Saudi Arabia, Brunei and other oil-rich states are some of the best-known examples of places where English teaching can be very well paid, although there are often lifestyle restrictions to cope with in these places. Japan during the 1980s was another well-known destina­ tion for ELT teachers in search of good pay, although the recession follow­ ing the bursting of the speculative bubble in the 1990s combined with an increase in the ‘supply’ of qualified native speakers has reduced opportu­ nities somewhat (Neilson 2009, 44). In Japan, one set of frustrations that arises for many expat English teachers comes from the friction between the model of the expat English teacher as the globetrotting peripatetic, and the reality for many of the foreigners who want to settle in Japan and put down roots. In many cases an individual may start out with the wanderlust of the international travel­ ler, but may later wish to settle down with a home and family. It is not unusual for a young single person to be more willing to embrace risk with regard to employment, compared with an older person with more respon­ sibilities. Many problems relating to employment conditions for foreign teachers in Japan arise from the friction that inevitably results when the desire of the teacher for long-term security comes up against the fact that the employment contract was designed with the peripatetic teacher in mind. A commonly occurring biography among foreign English teachers in Japan (and other countries) is of the young carefree person who arrives in the country expecting to stay for only a short while, meets someone, gets married, and starts reviewing their career plans and their qualifica­ tions with a view to turning a temporary career into a permanent one.8 Many schools and boards of education in Japan, however, consciously follow the model that Japanese staff are permanent and foreign staff are temporary. Foreigners in public secondary schools are assistants and sometimes referred to as suketto or hired help (McVeigh 2004, 136). This condescending attitude is reinforced by the fact that the vast majority of 8 This pattern fits the biography of the informant in interviews B, F, I and E. Informant E also commented that this biographical pattern fits a large number of the CVs that he has looked at over the years of people applying for jobs at his university.

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English teaching jobs in Japan for native speakers share with the JET pro­ gramme the fact that they do not require any professional language teach­ ing qualifications or advanced Japanese language ability.9 Foreign teachers who do not wish to be temporary workers or viewed as enthusiastic ama­ teurs and who have decided that they are staying in Japan have found that they can respond to this problematic situation in a variety of ways that will be discussed in the following section. 3. Teachers as Risk-Managers: Strategies Available for Foreign Teachers Looking for Stability In this section we will examine four main options for foreign-language teachers who want more stability in their life and in their working condi­ tions in Japan. (i) Teachers can Look for Jobs that are Permanent At present it is illegal for someone who is not a Japanese citizen to hold a teaching post in a public school. Until 1982 the same was true of faculty positions in national or public universities. Private institutions are exempt from these regulations and are free to hire non-Japanese employees if they so desire. After two decades of a rising foreign population and chronic financial problems for many institutions, the competition for permanent posts has become acute. This has resulted in qualification inflation. Per­ manent jobs that only required a masters degree twenty years ago now require a PhD (either finished or near completion). This, in turn, has pro­ duced a boom in Japan-based teachers doing online masters degrees and doctoral degrees usually in TEFL, Applied Linguistics or a related field. After not arriving in Japan with any qualifications relevant to foreignlanguage teaching, many find themselves extremely well qualified, or even over-qualified.10 Most teachers who follow this strategy find that they also need to improve their Japanese language skills. Unlike part-time or temporary workers, permanent workers are often involved with admin­ istrative tasks that require ability in written and spoken Japanese.

 9 Undergraduate degrees are required by almost all employers as well as by the visaissuing authorities. However, the type of degree, the type of awarding institution and the major area of study are usually irrelevant. There have been some scandals involving teach­ ers with degrees from ‘diploma mills’. 10 I was once refused a post at an eikaiwa school in Sapporo on the grounds that my two MAs would create problems for the other teachers with no postgraduate qualifications.



the role of teachers109

(ii) Teachers can be Employed in a Series of Time-Limited Contracts Assistant language teachers at Boards of Education and foreign language instructors in universities are often employed on fixed-term contracts, usually lasting from three to five years. One tactic adopted by many English teachers in Japan is to line up another fixed-term contract in the final year of the existing one. This is only a realistic tactic if the person lives within reasonable commuting distances of a large number of potential employ­ ers, that is in the highly urbanised areas of Kanto or Kansai. Even in this kind of area, this tactic involves risks, especially if the teacher is the main bread-winner of their family and if they are considering pursuing this method of earning an income over the long term. Teachers following this tactic often retain the option of returning to their home country or mov­ ing to a third country where there may be better opportunities. (iii) Teachers can put Together a Portfolio of Part-Time Jobs Part-time job opportunities for English teachers exist in a variety of forms. Since it is not permitted to use graduate students as teachers, most univer­ sities depend on part-time instructors to deliver the curriculum. This is especially true of university departments which require a large amount of contact time in small class sizes. Also the eikaiwa industry relies heavily on part-time teachers. Therefore there are often a large number of part-time positions available, especially in densely populated urban areas. In some ways the tactic of putting together a collection of part-time jobs – maybe for half a dozen different employers at any one time – is more stable than tactic (ii) above since the teacher is not dependent on one main employer. If one part-time contract comes to an end, it can usually be fairly quickly replaced by another one. The drawback with this tactic, however, is that there are usually no pension or health insurance benefits associated with part-time contracts, and so the employees must make their own plans: they have to be their own individualised risk manager. (iv) Teachers can Become their Own Boss Some foreign teachers set up their business teaching English, often from their own home. In Japan, regulations relating to conducting a business from a residential address are fairly light, and so the main restrictions on this kind of business relate to the practical ones of space, time and cus­ tomer recruitment. In order to compete with eikaiwa chains these entre­ preneurs cannot charge too much per lesson, and so in order to succeed they have to put in long hours of teaching or employ other teachers.

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chapter four 4. Foreign University Teachers

The majority of non-Japanese nationals employed at Japanese universities are there to teach language or some aspect of their native culture, and many are only partially integrated into the day-to-day running of their institution. Before 1982, foreign nationals were not allowed to hold ten­ ured positions at national or public universities. This was due to the fact that permanent employees of such universities were classified as civil ser­ vants, and non-Japanese are barred from becoming civil servants. Those foreigners who were there full-time worked under the classification of gaikokujin kyōshi with renewable one-year contracts. For a brief golden age, the life of a gaikokujin kyōshi was enviable indeed with good pay, bonuses, free flights home, about three months a year paid vacation, hous­ ing subsidies, extra money for research and travel and so on. Most of these academics were told that the annual renewal of their contracts was a mere formality. They were led to believe that they had the same security as their Japanese colleagues who had a lifetime employment guarantee from day one of their appointment as an associate professor. The golden age for foreign academics came to an end in 1992 when, with the aim of saving money at a time of severe budget cuts, MOE advised national universities to get rid of older (and better paid) gaikokujin kyōshi and set term limits for future hires. The resultant sacking of foreign aca­ demics who had been given verbal assurances when they were hired that they could stay until retirement was one of the most shameful chap­ ters in the history of foreign faculty working in Japan. It even brought the intervention of the American ambassador to Japan, who protested – in vain – about the shoddy treatment of American nationals by universities that had gone back on their word (Hall 1998, chapter 3). The ‘guidance’ from MOE was non-binding and some foreigners were able to hold onto their jobs, but thereafter newly hired gaikokujin kyōshi were limited to five-year contracts or less. After the law was changed in 1982, a new category of permanent gaikokujin kyōin was created. During the passage of the new law through the Diet, LDP backbencher, Nishioka Takeo and other nationalists tried to enforce fixed employment terms for new foreign kyōin. They argued that this would be best since international academic exchanges were built around specific short-term projects (Hall 1998, 104). Their effort to change the legislation failed, but it illustrated the conservative view that national institutions like universities should only welcome foreigners on a tempo­ rary basis. This view was shared by some in the MOE. In 1996 one ministry



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official told an American researcher that in his opinion the 1982 legislation was ‘unnecessary and inappropriate’ (Lazlo 1998, 37). Universities in the private sector were never bound by the legal restrictions that full-time staff could not be foreign, but there we also find that the majority of nonJapanese faculty are hired on limited-term contracts (usually three years or five years) leading to the ‘musical chairs’ phenomenon of foreign teach­ ers in a certain region rotating around the jobs available at the universities in that area. In terms of relevant qualifications, many foreign professors share with their Japanese counterparts the fact that they hold advanced degrees in subjects other than language teaching or applied linguistics. Anthropolo­ gist Brian McVeigh notes how at one university he worked at, “all nonJapanese [faculty] regardless of their academic specialization, were required to teach some English” (McVeigh 1997, 78). The one exception was an American of Japanese ancestry who taught only history. In McVeigh’s words, “because he was not white, the administration appar­ ently felt that his racial characteristics would not be appropriate for the ‘internationalising’ experience of learning English, though he spoke this language fluently” (Ibid.). This preference for white Westerners to play the role of ‘native’ English language teachers can be seen throughout the edu­ cation system. Being white is often more important than having TEFL or TESOL teaching qualifications. Although foreign university teachers often lack language-teaching qualifications, there are several important areas where they are different from their Japanese colleagues. Firstly, the chances are very high that the foreign teacher will have experienced communicative language teaching as a student in their home country, since such a style of teaching is very common in secondary schools and universities in Europe, North America and Australasia. Also, if they have studied the Japanese language, the chances are very high that they will have been taught with a communica­ tive language study method, since that is the dominant orthodoxy for teaching Japanese as a foreign language at home and abroad. Secondly, the nature of the rotating job market for limited-term contracts described above means that most foreign teachers have to consciously seek to improve the relevant qualifications on their CVs, knowing that they will soon have to look for another language-teaching job in an increasingly competitive market. In contrast a Japanese university teacher in most cases has job security for life and so can spend their time on their own chosen field of research whether or not it has any connection to language teaching (as described in the section for Japanese teachers above).

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These factors mean that even for foreign teachers whose first degrees are in non-related subjects, the chances are high that most of them will under­ stand the concept of communicative foreign-language teaching, and will introduce aspects of it into their English classes. McVeigh has written about role of the native-speaker language teacher in universities in Japan in a way that will resonate with anyone who has experience of being in this position: At some universities non-Japanese language instructors are viewed as a cure-all for whatever ails the institution. ‘They expect miracles just because I’m a native speaker’ quipped one British instructor. All too often nonJapanese instructors are regarded as ‘energizers’, entertainers, activators of students, ‘cultural ambassadors’, living tokens of some idealized and stereo­ typical ‘foreign’ culture held up as a mirror of Japan. (McVeigh 2000, 85)

The first experience of teaching at a Japanese university can contain many surprises for the Western-educated academic. I arrived for my first teach­ ing job at a major national university, having never taught at the university level before in any country. Instead of receiving orientation related to the teaching I would be required to do, I was simply told by the head of the English department ‘you have taught English in high schools in Japan, so you don’t need any advice about what to do.’ He was absolutely right: the conditions in the classroom were almost identical. Most of the rooms I taught in were copies of high school classrooms with a podium for the teacher to stand on, a blackboard, and the students sitting at individual desks arranged in rows. Class sizes for most compulsory English classes were the same too: between forty and fifty students per class. Also, the level of spoken English was uniformly poor or non-existent, just as it had been in high school. I had the same advantages that I had had at high school too: the generally good behaviour of the students and their very high English reading ability. Life was also made easier for me as a new teacher by the fact that first- and second-year compulsory English classes shared a common textbook. I was surprised to see that the book was a Cambridge University Press text designed for ‘false beginners’, the euphe­ mism used in Japan and other Asian countries for students with good knowledge of the written language, but very low competence at the spo­ ken language. I associated texts like that with eikaiwa schools, not with prestigious universities. I later found out that its adoption was due to an attempt to create some sort of unity in the first- and second-year English curriculum. The attempt was a failure and, following negative feedback from the students, the compulsory-text idea was abandoned two years after I started work at the university, to be replaced by the opposite



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extreme: the policy that every English class had to have a different text­ book from every other class: a policy that required the adoption of over 250 different textbooks. This policy in its turn was soon abandoned, to be replaced by new ideas. In spite of some problems, there are also many positive aspects to being a foreign teacher in a Japanese university, not the least of which is a high degree of freedom in how one teaches and carries out research. Finally, it should be added that the negative experiences of Western tertiary-level educators in Asia are not confined to Japan. The recent expansion and internationalisation of higher education in China has led to an increase in foreigners working there, and research has found similar complaints to the ones voiced by McVeigh’s informants quoted above. ‘Beth’, an American English teacher told researcher Phiona Stanley that the Chinese college students in an Oral English class ‘expected me to get up there and be the funny foreign monkey … they wanted a foreign entertainer’ (quoted in Stanley 2011, 197). 5. Organisations Representing Foreign Teachers of English The largest national organisation representing foreign teachers in Japan is the Japan Association for Language teaching (JALT). It was formed in 1976 from a group of regional language teachers’ associations. It began with about 300 members, but by 1987 had grown into a national organisation consisting of more than 2,700 members (Wordell 1985, 17). In January 2012 its website reported that it had ‘nearly 3,000 members with 35 chapters and 26 SIGs (Special Interest Groups)’ (http://jalt.org/main/home). JALT is the largest affiliate of TESOL in Asia and is a branch of IATEFL (International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language). Through its journals, conferences and local branches JALT certainly has an effect on foreign-language teaching in Japan at the institutional level and in individual classrooms. Another organisation was formed by British teacher David Paul. When he came to Japan to teach English he had many of the experiences shared by the people discussed in this chapter. His response to these frustrations, however, went beyond the teachers who are covered by the categories described above. When I first came to Japan, I had some of the experiences as an English teacher which were very frustrating, and often made me quite angry. I have little time for those who sit around complaining, but not doing anything to change things. I felt I should either go back to the UK or do as much as

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Paul’s response to what he saw as some of the main problems of English teaching in Japan was to found David English House, an English education centre in Hiroshima, and to form English Teachers in Japan (ETJ), a grassroots volunteer organisation which charges no membership fee. Both of these organisations provide teacher training and other forms of support for teachers of any nationality based in Japan. There are several unions in Japan that have helped foreign teachers deal with discrimination and unfair dismissal. Three in particular have been very active: NUGW Tokyo Nambu, the General Union (based in Osaka), and the Fukuoka General Union. They operate under the umbrella organ­ isation National Union of General Workers and are open to Japanese and non-Japanese members. Unions have helped foreign employees take uni­ versities and other education institutions to court for unfair dismissal. Information and advice about what to do in cases of discrimination have also been shared on internet forums like the PALE (Professionalism, Administration and Leadership in Education) forum, run by members of the JALT PALE Special Interest Group. The anti-discrimination activist Arudou Debito also runs a website (http://www.debito.org) where infor­ mation is shared for the benefit of members of the non-Japanese commu­ nity resident in Japan, a group that includes but is not confined to foreignlanguage teachers and other workers in the education sector. Unions and other activist groups continue to struggle to have foreign teachers accepted as permanent employees if they so desire and are properly qualified. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, there will always be a certain section of the foreign-language teaching profession who prefer to travel from coun­ try to country and from job to job, but their choice of lifestyle should not be one that is imposed on the entire non-Japanese teaching profession in Japan. Unfortunately, a recent negative trend in employment (in educa­ tion as in other sectors) is the increase in temporary jobs (often mediated by despatch agencies), something which is a threat to the professional integrity and living standards of all language teachers whatever their nationality. Conclusion This chapter has shown that one reason for the failure to implement communicative language teaching successfully in Japanese schools and



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universities is the fact that a large number of teachers tasked with intro­ ducing this style of teaching simply do not recognise that this is an impor­ tant part of their job as they understand it. Their working lives are full of many tasks and responsibilities that have nothing to do with teaching English communication. Foreign native-speaker teachers are usually more committed to that style of teaching, but are often frustrated by the envi­ ronment they have to work in and the marginalisation of their role as teacher. When it comes to communicative language teaching, institutional and cultural obstacles alike conspire to prevent Japanese and foreign pro­ fessionals from doing their job to the full.

CHAPTER FIVE

PUTTING ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION POLICY INTO PRACTICE: THE ROLE OF LEARNERS To what extent do Japanese young people see themselves as individualised risk managers and global citizens, or to what extent do they aspire to these roles? Ability to communicate effectively in English is considered to be the hallmark of a global citizen. Therefore, a lack of willingness to learn English could reflect a rejection of the role of global citizen. Alternatively some social groups could respond more positively than others, potentially leading to more division and inequality, something that Japanese education policy has tried to mitigate in the post-war period. It has already been made clear in previous chapters that rational planning at the top of the education system has not unproblematically been turned into desired results at the level of the school and classroom. How much of this is due to resistance of Japanese young people to the role that MEXT wants them to adopt? Meredith I. Honig, an expert on education policy implementation, reminds us that the ‘essential implementation question [is] not “what’s implementable and works”, but what is implementable and what works for whom, where when and why?’ (Honig 2006, 2). Sociologist of education, Paul Willis, has written the following in the case of England. Power brokers and policy planners are transfixed by the internal logic of their ‘top-down’ practices and initiatives; however they fail to ponder the frequently ironic and unintended consequences of these practices and the creative cultural way in which subordinates and working class groups respond to them. These ‘bottom up’ responses are often informed by quite different social practices and assumptions. (Willis 2006, 507)

In 1977 Willis had written about how working-class boys and young men (‘the lads’) in an English industrial city had resisted the middle-class norms of the educational system by developing their own culture of resistance. However, by doing this they had participated in the generational replacement of individuals in unequal class positions (Willis 1977). Although they understood that an individual could improve his or her place in society by gaining qualifications (and in the 1970s, higher education in England bore no tuition fees), they also understood that no amount

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of extra qualification could improve the position of the whole class. Therefore, someone who worked hard on improving their qualifications must be seen as a traitor to the class, someone who arrogantly thought they were ‘better’ than their peers. There are parallels here with Japanese young people who understand that attaining communication skills in English can open doors to career advancement, but also know that attaining such status will mark them out as different from the vast majority of their peers who cannot follow. This, combined with the cultural norm that mitigates against ostentatious behaviour, explains why students who can speak English well (e.g. some kikokushijo) refuse to do so in front of their peers in the typical Japanese classroom. From the point of view of a British person, Japanese ‘lads’ can seem very passive compared to some of their British counterparts. Hooliganism is almost unheard of at Japanese sporting fixtures, and in the past thirty years, there have been no equivalents to the riots that broke out in 1981 and 2011 in several English cities. Japanese youth culture does not have the same widespread culture of recreational violence that mars English, Scottish and Welsh society, especially in town centres on a Friday or Saturday night. Levels of juvenile crime in Japan are low by comparative standards, but this did not prevent the media from sparking off a moral panic in the 1990s about out-of-control, criminal youth.1 Detailed research carried out in 2001 by Peter Ackermann found that in fact Japanese teenagers did not take ‘an aggressive or self-assertive position’ (Ackermann 2004, 79). Although there were clear problems of lack of communication and lack of empathy across the ‘generation gap’, this did not usually lead to aggressive confrontation. Many teenagers simply did not pay much attention to what was said about their generation by adults or in the media. This is confirmed by research by Dawn Grimes-MacLellan conducted during the same period but in a different part of Japan. She found that ‘many [JHS] students strongly dis-identified with the view that they were “problems” or “dangerous”, explicitly rejecting being positioned as the scapegoat for Japan’s problems’ (Grimes-MacLellan 2011, 74). It can be argued that in post-industrial societies like Japan, moral panics about out-of-control youth reflect drastic shifts in the lives of young people and their networks

1 The start of the moral panic can be traced to a grisly murder case in 1997 involving the murder of a ten-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy by a fourteen-year-old boy in Kobe. The murderer left the decapitated head of the boy at the entrance of a junior high school.



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of support. As Grimes-MacLellan puts it, ‘contemporary youth, navigating the shifting terrain of 21st Century postmodernity are aligning with and creating new cultures as they disengage from traditional ones’ (GrimesMacLellan 2011, 63). The school system, which was the product of a different age, is poorly equipped to cope with these changes. Other criticisms of Japanese youth that can be found in the media are the notions that they are lazy and irresponsible. In the words of Toivonen and Imoto, ‘nearly all youth problems in Japan are, in one way or another, concerned with incomplete or delayed transitions into what are viewed as culturally appropriate social roles’ (Toivonen and Imoto 2012, 17). If some members of the older generation are disappointed by the lack of the same work ethic among younger Japanese people, however, it is often because they are not aware of the economic realities facing younger workers. The economic squeeze that followed the bursting of the speculative bubble in 1991 put terrible pressure on many Japanese companies. But, true to their obligations, they tried to lay off as few workers as possible. This meant putting a freeze on new hires. Genda Yuji, an Associate Professor of Tokyo University, is very persuasive in analysing this trade-off between protecting the vested interests of middle-aged and older workers versus sacrificing the opportunities for young workers to gain entry to stable employ­ment. Genda is critical of those who put the blame on the victims of this squeeze. New words that were coined during the 1990s like parasaito shinguru (‘parasite single’ – those who still live at home with their parents even when they are in their late twenties or thirties) and furiitaa (‘freeters’ – those who do not take full-time work, but instead do a succession of part-time jobs) were designed to make young people feel guilty about not getting jobs that were simply not there (Genda 2005). Another response made by Japanese firms to the economic crisis and the rising value of the yen was to cut costs by shifting more and more production overseas. This process also reduced the number of jobs available for new hires in Japan. It also opened up firms to the criticism that they were running away from problems at home rather than trying to help solve them. Their withdrawal from Japan is one of the two types of ‘exit’ that Leonard Schoppa analyses in his book Race for the Exits (2006). The other ‘exit’ is the refusal of many Japanese women to marry or have children. Here Schoppa uses the concept of ‘exit’ devised by Alfred Hirschman. Hirschman’s (1986) theory contrasts ‘exit’ (withdrawal from a relationship or organisation) with ‘voice’ (attempting to improve a relationship or organisation by complaining or campaigning for reforms). In short, Schoppa contends that Japanese firms and women have not mobilised to

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press for reform through the political system (voice) because they could opt out (exit) instead. Looking at these trends through the prism of the risk society paradigm discussed in chapter 1, the effects of globalisation (i.e. the global competition faced by Japanese companies combined with their ability to move production offshore), and the effects of individualisation (i.e. the ability of individual women to make their own decisions about whether or not to have children, and the ability of young people to ‘opt out’ of a conventional career) are transforming society. In their discussion about the differences between ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ effects of globalisation, Kariya and Rappleye are clear that the effects of global economic change on employment in Japan must certainly be placed on the ‘real’ side of the line. As evidence they cite a decline of manufacturing jobs between 1992 and 2002 of 22 per cent accompanied by an increase of employees hired in the service sector from 1,481,000 to 1,804,000 over the same period (Kariya and Rappleye 2010, 27). Another structural change in the same period is the massive increase in part-time jobs.2 These changes in the labour market had a dramatic effect on the way transition from school to work was managed and has resulted in increasing social divisions between those who can get a permanent, secure job and those who cannot. This phenomenon has been called an ‘incentive divide’ by Kariya and has resulted in students from working-class families studying less hard at school (Kariya 2001). Some who leave school with poor employment prospects take advantage of the freedom offered by the furitaa lifestyle to come and go from parttime jobs in ways that are not open to permanent employees. This is another example of the way the globalised Japanese economy has turned young people into more individualised risk takers, although the kind of ‘bottom-up’ practices of young people that result from this transformation are not necessarily the ones envisioned by bureaucrats in Tokyo. We will now move on to an examination of the affect that this incentive divide and other cultural changes have had on the study of English and other foreign languages in schools, starting with junior high schools (JHS). Junior High School Students and their Attitudes to English Surveys show that lack of motivation to study English among schoolchildren is a serious problem. Alienation from English starts very soon after 2 In 1997 there were 1.07 million temporary workers in Japan, and by 2007 this had risen to 3.84 million.



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children are introduced to the subject. In November 2011, MEXT’s National Institute for Educational Policy Research conducted a nationwide survey of 3,225 JHS third-year students. The survey produced the paradoxical result that while 85 per cent of respondents believed ‘it is important to study English’ and 70 per cent agreed with the sentence that ‘English will be useful to get a job in the future’, only 11 per cent responded that they strongly hope to get a job that requires English skills. Furthermore, 43 per cent answered ‘I don’t want to get a job that requires English skills’, up from 36 per cent in a survey conducted in 2003 (Yomiuri Shimbun, 29 January 2012). An editorial in the Japan Times remarked that the ‘disjuncture between what [the JHS students] consider important for the future and what they want for themselves is puzzling and disappointing’ (Japan Times, 5 February 2012). It went on: ‘English teachers, administrators and the education ministry should take these results as a wake-up call. The current approach is clearly de-motivating students.’ There is clearly a serious problem concerning the motivation of JHS students to study English. Unfortunately it is not a new problem. A guide for foreigners teaching English in Japan published in 1985 warned that most second-year JHS students hate English because they find it ‘difficult’ and ‘not interesting’ (Tanaka Steinberg 1985, 98–99). A survey carried out in 2004 found that Japanese university students who were identified as ‘lower proficient’ at English mostly traced their dislike of the language to their second year in JHS (Falout and Maruyama 2004). As we explained in the introduction, it is an uncontroversial fact that English language is difficult for Japanese children to learn, especially since it has no direct relevance to the daily lives of almost all of them. The national survey quoted above shows that most JHS students are aware that English ability is important for adults competing in the job market. But their daily experience in the classroom only teaches most of them that mastery of English is far beyond their reach. Those students who see English as ‘too difficult’ and are also on the wrong side of the ‘incentive divide’ will be highly unlikely to put in the kind of effort required to master the language. Their refusal to study English hard is only one part of their alienation from the values of the education system. Like the British ‘lads’ studied by Willis, they refuse to enter the competition for the credentials necessary for a professional career and a middle-class lifestyle because they believe the system is rigged against them. In the face of these problems, many experts feel that more could be done to help students adopt a more positive attitude to English in the JHS classroom. Foreign teachers with qualifications in TEFL often express

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frustration when team-teaching in JHS classes because children are never allowed to ‘have a go’ at making an answer to a question when they do not have all the exact words at their fingertips. They are taught to remain silent until they have the one ‘correct answer’ in their heads, and then to verbalise the answer (Interview H). It is often difficult to stop the learning style of other subjects from carrying over into the English classroom. So if the students are told in their kokugo class that there is only one correct way to write a kanji character (to give just one example), then they also unconsciously assume that there is only one correct way to make a certain English sentence (Interview F). This is another example of the norms of the Japanese classroom working against a positive approach to learning a foreign language (Aspinall 2006). Foreign teachers who are new to Japanese secondary schools are often frustrated when they ask a student a question and expect the student to reply by giving their own individual opinion. The frustration begins with the silence that usually follows the question being asked, and is then compounded by the student consulting with his or her companions sitting in the desks on each side, in front and/or behind. The foreign teacher wants a quick answer – even if it contains mistakes, and wants an individual, original answer that does not require consultation with any other student. The Japanese student, however, feels that he or she must give a ‘correct answer’ and since the teacher has just asked a question that is not in the textbook, needs to think very carefully and confer with at least one other student before answering. This form of expected classroom behaviour fits exactly with the social norm for Japanese adolescents described by American anthropologist Gerald LeTendre. Japanese give young adolescents very few opportunities to be completely responsible for their own actions, to display self-control on their own, but organize many group routines or ‘scripts’ for adolescents to follow. Maturity becomes defined by how well one follows the scripts. (LeTendre 2000, 95)

This helps explain why an American – or other Western – teacher who walks into a Japanese classroom expecting spontaneity on the part of the students will soon be disappointed. An aspect of JHS English education that has come in for much criticism from foreign and domestic experts is the insistence that students must be mixed together in large classes regardless of ability or whether or not they had previously studied English. The requirement that children in compulsory education (i.e. up to the end of JHS) should not be put in streams or sets according to aptitude or ability is one that is based upon some very



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deeply held beliefs in Japanese society about what a good education should provide (Aspinall 2006, 263–64). Egalitarianism in compulsory education is also one of the few concepts in post-war theory and practice that has found vocal support from the Left and the Right of the political spectrum and is therefore very difficult to challenge. The practical effect of this egalitarianism is, in the words of one former JHS assistant teacher, ‘up to 15 (years old) you have kids with attention deficit disorder sitting next to kids who are going to top universities’ (Interview F). Good teachers often deal with this by getting the more advanced students to help those who are struggling. Less effective teachers allow those at the top and the bottom of the ability range to go to sleep while they direct the content of the class at those in ‘the middle’. As any teacher of adolescents knows, if the content of the lesson is too easy or too difficult for some students the likelihood of class disruption increases. Both the problem and the ‘good’ solution are clearly features of an educational ethos where the learning of social skills, including how to learn to be productive members of a group, are more important than the acquisition of particular intellectual skills like proficiency at a foreign language. The unintended consequence of such an approach is that parents are forced to pay for their children to go to juku or an eikaiwa class if they want them to receive education in subjects like English that is appropriate for their individual ability and objectives. MEXT is aware of this problem, and as part of its 2003 Action Plan to improve English it proposed that ‘Small-group teaching and the streaming of students according to proficiency in the English classes of junior and senior high schools will be positively adopted’ (MEXT 2003, 3). Apart from some pilot projects including the ‘Super English High schools’ (SELHi), no serious efforts have so far been made to implement this proposal. The widespread adoption of ‘small group’ teaching would require the recruitment of more full-time teachers, something that is not possible due to budget constraints. Senior High School Students The issue of mixed-ability classes is lessened somewhat when students move on to senior high school (SHS) due to the differentiation that takes place at this level. At this stage, students who plan to enter a good university must make sure that they enter a good academic high school with an established record at getting its graduates into top universities. In order to do this they must pass the school’s entrance exam. Both the high school

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entrance exam system and the university entrance exam system have been identified as serious obstacles to effective communicative foreignlanguage teaching in Japan. The main problem is that these are paper tests focusing on the written language. Although there are individual schools and universities that include oral interviews in some limited cases, the number of these is too small to have much of a wash-back effect on high school teaching. Not all high schools prepare students for university entrance of course. There are specialised high schools in agriculture and fisheries, as well as industrial and commercial high schools. There is also the option of going to five-year technical colleges (kōsen) that provide a very high quality technical education to young people (mostly boys) aged 15–20. Whatever option a student takes at fifteen-plus (and about 97 per cent of young people in Japan stay on in full-time education or training until they are 18, even though it is not legally compulsory) he or she cannot escape English. English is a compulsory component of every single kind of postfifteen education in Japan, as it is of post-eighteen education. There is simply no escaping the subject; and this is probably another cause of its unpopularity. As is the case in most other OECD countries (the notable exception being Germany), vocational education at the secondary school level in Japan carries with it the stigma of being of less value (of having lower social capital) than a thoroughgoing academic education. This means that students in these high schools have almost certainly not mastered English as an academic subject. In most cases this leads to even more alienation from English than one finds in academic high schools. In a few cases, however, I have seen skilled English teachers take advantage of this and turn it into a learning opportunity. Some of the best high school English classes I have been involved in were at a commercial high school in Saitama (the school I visited twice a week during my time as an ALT on the JET Programme). The JTE was highly trained and capable, and the students did not have the burden round their necks of having to spend all class time preparing for paper tests of the written language. The classes were all girls who clearly had the intellectual capacity to study at university but, due to the gendered nature of the Japanese workforce, were on course to leave school at eighteen and get an OL (office lady) job. The result was that we could forget about entrance exams and spend a large amount of class time doing communicative English activities. This experience also taught me that the cultural traits of the Japanese schoolroom mentioned above do not have to be obstacles to effective communicative language teaching.



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A good teacher can always create his or her own ‘small culture’ in the language classroom that can promote the learning of English as a spoken language as well as a written language. It is not impossible also to do this in a school that is preparing students for entrance exams, but in that case there is always the danger that ‘English conversation’ will be seen as a distraction by those students who are hoping to get a good score at a traditional entrance exam. This is exactly what I was told by students at my other high school, a prestigious boys’ high school which routinely got at least fifty boys into Tokyo University each year. To take another example, in 2007, a Japanese high-school teacher in Hyogo prefecture introduced an ‘English only’ class with some success but found that the students ‘avoided speaking English as much as possible, despite their belief that it would help them’ (Kurihara 2008, 7). So the paradoxical attitude to English that so puzzled the Japan Times when it was found in JHS children is also common at the SHS level: most students recognise the value of English, but those same students are reluctant to ‘give it a go’ and try to improve their own competence. The reluctance of students to speak English is another factor that prevents SHS teachers from speaking English too. For busy JTEs it is simply easier and less stressful to go with the flow and take the pressure off themselves and their students by speaking Japanese throughout the lesson. One of the successful contributions of the JET programme therefore is that it puts the JTE in the situation where he or she has to use some spoken English in the classroom. This is a limited achievement, but it is a start. JET is not the only example of a national programme aimed at improving spoken English. Another example of a successful programme aimed at improving communicative English teaching is the Super English Language High School (SELHi) programme organized and sponsored by MEXT (and discussed in chapter three). The original aim was to establish one hundred such schools, including at least one in all of Japan’s forty-seven prefectures. Schools that successfully applied were given extra resources from MEXT in return for conducting action research into the improvements in English teaching that they were undertaking. The programme grew to comprise 169 schools by 2011. Most of these schools decided to focus their efforts on a select group of students. This means that some students are allowed to follow a special course where more time is devoted to English language study. Those high schools that offer special courses in English language allow selected students who take those courses to concentrate on English and reduce the number of class hours spent on other subjects such as

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mathematics and science. This practice overcomes the twin obstacles of mixed-ability classes and shortage of time spent on the task that hold back progress in English language programmes at most high schools. As we have seen elsewhere in this book, it is also a practice that comes up against the egalitarian norm that is one of the common characteristics of learning in Japan. For that reason schools and teachers that have adopted this kind of programme have often encountered problems in breaking with the old ways of doing things and establishing a new kind of language syllabus. University Students: Problems of Motivation University students in Japan have no choice about studying English, at least for the first two years of their time in higher education. There is a clear and understandable difference between those students who have chosen English language as their major field of study and those who have chosen another subject. It is common for teachers to complain of apathy and lack of motivation in the latter group. This problem of lack of motivation is not confined to the study of English. The general apathy of students at universities in Japan has been commentated on by almost every study that compares Japanese education to education in the West. The following account, included in a guidebook for foreign teachers coming to Japanese universities, can be regarded as fairly typical. The young men and women seen on the college campuses today had to study extraordinarily hard in high schools and in some cases for an extra year or two in intensive preparatory schools after graduating from high school to pass the entrance exams for entry into university. Once they begin college, passing courses is mostly a formality and lack of motivation for learning is widespread. Thus the prevailing attitude in society at large as well as among faculty members and students is that college is a place for enjoyment, a ‘leisure-land.’ Many college students do in fact devote far more hours and energy to part-time jobs, extra-curricular activities or personal interests, than to study. (Nozaki 1993, 28)

Very similar descriptions of student life can be found in the literature on education in Japan (see e.g. Ishikida 2005, 156) as well as literary and other general accounts of contemporary Japan. Is this a fair or accurate view of Japanese university students? A note of caution should be sounded when the sheer size, as well as the variety of Japan’s post-eighteen population in full-time education is taken into consideration. In 2010 there were 778 universities in Japan (86 national, 95 prefectural or municipal and 597



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private). They catered for 2,844,582 day students and 42,832 evening students. There were also 395 two-year junior colleges (26 prefectural or municipal and 369 private) catering for 155,273 students (2,608 of whom were on evening courses). In addition there were 3,311 senmon gakkō (specialised training colleges) catering for 637,897 students studying a variety of subjects from fashion design to nursing (all figures are from Ministry of Education 2011). Firstly we will examine in more detail the case of students studying in four-year universities. Taking this group of students as a whole, one objective fact that is beyond doubt is that the overwhelming number of those who enter university will succeed in graduating (although some may take longer than four years). For example, 91.5 per cent of entrants to four-year universities in April 1995 had graduated by March 2003 (Ishikida 2005, 156). This figure makes sense when the intense pressure on universities to graduate as many students as possible is taken into consideration. One factor is that MEXT requires a high rate of graduation in order for a higher education institution to be accredited. The second major factor, which mostly affects lower-level private universities, is that if an institution were to get a reputation for failing a significant proportion of its undergraduates, this will quickly translate into difficulties in attracting new students. Since the declining population of young people already makes it difficult for many private universities to attract full enrolments, they do not want to do anything that might put off potential candidates (Kinmonth 2005). The objective fact that almost all students graduate would seem to give credence to the view that the student life is an academically undemanding one. Indeed, several scholars have accused the majority of Japanese students and professors of indulging in simulated higher education. Just to take two examples, McVeigh writes about ‘higher education as myth’ (McVeigh 2002) and Kinmonth describes students ‘spending four years at institutions that represent “higher education” in name only’ (Kinmonth 2005, 130). Both of these scholars have experience working in the university system in Japan. Surprisingly, there have not been many thorough investigations that focus on the student’s point of view. Lee-Cunin surveyed students in Shiga University, Faculty of Economics in 1998–99 (shortly before I arrived there as an associate professor) and found the students to have a greater critical awareness of the shortcomings of the education they were receiving than many had assumed (Lee-Cunin 2004). She did confirm one problem that has been identified by many critics of the system: Shiga students spend a lot of time, on average eighteen hours, in the classroom or lecture theatre each week (Lee-Cunin 2005, 146).

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For a non-laboratory subject like Economics this is far more than the same type of course requires in the UK for example. Japanese students, therefore, are given limited time for self-study and individual research, and that is before other commitments for club activity, part-time jobs (arubaito), commuting and job-hunting are taken into consideration.3 The ‘leisure land’ description of life at a Japanese university is therefore something of a misnomer. It is true that students do not have the stress of entrance exams hanging over them, and they know that graduation is virtually guaranteed, but they are still kept very busy throughout each day in ways that are very reminiscent of their time in secondary school. The university teacher’s freedom to choose the form of assessment as well as the method of teaching in most cases allows for the creation of many ‘small cultures’ where communicative language learning is the order of the day. In spite of this, university teachers still report having to battle with serious problems of low motivation among students. Is this part of a general apathy, or are there problems particular to the subject of English at work here? To answer this question we turn to research carried out in the fields of Applied Linguistics and TEFL, where ‘motivation’ is a topic that has attracted a lot of interest in recent years. An article published in 2003 by Kay Irie of Temple University examined a representative selec­ tion  of survey studies published between 1990 and 2001 in English and Japanese. One of the key conclusions of the article is the following. [I]t may be that performance orientation4 is a widespread aspect of the L2 [i.e. English language] motivation of Japanese university students. If this is found to be true, the concept may shed some light on many Japanese university students’ underachievement and apathy in learning English, because a performance orientation is usually associated with maladaptive, helpless patterns of attribution. When performance oriented students experience failure, they tend to attribute their failure to lack of ability, which they believe cannot be changed. Therefore, they are inclined to do the minimum necessary to avoid losing face, feeling that nothing they can do will lead to mastery. (Irie 2003, 95). 3 Employers look favourably on students who devote significant amounts of time to part-time work and club activity because they believe it helps them to develop wellrounded personalities. Therefore it is rational for students to devote evenings and weekends to these activities rather than academic study or research. As far as commuting is concerned, a lack of student accommodation forces most students to live at home and commute to their college. One-way trips of two hours or more are not uncommon. Jobhunting activities can eat into the time of many students in their third and fourth years. 4 In language learning, ‘performance orientation’ is usually associated with a desire for high grades and better performance than others. It is often contrasted with ‘mastery orientation’, which is usually associated with an intrinsic interest in learning a language.



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As the author concedes, this is, at present, a tentative explanation of the problem of motivation among Japanese university students. But it tallies with an abundance of anecdotal accounts of students doing the absolute minimum required to get a credit from a required English course. The concern about losing face also helps us understand the reluctance of many students to ask or answer questions in English in front of their peers. To understand more fully the inability of students to sustain motivation over a period of time we come back to the straightforward point about the difficulty of the English language. On arriving at university, some students acquire false hope that they will make rapid progress by the simple presence of a native-speaker teacher in the classroom (Long and Russell 1999). For these, and others, a perceived lack of progress over many years can all too often induce a ‘fossilised learned helplessness’ (Burden 2002, 9). After eight years of compulsory English the biggest lesson that too many Japanese students learn is that English is just too difficult for them to master, or even to use for fairly limited communication purposes. The Differing Perceptions of Students and Teachers Research conducted by Aya Matsuda in a private SHS in Tokyo found that there were significant differences in the attitudes of teachers and students to the study of English. They all agreed on the importance of English as the global lingua franca. As we have already noted in this chapter, this acknowledgment of the importance of English is not always accompanied by enthusiasm to study it. This verdict is confirmed by Matsuda’s research that found only a small minority of students said they studied English hard. The contribution of Matsuda’s research, however, is that part of the reason for low student motivation was a mismatch between what the students wanted to learn and what the teachers wanted to teach. [The research suggests] that teachers were more interested in broaden­ ing  students’ perspectives in general through the acquisition of metaknowledge about the language while the students themselves were more concerned about acquiring communicative proficiency in English and practical benefits this would bring. (Matsuda 2011, 48)

This mismatch sounds very much like the difference between eigo and eikaiwa, the former being English as an academic subject necessary for passing exams, and the latter being English that can actually be used to communicate with foreigners (there will be more on this distinction in the next chapter). It suggests that one solution to the motivation problem

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would be to stop treating English language education as a dry academic subject – rather like the Latin and ancient Greek taught to nineteenthcentury public schoolboys in Europe – and change it to become more like the teaching of a living language. The following comment from one student illustrates the frustration with the way English is taught: I mean [the teacher] takes a simple sentence, like There is a pen, really, There is a pen, it’s like the elementary or middle school [JHS] level, right? And then he explains it for an hour, and it makes no sense. None. You [the researcher] were there too right? Didn’t you think it was boring too? (Matsuda 2011, 51)

Minority, Bilingual and Returnee Students: ‘Internal Internationalisation’ National policy relating to English language teaching has been premised on the same principles of equality and uniformity that underpin every other major area of education. MOE/MEXT officials have always striven to ensure that every child in Japan gets the same education up to the age of fifteen, and then the same access to educational choices after that age. Such an ideological position has made it difficult for ministry policy to address the concerns of various minority groups. In recent years there has been a growing awareness of such groups, and an increase in the diversity of people coming to Japan to live, as well as those leaving Japan for substantial periods of time and then returning. This had been accompanied by the growth in the number of scholarly articles and books on themes related to ‘multicultural Japan’. Minorities that have been studied include Ainu, Okinawans, Amerasians, Koreans, Brazilians, Chinese and child returnees. Official policy towards these groups both at the local and the national level has been to assimilate them into Japanese society mainly by trying to ensure that children from non-Japanese-speaking homes are taught sufficient Japanese language to be able to participate in the education system. In the words of Boocock: Although fewer educators and researchers favor this strategy now than in the past … at all levels of the education system, rapid assimilation remained the dominant ideology. Lip service is given to notions of multiculturalism and the need to value difference or diversity among children but in practice the limited resources that are available focus on improving children’s daily and academic Japanese language skills. (Boocock 2010, 250)

Lack of government support for the children of immigrants is sometimes made up for by local NPOs. Burgess for example, looks at NPOs in Yamagata



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Prefecture that help the children of immigrant children learn Japanese (Burgess 2007). In general in contemporary Japan it is hard to find any acceptance of the concept of multilingualism (Gottlieb 2005:54). This bias towards assimilation is entirely in accord with the general thrust of policies relating to international education discussed in chapter 3. The aim of policy in this area is to nurture young Japanese people with a strong sense of national identity, and to equip those people with skills that will help them promote Japan’s interests in an increasingly globalised world. The threats and risks posed by globalisation require a renewed effort to defend and strengthen the national identity of Japan’s citizens. This approach, in turn, reinforces Japan’s self-image as monocultural and homogenous. People living in Japan who are not identified as clearly ‘Japanese’ for one reason or another have to choose to ‘self assimilate’ or be regarded as ‘foreign’. This binary choice is reinforced by the way government statistics are compiled: as well as by the law that does not allow dual-nationality for adults: The Japanese government and compilers of other official statistics compute ethnic minorities by nationality. There are no self-professed statistics of one’s ethnic origin; thus foreign nationals who take on Japanese nationality become simply ‘Japanese’. This means that officially one is either ‘Japanese’ or a foreign national. (Tsuneyoshi 2011b, 117)

There are some who try to express a dual identity as being a ‘hyphenated Japanese’, but experts in this area are agreed that such efforts have, to put it mildly, “yet to catch the imagination of the majority” (Tsuneyoshi 2004a, 78). This is a large and complex topic, but for the purposes of the present discussion we will examine three cases of minority children whose ability at English presented policymakers with potential opportunities to further English language education in Japan’s schools: Amerasian children in Okinawa, returnee children from English speaking countries and the children of international couples in which one or both parents have nativespeaker-level English. MEXT is aware that numbers of English-speaking families living in Japan has increased since the 1980s, and in the 2003 Action Plan it stated that ‘People living in the local community proficient in English will be positively utilized’ (MEXT 2003, 7). Once again, however, a MEXT goal has run into difficulties at the level of implementation. Explanations will be presented for why these opportunities were, for the most part, missed until recently. In Okinawa, ‘Amerasian’ was the label given to the children of Japanese mothers and American servicemen fathers. There are far more Amerasians

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in Okinawa than other parts of Japan due to the US invasion of Okinawa in 1945, the subsequent administration of the prefecture until it was returned to Japanese sovereignty in 1972, and the continuing presence of 74 per cent of all US bases in Japan (although the prefecture accounts for only 0.6 per cent of Japanese territory). These children were marginalised in Okinawan society and suffered bullying in school. To escape this treatment, some Amerasian children sought and gained admittance to US Department of Defence Dependent Schools attached to the military bases. Others, who were ineligible for this option, entered the ‘AmerAsian’ school established by five mothers of Amerasian children in 1998. Most subjects in this school are taught in English and most (but not all) Amerasians are proficient in that language. In her research Noiri noted that this could be a cause of envy from other Okinawans: ‘Expressions such as “Are you hafu (Amerasian)? Lucky you can speak English” are often uttered’ (Noiri 2010, 94). The inflexibility of attitude as well as curriculum in the local schools, combined with prejudice against Amerasian children meant that mothers who wanted to exploit the English skills of their children had either to get them into American base schools or found their own school. A readymade English-speaking resource was wasted. Japanese children who spend a significant amount of their childhood and schooling abroad and then return to Japan are known as kikokushijo. According to official statistics, in the 2009 academic year there were a total of 12,118 returnees in the formal school system (7,010 in elementary schools, 2,995 in JHS, and 2,049 in SHS, and 64 in six-year secondary schools) (MEXT 2011, 134). Of all school students in Japan, this represents only about 0.08 per cent of the total number. In spite of only making up a tiny proportion of the total student population, kikokushijo have been the subject of much interest in Japan and abroad. They have been the subject of academic research in English since the 1980s. Studies in English retain the Japanese term kikokushijo because, as Goodman notes, ‘it is significant that there is no equivalent term in English or any other major Western language’ (Goodman 2012, 32). Nukaga and Tsuneyoshi note three stages in this research. The first stage documented how difficult it was to get back into Japanese society once one was out (White 1992). Policymakers believed that returnees needed special attention to help them re-adapt to Japanese society and so a system of special schools known as ukeirekō (reception schools) was set up in the 1980s. Some critics saw these schools as kinds of decontamination chambers. Returnee children must not be allowed to contaminate other children with foreign habits and ideas. The second stage noted that in spite of discrimination many kikokushijo



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became positive models of internationalisation (Goodman 1993). Unlike other minority groups, returnees were usually the children of middle-class professional families with high academic aspirations, and this status rubbed off on the schools where they went on returning to Japan. The third stage sees returnees as ‘one of the players among many in the growing multicultural landscape that is evolving in Japan’ (Nukaga and Tsuneyoshi 2011, 220). One measure of the increased acceptance of returnees is the number of Japanese universities that will allow them to bypass the traditional entrance exam system. At first only a handful had this policy, but by the year 2000, over 300 universities had a quota for entrance by kikokushijo (Kanno 2003, 18). It is not clear whether this increase is due to a positive desire for a more international student intake, or simply a response to the well-reported, chronic decline in the population of student-age Japanese young people and the concomitant need to diversify methods of university entry (see Kinmonth 2005). Kanno, in her detailed study of the experiences of four returnees, found that although university entry had been made much easier by these changes, this flexibility had not been transferred to the internal workings of the institution: Although at the entrance these institutions seem open enough to students of diverse backgrounds, once inside they expect students to adapt to their system, rather than adjust their system to the needs of a changing student body. And since these institutions were traditionally developed for the education of monolingual and monocultural students, bilingual and bicultural students have major adjustments to make. (Kanno 2003, 135)

This assumption that outsiders will conform to the group can result in the wasting of scarce foreign language talent, as well as having negative consequences for the personal growth of the returnees (Ibid.). There have been many accounts of the conformist culture of the classroom forcing returnee students with a good command of English to disguise their ability and fake a strong Japanese accent in order not to stand out from their peers. On a more positive note, the very latest research on kikokushijo shows that they do not have so much trouble fitting in to the behavioural patterns of the current younger generation (Goodman 2012, 45). It will be a positive sign if, in the future, the term kikokushijo as a mark of difference falls into disuse. Families where one or both parents have native-speaker-level English are another potential resource for helping schools and communities improve levels of English. However, in almost all cases where the children attend local schools, the monolingual nature of the school environment forces parents to work hard outside school hours to avoid their children

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also becoming monolingual. The following is an illustrative account of teaching English to a bilingual child, written by a British father. Whilst in the first few years of elementary school, he too [like his elder brothers] went through an ‘anti-English’ phase, where it was difficult to make him even reply in English to questions in the language. … At one stage this manifested itself in continual long-drawn-out argument as resistance to even starting an English session. Why did he have to learn English in his free time whereas other children did not, he wanted to know (Brison 2010, 17).

There are various strategies available to parents in Japan who want their children to grow up bilingual (see e.g. Kawai 1997). The one adopted in the case described above is the ‘one parent, one language’ approach in which each parent speaks his or her native language to the child all the time. Problems arise with this approach if the primary carer is Japanese and the other parent is away from the house for long hours. Another approach which is possible if the Japanese parent is also fluent or near-fluent in English is ‘the minority language as the home language’ wherein the house rule is that once you are indoors you must speak only English. Some families also supplement their children’s formal education with after-hours classes in English. Extended vacations in English-speaking countries (often the native country of the English-speaking parent) are also commonly used. Whatever the strategy adopted, these parents have to work hard outside school hours to make sure the monolingual nature of the Japanese school does not deny the chance of bilingual development for their children. Parents who, for whatever reason, want their children to grow up bilingually and biculturally in Japan have to contend with the fact that the Ministry of Education and its schools do not ‘recognise the possibility of students constructing multiple identities in the world’ (Parmenter 2000, 252). The ministry does not accredit or financially assist bilingual schools like the ‘AmerAsian’ school mentioned above that are established to help minorities. To make matters worse, private donations to non-accredited schools are not tax-deductable. In her in-depth study of bilingual education in Japan, Yasuko Kanno argues that this ‘lack of accreditation in effect constitutes financial discrimination against ethnic minority populations’ (Kanno 2008, 79). This inflexible position of the ministry has undermined efforts to exploit the international human resources that Japan has within its own borders.



the role of learners135 Conclusion

Lack of motivation of school students in Japan has become a serious issue, and one that has provoked national concern. The ‘employment ice age’ that has frozen large numbers of young people out of permanent, secure jobs is a national crisis. It is accompanied by anxiety that Japan is turning into a kakusa shakai – ‘gap society’ – one where there is a widening gap between ‘the haves’ and ‘the have-nots’. Large numbers of young people are alienated by the jobs crisis and do not see the point in studying hard at school. This has created what Kariya calls an ‘incentive divide’ where those who try hard at school (usually the children of middle-class parents) go on to secure employment, while those who do not (usually those from working-class backgrounds) will go into a life of insecure employment. As has been noted so many times in this book, the English language is a difficult language for the vast majority of Japanese people to learn. It is often taught in a dry and unnecessarily complicated way in secondary schools. Given these facts it is not surprising that those who are already alienated from school will be especially alienated from English lessons. But even those motivated students who aspire to get into good universi­ ties and who work very hard are clearly uninspired and often bewildered by the way English is taught. Reforms that might deal with these problems would be ones that allowed greater choice and flexibility in the English curriculum and that introduced more teaching of English that was relevant to the needs of the students.

CHAPTER SIX

THE PRIVATE SECTOR AND INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION One role of the private sector in any capitalist society is to satisfy the requirements of students and their parents when education provided by the public sector falls short. The success of the private sector in Japan in attracting fee-paying customers stands as an indictment of the public sector, especially in the field of international education. Of course the private sector option is only available to those who can afford it. The stark reality is that economic forces are currently turning Japan into a more complex and less equal society than it was in the immediate post-war period. The choices made by individual students, schools and employers can have more effect on the direction of educational change in Japan than the words of politicians and other policy-makers. This chapter will investigate how private institutions interact with their ‘customers’ as well as other actors in both the public and private sectors. Although some of the rhetoric surrounding globalisation implies that the private sector should be more efficient in meeting the needs of both students and their future employers, this chapter will show that the role of private institutions within the Japanese education system is far more complex. The private sector, as it is presently constituted, is not the panacea to Japan’s problems relating to international education. We will begin an analysis of this sector by first placing it in the context of globalisation. Japan’s Responses to PISA and the OECD As was discussed in chapter one, a highly influential organisation in spreading the gospel of globalisation to national governments is the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development). It gathers data on the education systems of member states and publishes results in order to encourage countries to borrow successful ideas and methods from each other and to reform those parts of the system that are underperforming. Its influence is due to a consensus that holds that technological revolutions in transport, communications and data processing have transformed the global economy. The OECD’s advice has no legally binding power, and so the enthusiasm with which governments and elites in so

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many different countries embrace its reports, especially its PISA (Pro­ gramme for International Student Assessment) results, indicate that, at least in recent years, it has been providing fuel for many a domestic agenda that has had its own dynamic. In particular the notions that educational ‘quality’ and ‘performance’ can be measured and compared across borders has become an OECD orthodoxy that has been picked up globally. In the Japanese case, the effects of globalisation on education policy have been mixed and contradictory. Japan’s rankings in the 2003 and 2006 PISA tests for fifteen-year-old students caused wide public concern about a general decline in the academic ability of Japanese children. The ensuing moral panic allowed opponents of MEXT’s yutori kyōiku reforms to force a U-turn. As a result material that had been cut from the school curricula was reinstated. The room for manoeuvre that yutori kyōiku had given teachers to devise their own lesson content was taken away. The ‘winner’ of the 2003 PISA rankings was Finland, a hitherto undiscovered land as far as Japanese educational discourse was concerned. The novelty of finding such an unknown country as a potential model for educational ‘success’ allowed teams of Japanese education experts to hop on convenient Finnair flights to Helsinki in order to discover the holy grail of PISA success. A plethora of publications resulted from this quest. In his analysis of a large selection of this work, Takayama Keita found that progressive education scholars emphasised the competition-free schooling, decentralisation, and individualised and egalitarian curricular orientations they found in Finnish schools. Analysing the same schools, neo-liberal observers highlighted the use of the market (for parents in choosing schools), deregulation and entrepreneurship (Takayama 2010). In other words, many Japanese experts saw what they wanted to see in Finland and disregarded the rest. In this respect at least, global comparisons had less effect on Japanese educational discourse than many pretended. During the 1990s and 2000s some deregulation, decentralisation and privatisation did take place, but at least in the case of foreign-language education, the dominant force for change was neither government fiat nor foreign pressure, but consumer demand. Various kinds of informal privatisation, for example in language testing, took place. But the dynamic force pushing change forward came from disgruntled language students of all ages. In a complex capitalist society like Japan’s, failure of public provision to satisfy demand will result in the spread of private-sector initiatives aimed at filling the gap. This brings about a kind of ‘bottom-up’ privatisation of public services driven by consumer demand.



the private sector139 Education Reform in the 1990s and 2000s: Introducing Private Education into the Public Sector?  Private Secondary Schools

Mainly due to the fact that Japan was never a colony of Great Britain or the USA, the relationship between private schooling, English language ability and membership of a social and political elite is different from that found in some other Asian countries like the Philippines, India and Bangladesh. Unlike those countries, Japan does not have an elite that is privately educated and fluent in English. Neither state schooling nor an inability at English have been handicaps in rising to the top in modern Japan. This does not mean that there are not some very prestigious and influential private schools and universities. Private schools take advantage of the lack of choice evident in the state system. The following paradox which was written in 1989 still holds true today: A system which is essentially motivated by egalitarian ideals, equal access to equal public schools, gives private schools that can retain their selectivity, an advantage relative to the public sector as a whole. (Benjamin and James 1989, 162)

Out of a total of 22,000 elementary schools in 2010, only 213 (1 per cent) were private, and out of a total of 10,815 junior high schools in the same year only 758 (7 per cent) were private. The figure increases in the postcompulsory years where out of 5,116 senior high schools, 1,321 (a quarter) were private (all figures from MEXT 2011). However, the private schools vary in their academic reputation, with some schools relying on the reputation of their baseball team in the national high-school baseball championships rather than academic achievement. There is some evidence that the introduction of yutori kyōiku reforms in the 1990s helped private schools gain some ground in competition with state schools. The removal of Saturday schooling in 2002 in the state sector allowed private schools the opportunity to offer an extra day of schooling as a competitive advantage. The danger of a ‘prestige reversal’ – that is, private schools becoming more prestigious than elite state schools – is one of the factors pushing pilot projects that allow some limited choice to parents in the state sector (Dierkes 2008, 232). This is especially apparent in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Traditionally, high schools were defined as elite due to the number of graduates they could successfully get into top universities. Probably the most famous private high school is Nada, located in Kobe and the subject

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of ethnographic investigation by Thomas Rohlen in the 1970s (Rohlen 1983, 18–28). Schools like Nada are dedicated to the intense preparation required for the difficult entrance exams of the top universities. These exams almost never require a test of spoken English (see discussion in chapter 3) and so any activities that might improve communicative English are seen by almost everyone as a waste of valuable time. From his research Rohlen relates the following incident: [A] Nada junior [was] selected to spend a year in the United States as an American Field Service exchange student. His spoken English was already far superior to that of his English teacher, and a year living with a family in rural California would make him virtually bilingual. The Nada teachers saw the matter differently. Spoken English, to begin with, is not on the university entrance examinations, and nothing the boy would learn during a year in an American high school would help either. During that year the student would begin to forget the exam-relevant material he had learned at Nada. In their estimation he would slip from being a strong candidate for Tokyo University to one whose chances were slim. A compromise was finally reached, since the boy was adamant. He would do an extra year at Nada after his return, making up the time ‘wasted’ abroad. (Rohlen 1983, 26)

Since Rohlen did his research, the use of listening tests has become far more widespread, including in exams for prestigious universities. Interviews, during which students can be tested on their communicative competence, are still rare and mostly confined to entrance exams for university programmes that involve classes taught in English. Therefore, most parents and teachers with sights on a top university place would still advise a high school student considering spending a year abroad not to ‘waste’ his or her time in such an endeavour. Parents who want their children to develop good all-round English skills, on the other hand, can choose private high schools that specialise in this area if they can afford it. Most large urban areas have private schools like Mejiro Gakuen High School, discussed in chapter three, that allows students on its special English programme to take extra hours of English and a compulsory study tour to England. Students on this kind of programme are receiving roughly double the amount of classroom hours devoted to English compared to students at regular high schools. To take English proficiency even further, a small but growing number of private schools offer immersion programmes in English. The first school to do this was Katoh Gakuen, which set up its immersion programme in Numazu, Shizuoka Prefecture in 1992. The Ministry of Education’s course-of-study content is followed, but it is taught in English instead of Japanese. English is not taught as an academic subject, it is simply used as the language of



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instruction in regular classes. The enrolment is small: twenty-eight students in the year the school was established growing to 570 (K-12) by 2012. The fact that English immersion students have not done worse at Japanese language tests than their monolingual peers has been used to argue the case that teaching English to young children does not damage their ability to learn Japanese.1 International Schools International schools are another option for those seeking fluency in English or another foreign language. Most international schools of the traditional kind were originally set up to serve the needs of the expat community. For this reason the majority are located in Tokyo and Yokohama with a few located in other urban centres like Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe, and one in Okinawa. However, in the last twenty years or so their intake has become more diverse, and they are beginning to be seen as a schooling option for the parents of Japanese children. Also, a new wave of international schools has come into being to cater for the needs of ‘newcomer’ immigrants from South America. Currently in Japan there are roughly thirty-five international schools of the traditional kind. In addition there are about one hundred schools for Brazilians and Peruvians and three Indian schools. The number of foreign residents under age twenty rose from just over 240,000 to over 280,000 in the decade 1996–2006, but has declined following the 2008 financial crisis and the March 2011 tsunami and nuclear disasters. The drop in the population of registered foreign juveniles has led some international schools to aim their marketing more at international children with one Japanese parent (who are registered under Japanese law as Japanese nationals, not foreigners), and at returnee Japanese children (kikokushijo). They are also looking to attract Japanese parents who want a multicultural education or an English language immersion education for their children. Although some schools limit the number of children from this kind of background, there have been reports

1 Marshall Childs wrote an article for his ‘Practical Linguist’ series of columns in the Daily Yomiuri on 30 October 2000 on the topic of English immersion for young children, using the example of Katoh Gakuen (where he works) to show that learning one language does not hamper the learning of the other: ‘languages do not work like balloons in an enclosed space where if one gets larger the other must get smaller.’ The programme director, R. Michael Bostwick, has also published research based on the Katoh Gakuen method (see for example Bostwick 2001).

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of a rise in the number of Japanese children going to international schools (Japan Times, 3 January 2008). The international school option is one that entails certain risks. Those parents who are based permanently in Japan and choose an international school are taking a risk with their children’s future in the sense that most of the schools described above are not accredited by MEXT, or are only recognised as ‘Miscellaneous’ and therefore graduates of these schools are not able to apply to Japanese universities using the regular application methods.2 Measures aimed at increasing the international dimensions of Japanese universities, like the ‘Global 30 project’, however, mean that some domestic universities are now allowing them to apply as international students.3 Instead of being accredited by MEXT, most international schools are accredited by private organisations abroad including the Western Association for Schools and Colleges (WASC), the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) and the International Baccalaureate (IB). Traditionally, graduates of international high schools have gone on to enter a university overseas in countries like the USA and UK where these accreditations are recognised. Another risk for Japanese parents is the danger that their children’s experience in international schools may disqualify them for full membership of Japanese society when they grow up. In ‘Hal International School’ (a pseudonym), a small but elite Tokyo school that was the object of ethnographic study by Yasuko Kanno, about 75 per cent of graduates go on to attend universities in the USA. This was only natural since the majority of pupils are the children of foreign diplomats and business executives. The expensive fees of this kind of elite school are a barrier to most Japanese families, but even for those that can afford it there are dilemmas 2 There are a few exceptions to the general rule that private international schools are not accredited. Makuhari International School in Chiba was founded in 2009 as the only private international school in Japan that receives ‘Article 1’ status, i.e. the same status as regular Japanese state or private schools, making it eligible for private school subsidies from MEXT. This was only possible because Chiba city has been approved as a ‘special deregulation zone for education’. Also in 2009, MEXT urged prefectural governments to ease criteria for giving accreditation to Brazilian schools that are suffering from financial difficulties. 3 One example of this can be seen in a 2010 visit by representatives of Nagoya University to Nagoya International School to talk to students about the option of entering the university in 2011 as part of the first intake of students on an English-based degree programme in engineering or science. This degree programme was created as part of Nagoya University’s ‘Global 30’ activities. The option of entering a prestigious Japanese university like Nagoya University had not been open to students from this international school before (Japan School News, January 2011, available at http://www.japanschoolnews.com/).



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that need to be faced. In the words of one of the school’s very experienced bilingual teaching assistants, ‘if we are not careful there is a risk that [the Japanese children at the school] will get caught in the middle and find themselves belonging nowhere’ (quoted in Kanno 2008, 89). The very real fear is that the children will not fit into Japanese or American society when they grow up. The same teaching assistant goes on inadvertently to echo the aim of MEXT’s English language policy: ‘I don’t want them to be incomplete (chūtohanpa-na) Japanese. I want them to be proficient in Japanese, and speak English in addition’ (Ibid.). Even parents who can afford the option of elite international schools for their children have to be concerned about the ability of their children to ‘fit in’ to Japanese society upon graduation. Of course the concept of ‘taking risks’ has positive as well as negative connotations. The positive side to taking children out of mainstream society is that they will grow up with a richer view of what ‘culture’ is. Writing about an international school called Columbia Academy (CA) in Kobe, anthropologist David Blake Willis is impressed by “the extent to which members of the imagined CA community view culture as a flexible active construct (or set of constructs) for their lives” (Willis 2008, 248). Another risk involved in taking the option of international schools for one’s children is the danger of sudden closure. Unlike public bodies, which are supported by the state, private schools can suffer severe financial consequences from a decline in ‘customers’. In 2000, Japan’s oldest international school, St Joseph International School in Yokohama, closed with a decline in students being cited as the reason. Protests by students, parents  and alumni were unsuccessful in preventing the closure. (Japan Times, 27 May 2000). In August 2011, St George’s Academy in Nagoya closed down, giving the same reason. In the latter case the closure was announced without warning less than one week before the start of the academic year, creating considerable difficulties for families forced to make alternative arrangements for their children. Since families were required to pay student fees in advance, many people lost considerable sums of money when the closure was announced. This particular case also illustrates the risks inherent in private education enterprises that involve businesses crossing international borders. Because the owners of St George’s Academy returned to Canada before announcing the school’s closure, any parents or other interested parties who wanted to take legal action to recover some of their financial losses had to face the prohibitive burden of taking such action in a foreign legal jurisdiction. Unfortunately, the behaviour of the owners of this international school gave credence to the belief among

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many Japanese that doing business in Japan with foreigners always involves the risk that the foreign party might suddenly cut and run. Foreign University Branches in Japan Another example of the lack of permanence of foreign enterprises in international education can be found in the university sector. In the 1980s an experiment to solve the perennial problem of the dearth of opportunity to practice English or receive an ‘international’ education in Japan took place in the form of the opening of about forty branch campuses of American universities all over the country. A variety of arrangements were tried, from single university branch campuses (e.g. Southern Illi­ nois  University, Texas A&M–Koriyama) to system branches (Minnesota State University System branch in Akita) to consortial arrangements among groups of American universities (e.g. the fifteen public universities of Michigan state setting up a Center in Shiga prefecture). Due to the vast wealth that was being created during the ‘bubble’ phase of Japan’s economic development, many of these branch campuses were set up in the belief that they would be self-supporting or even make money for their home institutions in the United States. Some universities were accused of ‘assuming that the Japanese would consume American education as enthusiastically as they did Big Macs’ (McMurtrie 2000). By the early 2000s all of these campuses had closed or been taken over by Japanese institutions and it was clear to all that the experiment had been an almost total failure. There had been a complete miscalculation of the risks involved in these ventures. Although the Anna Karenina principle applies to a certain extent here, with each Japanese–American joint venture falling into misery and failing in its own particular way, four general reasons for the failure overall have been identified by John Mock, an American anthropologist who had direct experience with several of these ventures: 1. Tertiary education institutions have never been big money-makers, but in the heady days of Japan’s bubble economy this simple fact was forgotten. American home institutions expected their branch campuses to make money. 2. There was no clear understanding between Japanese and American partners on what outcomes were expected. For example, universities in the US are quick to fail students with failing grades, but Japanese universities are very reluctant to fail anyone. Satisfactory solutions to this kind of problem were not forthcoming due to factors 3 and 4 below.



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3. There was too often a lack of cross-cultural competence among the key administrators on both sides. For example the provost of Minnesota State University–Akita was appointed in St Paul by administrators who had no knowledge of conditions 8,000 miles away in Japan. 4. There was a lack of flexibility from both sides and a lack of appreciation that a Japanese–American hybrid institution was probably going to need to evolve in ways that would be different from ‘normal’ institutions in both countries if it were to be successful. (Mock 2005) By 2012 the only surviving Japan campus of an American university was Temple University Japan which occupies the first nine floors of a modern building in the exclusive Minami Azabu district in Tokyo. In 2012 it had 785 students enrolled on its undergraduate programme and 372 graduate students as well as 912 students taking non-degree courses. In addition, the consortium of the fifteen public universities in Michigan continues to run the Japan Center for Michigan Universities (JCMU) in Hikone, a residential facility located on land provided by Shiga Prefecture. The facility has accommodation for about sixty students from Michigan or other US states studying in Japan for periods of one year or shorter. Finally, the failed branch campus of Minnesota University in Akita was taken over by Akita prefecture and was relaunched as Akita International University (AIU) in 2004. In 2012 it had a student population of about 800 of whom 150 were from overseas. The failure of almost all the efforts to open branches of US universities on Japanese soil can be viewed as another failed initiative to bring international education to Japan. Private Christian Universities Some of the best practitioners of English and other languages that one meets in Japan are graduates of the famous missionary-founded private universities like Sophia University, International Christian University and Nanzan University. These universities provide language programmes that are able to overcome the cultural impediments mentioned above. However, institutions in the private sector are not immune from cultural practices that inhibit practical language learning (Aspinall 2006). Sophia University was founded by Jesuits in 1913 following instructions from the Pope, who wanted a Catholic tertiary-level institution established in Japan. In 2006 it opened the Faculty of Liberal Arts in which all classes are taught in English. Plans to open the International Christian Univer­ sity (ICU) began during the period of the American Occupation. Japanese and American Christian educators came together to found a university in

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Tokyo based on Christian Principles. It was set up using money raised by Christians in Japan and money raised in the USA by the Japan International Christian University Foundation (JICUF) established in New York in 1948. In 1953, ICU opened its doors as the first four-year liberal arts college in Japan and adopted a mission to promote social justice and world peace. Nanzan University in Nagoya was founded in 1949 by German missionaries from the Catholic Society of the Divine Word. The university president is normally a catholic priest and member of the Society. This means that Nanzan is the only university in Japan normally to have a non-Japanese person as its president. The Eikaiwa (English Conversation School) Industry In the world of foreign-language teaching the free market operates in its purest form in Japan’s giant eikaiwa industry where it can be lucrative business. In 2002, foreign language schools were a 260 billion yen industry (Japan Times, 4 June 2004). If one alights from a train in any small town or suburb the length and breadth of the nation, one will soon encounter a sign indicating the presence of at least one eikaiwa kyōshitsu or English conversation school, whether it is part of a chain or operated by a lone entrepreneur. It is interesting to ponder the other commercial services that are omnipresent within the close vicinity of a small railway station, and provide for the essential needs of the populace of an advanced, affluent nation. There will be a post office, a branch of a bank (or at least an ATM), a convenience store and/or some kind of small grocery store, a hair salon and/or a barber’s shop, and a coffee shop and/or small restaurant. These services provide for the needs of the people living nearby: food and drink, hair cutting, financial and postal services. It is not immediately clear to a newcomer to Japan, if they are aware of the complete absence of opportunities to use it, why English conversation should always be added to this list of bare necessities. English conversation schools make money by catering to all kinds of customers with a diverse list of needs. My own experience in a mediumsized regional city in Hokkaido where I was employed by a small eikaiwa school for one year is probably typical. The youngest student I taught was eight years old and the oldest was ninety. Some students required instruction in the most basic tasks, such as simple greetings, while others had a mastery of quite advanced English but were worried about this ability decaying due to lack of opportunities for practice. Some students had concrete plans to go abroad for travel or study, while others had no intention of ever leaving Japan, but were studying English as a cultural pursuit



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roughly equivalent to the piano or flower-arranging. Applied linguist Philip Seargeant cites an advert for Gaba language school which features the question ‘What would I do if I could speak English?’ followed by approximately one hundred different sentence-long replies ranging from the ambitious, ‘I would open a shiatsu massage parlour for celebrities in Hollywood’, ‘I would start a dental practice for foreigners’, to the more limited ‘I would scold noisy foreigners on the train’, to the eccentric ‘I would live in Hawaii with several dogs’ (Seargeant 2009, 111–12). It might be quicker to make a list of categories of Japanese people who are not potential customers for eikaiwa schools. Japanese people are not alone in their enthusiasm for learning the global lingua franca. As Pennycook points out “if we reflect for a moment on what people are currently doing around the world after sleeping, eating and engaging in various forms of work, ‘learning English’ must surely account for quite a considerable part of current global human activity” (Pennycook 2007, 111). In Japan, the one common factor about the product eikaiwa schools are selling is that it is authentic or ‘real’ English. Brian McVeigh argues that this great demand for ‘real’ English spoken by ‘real’ foreign people results directly from the transformation by the mainstream school system of English language study into something that ‘bears no relation to reality’ (McVeigh 2000, 83). Studying English in the Japanese school classroom with a JTE, especially when the activity is related to exam preparation, is not seen as being relevant to the world outside. In Japan, eikaiwa or English conversation (study) is therefore a completely distinct concept from eigo or English language (study). When browsing a bookstore, for example, whether a given book has eikaiwa or eigo on its cover will immediately identify the content and purpose of the book: the former is related to ‘real’ English that one might need on vacation or for a business meeting, while the latter is related to school study and exam preparation. Overlap between the two worlds does not exist. In the eikaiwa world, the role of the native-speaker teacher is crucial. Seargeant explains the function of the native speaker in the following way: [Promotional literature for an eikaiwa chain] ties the idea of communicative practice to the native speaker as if they were logical equivalents, an effect which is further enhanced by adoring promotional pamphlets, adverts and Web sites with photographs of Caucasians enacting the role of a well-dressed instructor. (Seargeant 2009, 95)

Those who design such promotional material are knowledgeable about their target audience. Psychological research has shown that when Japanese subjects are played recordings of English spoken by people with

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different accents they consistently rate ‘inner circle’ varieties of English, like UK and US English as ‘more competent’ than others (McKenzie 2010, 145–48). Seargeant also argues that ‘advertising strategy is likely to affect directly the teaching methods within the classroom’ (Seargeant 2009, 96). This means that during recruitment, superficial factors like the appearance and accent of the native speaker become more important than any pedagogical considerations like teaching qualifications or experience. One important similarity that the eikaiwa industry has with governmentrun English education programmes, like the JET programme, therefore, is the willingness to hire foreign teachers who have no qualifications in language teaching. Private schools of the eikaiwa variety are also not immune from negative economic trends. According to METI, enrolment at private language schools has dropped from 826,858 students in February 2006 to 335,604 at the same time in 2010 (ELTNews.com, 26 April 2010). The collapse of eikaiwa giants Nova and Geos during this period may confirm that there is less of a market for this kind of school in today’s Japan. Nova Corporation, which at its peak had a network of 924 conversation schools, declared bankruptcy in October 2007, leaving 7,000 people jobless and 300,000 students with worthless ‘lesson tickets’. Geos Corporation, with a chain of about 330 schools nationwide, declared bankruptcy in April 2010, but was able to avoid the sudden mass redundancies caused by Nova’s fall by arranging for the intervention of another company, G.communication.4 The fall of these giants may provide an opportunity for smaller schools. In 2010, ETJ (English Teachers in Japan) estimated that it had 1,500 small school owners as members (ELTNews.com, 26 April 2010). The giant eikaiwa industry in Japan is a manifestation of globalisation and free-market economics. It is also a clear reflection of the continued failure of the state system to teach foreign languages in ways which can be put to practical use. Contained within the eikaiwa system, globalisation can be seen in both its real and its imagined forms. Many eikaiwa customers are unwilling or unable to venture beyond Japan’s borders, but they still want to have the ‘international’ experience of having a weekly con­ versation with an authentic foreigner. Other customers need to learn real English because their job requires the kind of interaction with nonJapanese people that is becoming more and more common in an age of

4 In 2009, Sahashi Nozomu, the President of Nova, was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for embezzling 320 million yen from employee benefits.



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economic globalisation. The growth of the eikaiwa industry, which in many ways mirrors the growth of the juku sector (Roesgaard 2006), took place without any planning or regulation from government ministries or agencies involved in education. It therefore represents a partial privatisation of the education system driven by ‘bottom-up’ consumer demand rather than ‘top-down’ ministerial fiat. Private Testing Companies The era of globalisation has given rise to many instances of private-sector organisations (both profit-making and not-for-profit) entering the field of public education provision in many countries. Transnational firms compete for shares in education ‘markets’ as they do in other public services that used to be the monopoly of the nation state. They are often invited to join ‘public–private partnerships’ with agencies of the state sector at the local or national levels. Proponents of this trend see it as a way of bringing private investment into schools and improving efficiency of management through competition. In 2000 the European Union declared that partnerships with business are ‘an effective framework for the transition to the knowledge based economy’ (quoted in Ball 2008, 37). It is not surprising, therefore, to find that private companies have become major players in the area of English language testing in Japan. However, this increased role has not come about through the putting out to tender of government contracts – the preferred neo-liberal method for bringing in entrepreneurial competition in order to create greater productivity in the public sector. Rather it has come about through collusion between government ministries, quasi-government agencies, non-profit private companies and for-profit private companies. Placements for amakudari ex-bureaucrats have also been involved.5 Between 1968 and 2001 the education ministry officially endorsed only one English proficiency test: an exam produced by the Society for Testing English Proficiency (STEP), an organisation set up in 1963 by the ministry with the task of improving practical English language ability. The Japanese name for the STEP test is jitsuyō eigo ginō kentei which can be abbreviated to eiken, the name it commonly goes by. In Japan, Eiken is conducted three times a year, and since 1994 there have been seven levels of difficulty for 5 Amakudari literally means ‘descent form heaven’ and refers to retired government bureaucrats taking positions in private or quasi-governmental bodies. See Colignon and Usui (2003).

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candidates to choose from (grades 1, the most advanced, to 5 as well as ‘pre-grade 2’ and ‘pre-grade 1’). There are two stages in each test, the first stage (vocabulary, reading, listening and writing) and the second stage (speaking). Only those who pass the first stage can progress to the second stage and only those who pass both stages receive certification. In the year 2010–11, examinees for all Eiken grades totalled approximately 2.3 million. According to the STEP website, the test has been taken by over 80 million applicants since 1963.6 English teachers in JHS and SHS often encourage their students to take the Eiken and in 2011 approximately 18,000 schools served as test sites. Japanese high schools and universities often grant preferential status to student applicants who have passed a specified Eiken grade, such as waiving the English portion of the school’s entrance examination. In its 2003 strategic initiative ‘Japanese with English Abilities’ and 2011 follow-up ‘Promoting Proficiency in English for International Communication: Five Proposals and Concrete Plan’, MEXT designated Eiken Grade 3 as a benchmark proficiency level for junior high school graduates, Grades 2 and Pre-2 for high school graduates, and Grade Pre-1 for English teachers. On its website Eiken claims to be ‘backed by’ MEXT, which is a true statement but one that hides the fact that since 2001 MEXT has refused to endorse any one specific test of English language proficiency.7 Eiken now had to compete with other English tests that claimed to provide a better service for students and schools. Huw Oliphant, the ALT advisor to MEXT, told me in 2005 that MEXT had no problems with universities and employers using the rival TOEIC exam as a method for verifying standards of English language acquisition (Interview N). According to marketbased theories of education improvement, the addition of greater choice into a particular market – in this case the testing of English language proficiency – should enable the ‘consumer’ – in this case the individual student, school or employer – to select the product that best suits their needs. The invisible hand of the market will then bring about a situation wherein test-takers are matched with the tests that are optimally suited to their needs. It is argued that this system is both more efficient and better suited to the requirements of the ‘consumer’ than the traditional

6 STEP website in English: http://stepeiken.org/. STEP website in Japanese: http://www .eiken.or.jp/. 7 As part of the administrative reforms of 2001, MEXT ended its policy of official endorsement for any technical examinations (see ‘New Tests Challenging TOEIC Strong­ hold’ by Eriko Arita in Japan Times, 25 October 2003).



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‘producer based’ model dominated by the vested interests of teachers, bureaucrats and the heavy hand of the state. An examination of the history of the TOEIC test, however, shows that in practice, the free-market system does not work in the ways the theory would suggest. Although it is certainly true that individuals in Japan in the twenty-first century do have more choice of language tests compared with the 1970s, all too often they are given tests that are not appropriate to their needs. The idea for TOEIC did originate with a private-sector Japanese entrepreneur, a man named Kitaoka Yasuo who was the owner of a small business called International Communication Inc., and who in the mid1970s approached the American company Educational Testing Services (ETS) with the idea for a new English test to be used in Japan to rival the monopoly of Eiken. ETS was chosen because since 1965 it had been jointly administering the TOEFL exam, a test designed to be taken by non-native English speakers who wanted to study at universities in the USA. ETS agreed to go forward but only with a Japanese non-profit organisation as a partner. ETS also required that this organisation should have government support, and so Kitaoka went to the MOE for help. At that time the MOE did not want to undermine the monopoly of Eiken and so they were uncooperative. Next Kitaoka turned for help to a friend named Watanabe Yaeji a retired high-ranking MITI bureaucrat. Watanabe was well placed to help because he had remained in close contact with MITI after taking an amakudari post as a board member of World Economic Information Services (WEIS).8 Watanabe could provide help for Kitaoka’s project by meeting both of the requirements of ETS in the form of his influence within the WEIS and MITI. With help from other retired MITI bureaucrats, Watanabe was able to set up a TOEIC Steering Committee within the WEIS and in 1979 they conducted Japan’s first TOEIC test. At first the numbers taking the test were modest, and it is possible that the TOEIC test might never have taken off if it was not for two related developments. Firstly, in 1981, the TOEIC IP (Institutional Program) was introduced. This allowed companies to administer the test on their own premises, at a time of their own choosing and at a cheaper price.9 The second, crucial development was the decision 8 Strictly speaking, this kind of appointment is known as a yokosuberi placement, i.e. one that puts a retired bureaucrat into a public corporation appointment. But in common usage, yokosuberi is a subset of amakudari (Colignon and Usui 2003). 9 In 2012, the test fee for each student taking TOEIC IP was 4,040 yen. By comparison, at the same time, the test fee for each student taking the TOEIC SP (Secure Program) was 5,565 yen.

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by two large, prestigious companies, Matsushita Electric (now Panasonic) and Fujitsu to introduce the TOEIC IP for their employees. It is highly likely that this development was aided by two individuals, Harata Akira, a Matsushita vice-president, and Akazawa Shoichi, an advisor for Fujitsu Computers, since they were both members of the original TOEIC Steer­ ing Committee and both retired MITI bureau chiefs (McCrostie 2010, 3). Thanks to the endorsement of these two major companies the TOEIC test became well established in Japan by the mid-1980s. In 1986 MITI set up the Institute for International Business Communication (IIBC), which would administer TOEIC in Japan. Watanabe Yaeji became the chair of this new public corporation. Public corporations like IIBC and WEIS make up an important sector in Japan’s political economy and ‘provide a linkage of control and coordination, money and political influence’ between the central bureaucracy and the private sector (Colignon and Usui 2003, 83). Because of the vertical segregation of Japan’s ministries, one public corporation will usually only receive retired bureaucrats from one ministry. Thus the IIBC as the creation of retirees from MITI/METI, was founded by people who, by definition, had no qualifications or experience in language teaching or testing.10 Their main duel role was to provide links with cor­ porations that might use TOEIC while making sure that the test was not threatened by any government actions or reforms. Watanabe’s stewardship of IIBC was seriously called into question by a scandal exposed by the weekly magazine FRIDAY in 2009. The magazine accused Watanabe of nepotism when he appointed the son of his girlfriend to the position of Chairman of the IIBC Board of Directors. To force the appointment, half of the people serving on the Board were forced out by Watanabe. The magazine article also questioned why Watanabe only showed up for work one day a week even though he was being paid a full-time salary. There were also allegations that IIBC money was being used for purposes not in any way related to language testing. The scandal forced the 92-year-old Watanabe to retire, but this was not the end of

10 Watanabe Yaeji himself confessed that he had no interest in or knowledge about language testing. He only started studying English in 1982 at the age of 65 (McCrostie 2010, 4). It is not unusual for an amakudari placement to know nothing about the business he is placed in. In 1994, former Ministry of Finance administrative vice-minister Yamaguchi Mitsuhide was made president of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. He had spent his career in other bureaus, and readily confessed that ‘I am an amateur in the securities business’ (quoted in Hartcher 1997, 38). The placing of unqualified people in very important posts is one of the reasons the amakudari system is so often criticised by those seeking to improve the Japanese system.



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embarrassing revelations. Later that year METI warned IIBC that its profits were excessive, and in July 2010 the Tokyo Tax Bureau announced that International Communications School, IIBC’s for-profit partner, had hid 100 million yen in income and had to pay 30 million yen in back taxes and fines. Critics have claimed that the IIBC’s lack of expertise on language testing as well as the distractions caused by various financial shenanigans have led it to fail to monitor properly how the TOEIC test is administered in Japan. Unlike the Eiken, TOEIC does not offer the candidate a choice of levels divided according to difficulty. The TOEIC test that most candidates take is a two-hour multiple-choice exam consisting of 200 questions: one hundred for reading and one hundred for listening. The maximum score possible is 990. Individual questions are not especially difficult, but most candidates find they cannot finish the test in the time allotted. Most Japanese test-takers score between 400 and 600. Experts identify this kind of test as an indirect proficiency assessment tool, ‘designed to measure the everyday English language skills of professionals working in an international environment’.11 It is suited for some purposes. It can be used to measure the proficiency and progress of a large group of test-takers, for example a particular section of a company’s workforce (Chapman 2005, 15). It is less well suited to measure an individual’s progress since the individual scores have high standard errors. A score of 650 for example actually represents anything in the range 625 to 675, meaning that a candidate who gets a score of 672 may actually be no better at English than a candidate who gets 627. This makes the TOEIC a very flawed instrument for use as a university entrance exam or for EFL classroom placement, and it is also of little use in measuring an individual’s progress unless the candidate has at least 200 hours of study between tests. In spite of these drawbacks the TOEIC test has enjoyed continued expansion throughout Japan’s colleges and universities, where it is employed to serve functions it was not designed for. The only explanation is that colleges are clearly following the lead set by business. In the words of McCrostie: TOEIC’s popularity in Japan stems mainly from its use by Japanese companies, which use TOEIC scores to decide which employees get posted overseas, receive promotions or raises and even which applicants get hired. As a result, the number of Japanese university students taking the TOEIC rises and the negative impact on learning to use English communicatively increases. (McCrostie 2006, 30) 11 Alastair Graham-Marr writing in the Daily Yomiuri, 25 April 2010.

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McCrostie and others argue that TOEIC is having a negative effect on university English because an increasing number of universities have completely oriented their English programmes towards raising students’ TOEIC scores. This results in English language classes metamorphosing into TOEIC test preparation classes. If this is the case, why are so many universities using TOEIC? There are several answers to this question. In chapter 4 the fact that most faculty who teach English full-time in Japanese universities are not qualified in teaching or testing foreign languages was discussed. This, combined with the fact that universities are required to graduate almost all of their students, has led to a lack of robustness of the English language programmes of most (but certainly not all) universities. Employers, therefore, have almost no way of knowing the English aptitude of graduates unless they test or interview them themselves. It was a straightforward procedure for companies that were already using a standard testing system in-house to apply that system to new entrants. Since TOEIC had, during the 1980s, become that standard, it was only logical that TOEIC scores should be used to set minimum standards for entrance to the company. Probably the most important obligation for universities to their students is to help them find good jobs upon graduation (Poole 2010), and therefore it was a natural process for universities to start helping students to improve their TOEIC scores in order to make them more employable. For low-level universities, TOEIC is a lifeline that can help them improve their employment record and therefore their reputation. For higherranked universities the herd tendency of following what others are doing meant that once a critical mass had been reached almost all universities had to have some kind of TOEIC test preparation programme, although the extent that this would dominate the whole English curriculum has varied from case to case. The large number of full-time university English teachers who are not qualified in language teaching and not especially interested in pedagogical issues are not opposed to TOEIC because it provides the kind of test preparation classes that both they and their students are very familiar with, owing to the similarity with university entrance exam preparation. Also, the availability of TOEIC test materials reduces the burdens of making and marking tests. Motivation of the students also increases when they are shown that the test result they gain can be of use in their jobhunting activities. The spread of TOEIC, and to a much lesser extent TOEFL, into university campuses with the approval of government agencies can be seen as an



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extension of the activities of the private sector in a government-regulated educational domain. The fact that both of these tests are administered by a foreign company – ETS – also qualifies this development potentially as an example of globalisation in education. Meanwhile the domestically produced Eiken is still very popular and has introduced new features in order to compete with its foreign rivals. However, as we saw from an examination of the way TOEIC achieved its dominance in Japan, its rise was less due to the kind of market deregulation required by neo-liberal orthodoxy, and more due to the personal links Kitaoka Yasuo had with key people in MITI. Once adopted by a critical mass of influential companies the test then started being used for purposes that were ill suited to its design. TOEIC then spread from companies to colleges and universities where the herd instinct took over. There are clear similarities between this process and the creation of the JET programme that was discussed in chapter 3. In both cases the ministry of education was not involved when the key decisions were made. This meant that the agendas of other actors dominated subsequent events. In the case of the JET Programme, MOFA and MOHA used the recruitment of foreign graduates to pursue aims that had nothing to do with improving English language education in Japan’s secondary schools. In the case of TOEIC, MITI/METI responded to the needs of private companies for an English test that was more flexible and cheaper compared to the MOEsponsored Eiken. Companies have long recognised the need for more staff who can communicate in good English (see e.g. Keidanren 2000), and therefore they were receptive to the notion of increasing the testing of their employees. Neither managers of companies nor bureaucrats at MITI/ METI are qualified in language teaching or testing, and yet it was their decisions that brought about the emergence of TOEIC as the de facto standard test for English in Japan. Those responsible for English language teaching in universities and colleges then allowed this system of testing to spread down into their classrooms. The ministry of education did not have the imagination, the resources, the connections or the will to stop this from happening. Conclusion According to neo-liberal perceptions of globalisation it is to be expected that the private sector will come to play more of a role in the provision of education as in other public services. In present-day Japan, the private

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sector plays a huge role in international education in the form of private secondary schools and universities, private testing companies and private eikaiwa schools. In 2002 the English language education market taken as a whole was said to be worth three trillion yen per year (Daily Yomiuri, 26 March 2002). The risk society paradigm as applied to post-industrial Japan also posits that many people will become their own ‘risk managers’ and decide to invest their own time and money in foreign language study and study abroad in order to further their own individual goals. The unforced enthusiasm of millions of individuals who consume the products of these international education businesses would seem to verify that assumption. The question still needs to be asked, however, as to whether or not these two trends are making Japan a more ‘global’ society in the way that Western writers on globalisation and risk-society theory expect? If one of the requirements of a global society is one in which a large proportion of the population can converse in a straightforward way with people from other countries, then the activities of private-sector actors, like those in the public sector, have not been successful in bringing it about. To make this point, however, is to assume that the goal of the private-sector actors discussed in this chapter is to help their customers achieve fluency in communicative English (and other foreign languages). It is only natural that the aim of some customers of eikaiwa and TOEIC testing etc. is to achieve a high level of fluency, although some are clearly unaware of the amount of time and effort that is required. Others, however, are pursuing English for different reasons. As Seargeant concludes from his research in this area: Another role played by ‘English’ in Japan … is the way that the pursuit of the language becomes a means of expressing one’s identity and of negotiating aspects of one’s native culture. In this case, linguistic competence need not be the desired outcome at all, but instead it is an engagement with the processes represented by English language learning – and by the status and meaning that the language has in contemporary Japan – that appears to be the true object of the motivation. (Seargeant 2009, 131)

CHAPTER SEVEN

STUDY ABROAD POLICY AND PRACTICE In analysing the study-abroad plans of educational institutions in Japan, the challenge is how to match research into institutions and national bodies responsible for international education policy with the experiences of individual students, both Japanese and non-Japanese. Nobody is forced to go and spend part of their student life in a foreign country. On a global scale, millions of individual decisions – to go or not to go abroad to study – are translated into massive waves of voluntary migration each year. This movement of students poses both risks and opportunities to the nations, institutions and individuals concerned. This chapter will analyse these phenomena in the case of Japan by adopting the paradigm of ‘risk society’ introduced in chapter 1. This paradigm is useful because it helps us analyse the way individuals are now being encouraged to become their own ‘risk managers’, that is calculators of how their actions and choices will affect their own lives. It can be a powerful heuristic tool when it is used to link the choices made by individuals with global trends of an environmental, economic or technological nature. This chapter will recap how the risk society paradigm can provide a framework for reconciling the twin developments affecting Japanese education at the start of the twenty-first century: the parallel trends of individualisation and globalisation. Then it will examine international trends in the area of study abroad. Finally it will address the particular problems Japan has in its efforts to expand the number of students who cross the country’s border in both directions. Risk Society, ‘Individualisation’ and Globalisation In chapters 1 and 3 we discussed one of the chief justifications for the education reforms that were proposed in the 1980s and 1990s: the argument that Japan needs a freer educational environment to nurture creative self-starters, a view well summed up in the 1996 Report of the Central Council on Education (Chūkyōshin), the government’s main advisory body on education (Ministry of Education 1996). This report was full of references to the need for personal autonomy (jishusei), independent decision-making (shutai-teki handan) and individuality (kosei).

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In common with their colleagues in other ministries and agencies, education bureaucrats faced the challenge of how to help Japanese people and institutions cope with the economic and social transformations of the 1990s. The decline of the domestic large-scale manufacturing industry, combined with changes in fundamental social institutions like the family, accompanied the gradual shift to a post-industrial society. As we saw in chapter 1, sociologist Ulrich Beck argues that this process inevitably results in a rise in ‘individualisation’: ‘the individual is becoming the basic unit of social reproduction for the first time in history’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2001, xxii). This rise of ‘individualisation’ is accompanied by the shattering of the historic alliance between capitalism, the welfare state and democracy. At the same time as it is undermined from below – by the rise of the individual – this alliance is simultaneously attacked from above, by the rise of globalisation. Beck argues that the current stage of globalisation is a genuinely new phenomenon due to the ‘scale, density and stability of regional–global relationship networks and their self-definition through the mass media, as well as of social spaces and of image-flows at a cultural, political, economic and military level’ (Beck 1997, 12). How have Japanese institutions responded to these challenges? As we discussed in chapter 1, the Ministry of Education is inclined to see the outside world as a risky and potentially dangerous place. It is thus vital that Japan engages with the world. ‘Today, nations in the world are more and more interdependent. If they are to develop together it is necessary that each nation learn about the history, culture, customs and value systems of other nations and strive for mutual understanding’ (MOE 1993, 137). The statement goes on to stress the important role of exchange and cooperation in the fields of education, culture and sports. It recognises that nation states are increasingly dependent on one another although they clearly remain separate entities. The government believes that Japan must, at the same time that it is striving for ‘mutual understanding’ with other nations, also ‘make an active international contribution in keeping with its international status’. Also, if the outside world is seen as an unpredictable place, then it makes sense to bolster the nation’s defences at every level. The nation’s borders must be defended not only from potential military or terrorist threats. As we saw in chapter 1, educational sociologists, Kariya Takehiko and Jeremy Rappleye (2010) use the terms permiology and immunology to analyze Japan’s response to globalisation in the field of education. In Japan, as in other nations there is a ‘highly selective opening to the “world”; permeability conditioned by and subordinate to internal policy



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discourses and influence from abroad “framed” according to domestic political proclivities’ (45). Protecting national interests also involves improving the way that Japan is seen abroad. The Japanese government cooperates with nongovernment agencies and international organisations to sponsor and encourage a wide variety of exchange programmes in various artistic, educational and sporting fields. The Agency for Cultural Affairs (an agency under the wing of the Ministry of Education) is responsible for the ‘promotion of International Artistic and Cultural Activities’. It is made clear that one of the aims of this activity is ‘taking Japan’s traditional cultural activities into the international arena’ (MOE 1995, 197). One of the consistent themes in Japanese government policies on internationalisation is the perceived need to improve Japan’s ability to promote itself in the international arena. Japan, it is argued, needs to present a better case for itself in the court of world opinion. Ebuchi (1997), for example, has discussed how Japanese officials usually focus on internationalisation in the area of higher education policy as a means of making Japan better understood and accepted by the rest of the world. This policy clearly requires Japanese people to go out into the world and learn how to interact with non-Japanese people. It also requires non-Japanese to be invited to stay in Japan for limited periods of time. The JET programme (discussed in chapters 3 and 4) was one expression of the latter policy. Another expression is Japan’s policy on international student exchange. Before looking in more detail at the Japanese case, we will examine briefly international trends in this area of education policy. Worldwide International Student Policy There was a time when the experience of studying abroad was confined to a small elite. In 1950, only 110,000 foreign students were enrolled at universities worldwide (Gürüz 2011, 203). A half-century later this number has dramatically increased: according to UNESCO, in 2008, there were 3.3 million internationally mobile students worldwide (OECD 2010, 309). There are no signs of this growth slowing down: IDP Education Australia estimates that by 2025 there will be 7.2 million international students, 70 per cent of whom will be Asian (compared with 43 per cent in 2000). This increased demand is based on projected growth in household wealth, increased demand for higher education, the lack of capacity in some countries to meet this demand, and growing interest in studying overseas (Boehm et al. 2002).

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Why are so many students and their families making the expensive and risky choice of receiving all or part of their higher education abroad, and why are domestic institutions and governments encouraging them? De Wit (2002), looking at America and Europe, categorised the various rationales for internationalising higher education into four groups: political, economic, social–cultural and academic. Government agencies have motivations in all of these categories. As far as individual students are concerned, they usually see an international aspect to their education as being intellectually worthwhile (an academic rationale) as well as helping them to develop intercultural competences (a social–cultural rationale) that can be of use in the labour market at home or abroad (an economic rationale). Gürüz also identifies these rationales and goes on to note that new incentives have emerged more recently, such as the intense, international competition for the creative young minds that employers see as key factors of production, and networking in the global knowledge economy (Gürüz 2011, 198–99). For years the central importance of the English language in global academic exchange gave a competitive advantage to Anglophone countries, helping to explain why American and British universities dominated global performance tables. Universities in many parts of the world, however, promise to beat the Americans, British and Australians at their own game as they nurture English-language-only institutions or departments within their own borders. To take just one example, in May 2012, the Politecnico di Milano, one of Italy’s leading universities, announced that from 2014 most of its degree courses would be taught entirely in English (BBC News, 16 May 2012). Today, many large, well-established universities, wherever they may be geographically located, see themselves as involved in a global competition. In the words of Gürüz, ‘higher education worldwide is now a global business. It will become even more so in the near future, and competition will become even fiercer. Traditional institutions will have to compete with not only traditional institutions in their own countries, but with those in other countries, and with the new types of providers across the globe’ (Gürüz 2011, 324). Given this clear global trend, what has been the response of Japan? International Student Policy in Japan: Incoming Students In the 1980s, Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro recognized the need for Japanese universities to become more international. In 1983 he set a target of 100,000 foreign students to be accepted annually by Japan (Tsuruta



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2003, 123). This target was to be achieved in the year 2000. Given the fact than in 1982 there were less than 9,000 international students in Japan, this was an ambitious target. By 1998 only about half of this target was achieved and bureaucrats were worried that they would fall embarrassingly short of their goal. Studies conducted around that time found that many universities were ill-prepared to accommodate foreign students (Horie 2003, 25). As a consequence, the need to educate professionals in the field of international education began to be addressed more seriously by some institutions. Also in 2002 a new exam for foreign applicants, the Examination for Japanese University Admission for International Stu­ dents (EJU), was introduced in order to streamline entrance procedures. Between 2000 and 2003 the number of students coming to Japan surged from 64,000 to over 109,000 meaning that the target had been reached and surpassed only three years late. In 2010, a record high number of 141,774 foreign students were studying in Japan.1 This number dropped after the disasters of March 2011 as many students cut short their study tours and went home (sometimes forced to do so by anxious home institutions or parents or both). But at the time of writing there were clear signs that numbers were recovering. As a result of the expansion in numbers of incoming students, Japan is now the seventh largest higher education exporter (i.e. recipient of foreign students) in the world (Newby et al. 2009, 79). On the face of it, Nakasone’s doubters have been proved wrong. Building on this achievement, Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo, in 2008, called for the tripling of overseas students in Japan to 300,000 by the year 2020. The plan involved coordination between MEXT, METI and the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLITT). Although this seems like another ambitious plan, if it were successful it would not actually improve Japan’s relative standing in the world, due to forecasts of large global increases in the numbers of students studying abroad mentioned above. In support of this plan, MEXT announced the ambitious ‘Global 30’ project in 2009. This planned to allocate additional funding to thirty top universities to help them expand their global profiles and create new English-language degree programmes designed to attract international students. Japanese government agencies are also involved in other ambitious international exchange programmes, many of which have an emphasis on building ties within Asia. 1 Figures from the Japan Student Services Organization quoted in the Japan Times, 24 December 2010. These figures include foreigners studying at Japanese language schools as well as universities and colleges.

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Japan’s international student policies, however, have some serious pro­ blems that are not revealed by the simple headcounts of students entering the country from abroad. Firstly, the rapid increase of student numbers after 2000 was almost entirely due to students coming from one country, China.2 It is clearly risky for Japan to rely so heavily on students from one country. It is also problematic because most of the students are undergraduates and they are studying in the medium of the Japanese language, allowing Japanese universities to accept them without having to introduce any serious internationalisation of the curriculum or teaching methods.3 This would not be a problem if Japanese universities were guaranteed, for some time to come, large numbers of students coming to the country happy to study or research their specialist areas in the medium of the Japanese language.4 Once the current Chinese (and to a lesser extent Korean) rush is over, however, it is very hard to see where students who are attracted by this prospect will come from in large numbers. This is in stark contrast to the clear, and growing, global demand for courses taught in English. Given the limitations on the supply of overseas students who want to study in Japanese, there is an urgent need for more Japanese universities to develop courses where English is the medium of instruction. In the case of undergraduate programmes, some private universities are leading the way, most notably Ritsumeikan University, based in Kyoto, which has opened a new campus called Asia Pacific University (APU) in Oita Prefecture, where a large part of the curriculum is delivered in English (Goodman 2007, 80–81). From September 2011, Ritsumeikan and other universities that are participating in the ‘Global 30’ programme began offering more courses taught in English. In addition, there are a limited 2 The number of Chinese students rose from 24,000 in 1995 to 80,000 in 2005, representing about two-thirds of the total number of international students in Japan. As well as rising incomes in China, another factor that helps explain the rise in numbers of Chinese students going abroad is the abolition of the system of assigned workplaces for graduates of domestic universities. For more information about Chinese students studying overseas see Ryan (2011). 3 Goodman (2007) shows that a large proportion of the incoming undergraduate foreign students attend low-level private universities. Some of these institutions have been involved in scandals when it had been found that students were barely attending classes and spending much of their time doing part-time jobs. 4 A fringe phenomenon worthy of note here is the annual migration of Brazilian students to Japan during their summer vacation to do manual jobs. They are not enrolled in schools or colleges in Japan and do not undertake any formal study, but research has shown that one of their motivations to come to Japan is ‘personal growth’. Another motivation for those of Japanese ancestry is desire to return to the ancestral homeland (Sasaki 2012).



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but growing number of undergraduate programmes in smaller publicsector institutions, for example Akita International University which offers a Liberal Arts programme entirely in English, and the International University of Japan in Niigata. In the case of postgraduate programmes it is the national university sector that is leading the way (Huang 2006, 528). Although there are already some outstanding programmes available, in general there is a need for improvements in pedagogical quality of courses offered to international students. Professional international educators involved in the ‘100,000 plan’ reported being dissatisfied during their regular consultations with government bureaucrats due to the emphasis by the bureaucrats on the numerical target and their lack of concern with the quality of international education programmes (Horie 2003, 155). Research commissioned by the British Council in 2010 found that Japan still scored very poorly on ‘quality assurance and degree recognition’ compared with several competitor nations (British Council 2010). Another problem related to the expansion of international education in Japan at the highest levels is the lack of opportunity for foreign students or researchers after they complete their period of study. Japanese government studies have found serious difficulties for foreign researchers wishing to build a career in Japan (Newby et al. 2009, 84) Pursuing a career within Japanese academia is particularly difficult for non-Japanese. According to Ministry of Education figures, only 5,652 of the 158,770 professors employed full-time are foreigners on full-time contracts. A large proportion of these are English-language teachers on short-term contracts. This is a very low proportion in comparison with other OECD countries. The 2009 OECD review of tertiary education in Japan criticised the Japanese government for failing to provide an ‘overall policy framework … within which all internationalisation and globalisation efforts of the higher education institutions can be stimulated, developed and interpreted’ (Newby et al. 2009, 85). At the present time when universities are short of money and the population of Japanese students is seriously declining, one would expect more enthusiasm for any government initiatives that would bring them more students, more money and more status. Yet when MEXT launched the ‘Global 30’ initiative to set up thirty universities (public or private) that would be at the forefront of international expansion, only twenty-two institutions applied in time for the first deadline, and of these only thirteen were deemed acceptable. Due to government budget cuts the policy was modified to involved only these thirteen universities.

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To outside observers, the need for Japanese universities to extend their educational and research programmes available through the medium of English may seem self-evident. However, although ministry policy is also behind this aim, there are many within Japan’s academia who are opposed (Ishikawa 2011, 201). For critics there is the simple fact that teaching and supervising research in a language other than one’s native language represents a significant increase in workload. At a time when cuts in income5 are forcing universities to reduce the number of full-time staff and therefore increase the workload of those who remain, even further additional burdens are understandably unwelcome. There are also problems of intercultural communication between Japanese professors and foreign students that can add to stress levels for both groups. American and Australian students, for example, are used to interrupting their professors with direct questions during the class, something that is frowned upon by Japanese norms of communication between teacher and pupil. It is understandable that many (but certainly not all) Japanese professors prefer a monocultural and monolingual atmosphere in their classrooms if they are given the choice. Opposition to the increase in the number of non-Japanese speaking foreign students is also likely to be strong if MEXT-imposed strict limits on the quotas of students going to each university mean that the number of Japanese students admitted to top-ranked universities will have to go down to make way for the newcomers (Ishikawa 2011, 203; Interview R). In addition to the above resistance to the spread of courses in English that is grounded in concerns of a practical nature, there is also a body of thought that calls for active opposition in order to defend national cultural interests. This point of view regards the global dominance of English as a threat to be resisted, for reasons of principle. Tsuda Yukio, a professor of International Communication at Tsukuba University (a major research university which has a high international profile), has argued that English is not simply a value-free tool for international communication. Rather it is an example of Western linguistic imperialism that will bring about the destruction of many other languages and a global linguistic class-structure with those who are native-speakers at the top and others in inferior positions (Tsuda 2000, Aspinall 2003). Tsuda calls for Japan to join other nations in resistance to the dominance of English, and he is very critical of 5 National universities are having to cope with cuts of 1 per cent a year over a period of twenty years from 2004 to 2023, and private universities are faced with reduced student-fee income from a diminishing pool of potential students as the Japanese population shrinks.



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those Japanese who are devoted to eigo shinkō or ‘English worship’, which he sees as an example of a national inferiority complex. Another influential thinker who takes a similar line is sociolinguist Suzuki Takao of Keio University. He agrees with Tsuda’s point about Japan’s historical feeling of inferiority towards more powerful nations (first China, then Europe and now the United States), and argues that eigo shinkō is a present-day example of self-colonisation (Suzuki 1999, 145). Both Tsuda and Suzuki acknowledge the importance of English in the present-day world, but they object to English being given precedence over Japanese within Japan itself. In 2010, when the Japanese companies Rakuten Inc. (an online shopping service) and Fast Retailing Co. (operator of the Uniqlo chain of clothing stores) announced they were making English their official in-house language, Tsuda wrote letters to the company presidents urging them to reconsider. He argues that they were not treating their own people and language with enough respect, and that they were setting a terrible precedent (Asahi Shimbun, 16 October, 2010). The point of view that Tsuda embodies is one that puts preservation of national autonomy above international competitiveness. It is an intellectual defence of the common preference in Japan for the maintenance of monolingualism in business and in education. One serious problem facing those who are trying to encourage more internationalisation is the conservatism of the majority of the people who work and study in Japanese institutions of higher education. Too many academics and administrators have what has been described by anthropologist Greg Poole as an uchimuki or inward-looking view of the world (Poole 2010). Such people often spend their whole working life at one insti­ tution (indeed, in Japan many academics get jobs at universities where they were themselves students). This results in the nurturing of group cohesion, loyalty to the institution and mistrust of outsiders. Institu­tional harmony and togetherness can be positive characteristics, but if they are overemphasised they can be damaging for any institution that wishes to become a world-class university or department. One foreign professor working at a Japanese university describes the situation as follows. To put it simply, the fundamental barrier to world-class status for Japanese universities is that many faculty members just aren’t that enthusiastic about welcoming large numbers of international teaching staff and students as anything more than visitors.6 6 Jay Klaphake, ‘A Foreigner Friendly Field of Dreams?’, in Japan Times, 30 March 2010. The author’s words are given more power by the fact that he is an associate professor at

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These social characteristics are also damaging when looked at from the point of view of young, ambitious, Japanese graduate students wishing to pursue a career within Japan. Given the uchimuki nature of many of their senior colleagues, it makes more sense for the ambitious Japanese student to devote his or her attention to developing strong bonds within a particular gakkai (academic association) or within a particular university, than it does to develop a high-profile international image. There are anecdotes of junior research students carrying the bags or acting as chauffeurs for senior professors. This kind of behaviour is highly rational in a uchimuki world. In the majority of cases, of course, ambitious researchers will try to develop an international profile at the same time that they develop their contacts closer to home. It is certainly not unheard of for ambitious research students to be obsequious to senior colleagues in other countries of course. The problem for Japan, however, is that, when all things are considered, there are too many incentives to look inward, and not enough incentives for a global perspective. The 2009 OECD report says that ‘the international dimension is rather marginal in national higher education policy making’ (Newby et al. 2009, 86). With the exception of a small number of internationally inclined private universities, this marginalisation is also a factor at the level of micro policy. The damaging consequences of this on Japan’s hightech research are now becoming clear. Between 2006 and 2009 the number of patent applications in Japan sank while those in Europe and America remained steady, and those in China soared. The reason for Japan’s disappointing performance is clearly connected to a recent change in the nature of innovation: the dramatic internationalisation of R&D. In 1990, less than 10 per cent of international patent applications had a foreign co-inventor, but ten years later this had risen to about 25 per cent. Japan, by contrast, ‘remains woefully insular: only 4% of Japanese applications included a foreign co-inventor’ (Economist, 2 October 2010). Japanese researchers have no alternative but to learn to work more effectively with foreign colleagues, unless Japan is to fall further behind in high-tech competition with rising Asian powers as well as established Western countries. Given the fact, mentioned earlier, that Japan will need to more than double the number of international students it accepts in the next ten years in order to maintain its present global position as an

Ritsumeikan University, one of the few universities in Japan that is making serious efforts in the area of international education.



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importer of students, the insularity and lack of urgency evident in Japan’s institutions of higher learning should be a cause for concern for anyone interested in promoting Japan’s place in the world. International Student Policy in Japan: Outgoing Students An editorial appearing in the Yomiuri Shimbun on 7 October 2010 celebrated the announcement that two Japanese scientists, Suzuki Akira and Negishi Ei-ichi, had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (sharing the prize with a third, American scientist). The celebratory tone of the article, however, was tempered by its warning that ‘there are worrisome signs emerging as to how long Japan will be able to retain such technical prowess.’ It went on to warn of the ‘inward-looking attitude among young Japanese researchers’. To back up this assertion it estimated that at present, Chinese students account for about 30 per cent of non-American students who receive doctorates at US universities, South Koreans account for about 10 per cent, while Japanese students only make up 2 per cent of the total. The newspaper pointed out that both of the new Nobel Laureates went to study in America shortly after graduating from Japanese universities (and one of them, Negishi, stayed there). After going on to mention the poor (and worsening) performance of Japanese universities in global rankings, the Yomiuri concluded that ‘the Japanese government and research institutions may need to renew their sense of alarm.’ For the reasons summarised by de Wit and mentioned above, the benefits of international education only really accrue if the movement of students is in both directions. However, the Japanese government has been much slower to set ambitious national targets for students going out from Japan comparable to the ‘100,000 student plan’ or the ‘300,000 student plan’ for students coming in. In the absence of any government initiative before 2011, numbers of students spending time abroad stagnated and then declined. In 2004, 82,000 students went abroad, but this went down to 59,000 in 2009. In 2010, the media focused on the case of Harvard University, the most prestigious higher education institution in the world, and therefore a natural destination for the best and brightest students from every part of the globe. The figures were alarming when Japan’s figures were contrasted to those of their Asian neighbours: between 1999 and 2009 the number of Chinese students at Harvard had increased from 227 to 463, and the number from South Korea had increased from 183 to 315. By contrast the number of Japanese students had declined from 151 to 101, of

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which only five were undergraduates. In 2011, in response to media criticism, MEXT began offering grants to universities to encourage participation in study-abroad programmes. Special five-year grants of 100 million to 200 million yen are being offered to forty universities as part of this push. It is to be hoped that this funding will help to reverse the decline. To understand why the number of Japanese students going abroad was declining while student numbers from comparable countries were rising, we need to think of these students as ‘risk managers’ weighing the costs and benefits of a future sojourn in a foreign country. Partly based on my own experience advising and escorting Japanese students travelling abroad for over ten years, and partly based on other research in this field I have combined the following two lists: reasons to go, and reasons to stay. Five reasons Japanese students participate in study-abroad programmes: 1. A small number of students and their parents choose the option of attending a foreign university because of dissatisfaction with the Japanese university system as a whole. This option is not available to most families because of cost. 2. Other students go abroad because their preferred area of specialisation is not available in Japan. This is supported by marketing surveys conducted by the British Council at higher education fairs in Japan (Walker 2005). 3. Japanese women opting for study abroad sometimes see this as a route to a career abroad or a career in Japan with a foreign company. This strategy is one way of escaping the limitations imposed on women by the Japanese workplace. This trend has been increased by the employment ‘ice age’ brought about by the 2008 economic crisis, in which some Japanese companies have indicated they will not be hiring women at all.7 4. Some students desire to escape the restrictions of Japanese society. They may have an idealised view of the country they are planning to study in (Walker 2005, 174–75). Institutions located in places that have a very positive image in Japan like California, Australia, the south of England etc. exploit these images to attract customers. 5. Often, university students are encouraged to try a study-abroad experience by other students who have already been. The positive 7 The new Japanese word ‘sekashū’ (a contraction of the words sekai – world, and shūshoku – job searching) has been coined to denote the concept of ‘global job search’ undertaken by young Japanese men and women as a response to the difficulties of finding work at home (Nikkei Weekly, 20 February 2012).



study abroad: policy and practice169 experiences of most Japanese students when they go abroad can therefore be considered another positive motivating factor. Research carried out on a group of 166 Japanese students participating in a short studyabroad programme in the USA by Tanaka and Ellis found that ‘statistically significant changes in the learners’ beliefs occurred in the study-abroad program. The strongest effect was evident in beliefs relating to self-efficacy and confidence’ (Tanaka and Ellis 2003, 81).

Eight reasons Japanese students do not participate in study-abroad programmes: 1. Almost all Japanese students study through the medium of the Japanese language during their time in full-time education. Very few have the required ability in English or another language that will enable them to take courses at a non-Japanese university. Lack of aptitude at a foreign language stops many Japanese young people from even considering study abroad. I have seen cases of students who have not had the time to improve their TOEFL score to the minimum required in order to attend universities in the United States. 2. There are almost no Japanese degree programmes that require language students to spend a certain period of study in a country where the target L2 language is spoken. A small number of exceptions occur in private universities with a reputation for excellence in foreign language education. By way of comparison, students in some foreign university systems (like England) are required to spend one year studying abroad if their major subject of study is a foreign language. 3. Japanese students in their third and fourth years are often engaged in job-hunting activities (shūshoku katsudō). Most are unwilling to be out of Japan during this period because of possible interruptions to these very important activities. The recession that followed the global financial crisis of 2008 meant that job hunting for most students became more difficult and time consuming. This was certainly one of the reasons for the decline in students going abroad in 2009 and 2010.8 4. Postgraduate study abroad in most countries is considered a very useful addition to a student’s curriculum vitae. However, large Japanese employers have not traditionally valued postgraduate qualifications of any kind, preferring to recruit fresh, young, recent graduates whom

8 In October 2010, the number of final-year students (i.e. those graduating in March 2011) who had secured jobs hit a record low of 57.9 per cent (reported in Daily Yomiuri, 27 November 2010).

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they can train themselves. In addition, there are some reports that Japanese students who have spent time outside Japan are regarded as not ‘Japanese enough’ and their future prospects may be limited. This factor encourages an uchimuki attitude among young Japanese people looking for work during a period of high graduate unemployment or under-employment.9 5. Study abroad for Japanese students can be an expensive proposition, even with the record high yen rate against the US dollar and the Euro following the 2008 crisis. Before the announcement of financial help by MEXT in 2011, there were almost no government or private scholarships to help university students spend time in foreign universities. After two decades of recession or sluggish growth, many families understandably look at a sojourn abroad for their sons or daughters as an unaffordable luxury. 6. Japanese students in high-status universities have little incentive to study abroad because of the number of attractive careers available in Japan (Yonezawa 2010, 132–33). This factor partly explains the lack of interest by elite students in going to Harvard or other prestigious foreign universities. 7. It can be argued that the lack of international activities by many faculty members has some influence on their students. The inward-looking, uchimuki attitude of professors mentioned earlier may rub off on their students. If academic staff hardly ever venture abroad, they are unlikely to encourage their students to do so.10 8. By almost any objective measure, contemporary Japan is a safe place compared to many less fortunate countries and territories. The risk of going overseas for an extended period of time is off-putting for many young Japanese people and their families simply because they will be leaving a safe place and going to a more dangerous one.11 The factor of risk will be discussed in more detail below.  9 A professor from Austin, Texas, wrote a letter to the Japan Times in 2010 commenting on how increasingly difficult it had become to recruit postdoctoral science researchers from Japan. He was told that many were worried that if they spent too long outside Japan they would be ‘forgotten’ and lose an opportunity for a permanent post (Japan Times, 14 October 2010). 10 According to MEXT, the total number of Japanese researchers (at universities or government backed corporations) who spent at least thirty-one consecutive days overseas studying or conducting research was roughly 3,700 in 2008 and 2009, down from a peak of 7,600 in the academic year 2000 (reported in Japan Times, 9 October 2010). 11 The belief that Japan is safe has been tarnished since the 1990s by the growth of an anzen-shinwa (security myth) discourse in the media and among some political leaders



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Policymakers in Japan who are serious about sending more Japanese students abroad need to do more to deal with the incentive deficit that is clearly evident for all actors involved in the process. The danger is that a decline in the number of Japanese going abroad to study will result in diminished efforts by overseas recruiters to target them.12 The Individualised Risk-Taking Student in the Global Education Marketplace In some ways the student studying abroad can be regarded as a perfect manifestation of the coming together of the processes of individualisation, globalisation and risk awareness at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Over the past twenty years, the global rise in the numbers of students studying abroad has, from time to time, been stalled by economic crises, terrorist attacks and scares about new pandemics like SARS (2002–3) or the H1N1 influenza virus (2004–5). In each case, after a brief pause, the upward trend has been resumed. The citizens of most post-industrial societies can see at first hand the effects of globalisation on employment trends. Many careers that were based on the domestic economy and the assumption that there would be stability from graduation until retirement (careers of the ‘Phase Two’ period in Beck’s terminology) are simply no longer available in the numbers they were. Students and their advisors can see the advantages of an international education which will help new employees cope with these changed circumstances. The decision to pursue a large part of one’s education in a foreign country is clearly not risk free. Students have to cope with the stress and problems related to living in a different culture and speaking a different (Yamagami and Tollefson 2011, 29–30). Advertisements for new apartments and houses routinely include a section explaining the security systems that are incorporated in the building. 12 In a survey of American universities taken in 2009, 30.4 per cent of respondents reported a decrease in the number of students coming from Japan compared with 19.4 per cent that reported an increase. Of the ten countries covered by the survey, in the case of only one other (Indonesia) was there also more reports of a decrease compared with an increase. In the case of China 60 per cent of respondents reported an increase compared with 11 per cent that reported a decrease. The same survey showed that most American institutions were less active in the overseas recruiting of Japanese students compared with Korean, Chinese and Indian students. Managers of American overseas student recruitment programmes are clearly expending their efforts in areas where it will draw dividends. Fall 2009 International Student Enrolment Survey: http://www.iie.org/en/Who-We-Are/News -and-Events/Press-Center/Press-Releases/2009/2009-11-16-Fall-2009-Enrollment-Survey.

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language. There are practical problems related to academic credit transfers, academic years that start and end at different times, visa requirements and so on. Also, in the case of something going seriously wrong, for example a serious illness or accident, home is that much further away. In the wake of the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster in Fukushima, anxiety felt by relatives and friends of foreign students studying in Japan was that much more intense because of the distances that separated them from their loved ones, and also by sensational reporting in some popular media. I know of more than one foreign student who was forced to return home by over-anxious parents, even though they were living more than 400 km from the Fukushima nuclear power plant and were perfectly aware that they were not in any danger. Research has confirmed the impressions of those who work with studyabroad students that these students tend to be more willing to embrace risk than those who stay at home. A research project targeting American undergraduates in the 1980s found that ‘it is striking that the study abroad students tended to be risk-takers more critical of aspects of the United States and less typically mainstream that the comparison group students’ (Carlson et al. 1990, 117). Another conclusion of that American project is very applicable to the Japanese situation: One faces the dilemma that it is probably the students who are already most international in their interests, most independent and analytical in their thinking, and relatively well equipped with coping and cross-cultural skills who elect to study abroad and, by the same token, may have less to gain from it than students choosing to stay at home. (Ibid.)

Because of the lack of diversity in Japan compared with most parts of the United States, and because of the lack of diversity in the overwhelming majority of Japanese universities and colleges, the problem of finding students who already have cross-cultural skills is great. This means that in order to send significant numbers of students abroad, Japanese institutions have no choice but to target those who do not have experience of mixing with people from different cultures.13 Accordingly, many universities are introducing or improving existing programmes that are designed to prepare students for overseas experiences and encourage those who

13 The lack of experience of meeting people from different cultures is not confined to a lack of opportunities to meet people from abroad. It also applies to a lack of experiences within Japan. This is due to the fact that most students apply to universities in their region, and many students in urban areas commute to their university from their parents’ home.



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had not previously thought about studying abroad to consider the option.14 Also, in 1998 the JCSOS (Japanese Council for the Safety of Overseas Students) was established as a non-profit-making organisation to help Japanese universities better manage the risks involved in sending students overseas.15 In the early days of setting up study-abroad programmes, some inexperienced and untrained staff had been put into very difficult situations when confronted with problems arising overseas. Organisations like JCSOS offer practical training for staff as well as orientation sessions for students before they go abroad. JCSOS also helps Japanese universities conduct proper risk assessments when setting up new exchange agreements or short-term study programmes with foreign partner institutions. Even without a thorough training session, every student is at least vaguely aware of the risks involved in studying abroad, but what are the factors that make some students embrace those risks while others shy away? Individuals do not weigh up risks in a vacuum; they are influenced by the surrounding culture and society. The theoretical paradigm of ‘social amplification of risk’ discussed in chapter 1 is concerned with how some risks can become the focus of concern in society (risk amplification) while others receive less attention (risk attenuation). It follows from this that the way in which the media report events like the Fukushima disaster will have an influence on the perceptions of those who do not have direct experience of the events. One example of media ‘amplification of risk’ is the way that crime by foreigners is often reported in Japan. Calls to increase the number of foreigners coming into Japan for any reason are met with anxiety about the danger that the foreigners will bring more crime with them. Yamagami and Tollefson are surely correct in writing that ‘no issue more explicitly expresses a discourse of globalisation-as-threat than the concern for security and safety which is particularly focused on the role of foreigners in crime’ (Yamagami and Tollefson 2011, 29). In 2007 the suggestion that Japan requires more foreign workers was met with the following words from the Justice Minister, Hatoyama Kunio: ‘Considering Japan’s culture, I must question whether that is a good idea. This may not be the right 14 One example of this kind of programme that I have participated in is the Shiga University SUIPP programme (Shiga University International Education Preparation Programme), introduced in 2010, which enables students to experience lectures in English and invites professors from partner universities to come to Shiga to talk about study abroad. The number of TOEFL preparation classes has also been increased. 15 An English language site for JCSOS can be found at: http://www.jcsos.org/english .html.

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thing to say, but that could provoke an increase in crimes by foreign nationals’ (Japan Times, 4 September 2007). Living lives in a country where the visibly non-Japanese population is comparatively small may cause people to exaggerate the risks involved with either welcoming more foreigners into their midst or spending more than a brief time in a foreign country. Also, the lack of foreign acquaintances will make many Japanese people susceptible to images created by the popular media. In one sensational example, the brutal murder of a family of four in Fukuoka by three Chinese students in 2004 was used by the popular media as a means to warn people about the general rise in crime by Chinese students (Brasor 2004). This was in spite of the objective fact that since there had recently been large increases in the number of Chinese students (due to the success of the Japanese government’s ‘100,000 student plan’) then the key thing to consider would be the rate of crime (which had not increased) rather than an absolute increase in incidents. One of the key sources of information on crimes by foreigners for the mass media is the National Police Agency (NPA), which regularly issues misleading statistics on rising foreign crime, including, for example, statistics for visa-related violations, crimes which by definition cannot be committed by Japanese nationals in Japan (Shipper 2005, 301). Anti-discrimination activist, Arudou Debito has used his internet site (debito.org) to monitor misleading NPA announcements about foreign crime as well as other sources of distorted information that can fuel fears about foreigners (Haffner et al. 2009, 194). If the prospect of foreign students coming to Japan, even in very modest numbers relative to the Japanese population, is portrayed as risky by Japanese government agencies and the media, then it should not be surprising to find that Japanese students who are considering travelling abroad to study are also subject to images of foreign countries (by definition, full of foreigners) as highly risky places. In a study of the cultural politics of fear in Japan, political scientist David Leheny writes about an official ‘overseas safety film’ entitled Sakusen kōdo Tokyo (Battle code: Tokyo) created by the Council for Public Policy in 1996. In this short animated film, which is intended to be both humorous and instructive, Japanese businessmen are kidnapped by a foreign power and transported to a simulacrum of Tokyo where they are observed closely so that the secrets of Japan’s economic success can be learned. The plan fails however, ‘because the foreign designers of this virtual Tokyo are unable to grasp one of the central differences between Japan and the rest of the world: Japan is safe, and its people are protected. Without warning signs, safety measures and a society made up of authentic (and peaceful) Japanese, the Japanese



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guests keep getting killed’ (Leheny 2006: 115). Although this film (and others like it) is available for loan in public libraries, it is doubtful that many prospective Japanese study-abroad applicants have seen it. The point, however, is that the main message of the film illustrates the official view of ‘Safe Japan, Dangerous Abroad’, a view that is shared by many of the Japanese public. The film also reminds Japanese people that if they do get in trouble overseas, neither Japanese officialdom nor Japanese society are there to protect them. This fact indicates that those Japanese students who do take the risk of going abroad to study are likely to be the kind of people determined to leave the cosiness and security of their home behind them in order to embrace the risks of travel into the unknown. Study-Abroad Policy and Globalisation: Myth and Reality It should not be forgotten that numbers of students studying abroad alone are not a measure of the internationalisation of a given university or the society in which it is located. In an article entitled ‘Five Myths about Internationalization’, by Jane Knight, myth number one is described as the idea ‘that more foreign students on campus will produce more internationalized institutional culture and curriculum’ (Knight 2011, 14). One reason why this does not necessarily follow is that ‘international students tend to band together and ironically often have a broader and more meaningful intercultural experience on campus than domestic students, without having any deep engagement with the host country culture’ (Ibid.). This is a problem for every nation seeking to nurture universities that are more in tune with the trends of globalisation. In the case of Japan, one particular practice that is common in both national and private universities must surely exacerbate the kind of division between domestic and international students described by Knight: that is the accommodating of overseas students in distinct international dormitories or halls of residence often named kokusai kōryū kaikan (international exchange halls). As in the cases described by Knight above, the ‘exchange’ that goes on in these facilities is mostly between foreign students and other foreign students of different countries. There will usually be formal events and parties in which foreign students can meet Japanese students, but these events cannot reach the majority of domestic students on any given campus. Once again, the Japanese students who take part in this kind of event will mostly be drawn from the minority of students already active in international programmes of one kind or another.

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In almost every ‘wealthy’ nation the number of foreign students coming in to study is padded by those who are coming under false pretences, usually to work illegally. This is certainly true in Japan, where low-level private universities, especially, have been caught giving student visas to foreign ‘students’ who should not have qualified for them and who have no intention of studying (Goodman 2007, 82). The most notorious case of this kind of illegal activity involved Sakata Junior College in Yamagata. When this college went bankrupt in 2002 it was revealed that about 200 mostly Chinese students had never attended classes and spent the whole time working in Tokyo (McVeigh 2006, 115–16). This was an extreme case and one that prompted MEXT to order more rigorous checking of class attendance by foreign students. Nevertheless it remains a fact that there are some low-level universities in Japan that depend on foreign students simply because there are not enough domestic students any more to fill their rosters. It can be seen, therefore, that numbers alone are only a rough indication of the internationalisation of higher education and that this is as true of an individual campus as it is of a large, national system. Private universities that have mediocre academic records and host large numbers of Chinese students with limited qualifications who are taught entirely in the medium of Japanese are not model global academic institutions, although they can be described as global from the point of view of a neoliberal market-economy view of globalisation. Conclusion The student who has had a successful study-abroad experience has not only enriched their own life and improved their CV, they have also, in a small way, added to their nation’s ability to thrive as a post-industrial economy and society. The rhetoric of the Japanese government and the educational institutions under its wing shows that they understand this. The problems that institutions and individuals have, however, in their efforts to increase the numbers of study-abroad students – both those coming into Japan and those going out – are serious. Too many institutions in Japan are locked into the mindset of the second phase of post-war development (where national creation of wealth was taken for granted). One aspect of this mindset is the reluctance to involve foreigners in domestic affairs except in a very limited and controlled way. The third phase (where there is fear and uncertainty about the



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nation’s prosperity), which Beck calls ‘global risk society’, involves breaking away from the safety and predictability of the previous phase. Thriving as a post-industrial society requires embracing risk rather than avoiding it: it clearly involves breaking away from the safety and predictability of the previous phase. If Japanese institutions are unwilling or unable to make this break they will restrict the opportunities of individual Japanese citizens, without, in the long run, giving them the security they crave. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Japan was referred to as a ‘late moderniser’ as it pursued a policy of ‘catch-up’ with the West. Does its current predicament make it a ‘late internationaliser’?

CONCLUSION The Ministry of Education has stated that the main purpose of Japan’s international education policy is to help it ‘make an active international contribution in keeping with its international status’. In order to achieve this, it has set out detailed policies that aim to improve the foreign language abilities of all Japanese people, and increase the amount of student exchange between Japan and the outside world. The present volume has provided a study of the nature of some of the serious obstacles that lie in the path of the successful implementation of these policies. In order to understand the problems faced by institutions and individuals when they try to adapt to global changes, the theoretical paradigms of globalisation and risk society have been used. Discourses that invoke the contested concept of globalisation have been used both by those who want more engagement by Japanese people with the world outside and those who warn about its dangers. Cowen’s twin notions of permiology to mean the study of the various ways borders may be permeable, and its opposite, immunology to analyse resistance to cross-border flows, were applied to shed light on the way some things cross Japan’s borders fairly freely while other things are excluded. Globalisation affects a large post-industrial society like Japan in complex ways. One heuristic device for making sense of this is the risk society paradigm introduced in chapter 1. This helps us understand how individual actors make decisions that, taken as an aggregate, decide the success or failure of government policies. One of the main concerns of this book has been the policy and practice of English language teaching in Japan. Since 1989 the Ministry of Education has been explicitly calling for all Japanese children to be taught communicative English, and has embarked on curriculum reform and introduced special programmes in order to bring this about. Unlike other areas of reform, this is one that has proved to be supported by all of the major actors of the education policymaking system (Aspinall 2006, 257–59). The question that needs to be addressed, therefore, is why the results to date have been so disappointing. There are some common themes that recur through this book that help to explain the difficulties schools and individuals have in meeting the ministry’s goals. One clear problem is the overemphasis of translation in the teaching of English. For many people involved in language study and

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teaching, the core activity of their professional life is translating foreign language texts into Japanese. The emphasis is on getting as accurate a translation as possible, something that requires a detailed knowledge of grammar and a very wide vocabulary. In this respect, Japan’s borders are highly permeable to information from the outside world. There is now a huge amount of translated texts available in the Japanese language that not only covers every academic discipline, but also embraces a rich and diverse selection of literature from every corner of the globe, and allows hobbyists and enthusiasts access to information about every conceivable interest and pastime from Argentinean tango to British steam locomotives. Translation is of course a very important activity and has provided an immeasurable amount of information to those who would not otherwise have had access to it, but its domination over the English language teaching profession (as well as the teaching of other foreign languages) clearly has negative consequences for the teaching and learning of communicative English. During the first two major periods of educational change in modern Japan’s history, the Meiji period and the post-war Occupation, the importance of translation as a goal of language education policy and the lack of viable alternatives meant that children would inevitably sit at their desks and study written examples of foreign languages. In both periods, Japan’s national policymakers were concerned with learning from the West via the medium of Western languages. Also during both periods, the vast majority of people could have no contact with Western foreigners. Given these facts it was entirely natural that Japan would have a foreign language education policy focused on helping Japanese people learn from the West. The key challenge for researchers into Japanese foreign language education policy is to explain how a policy paradigm for one set of national circumstances proved so difficult to change when circumstances changed. By the 1980s, the almost exclusive reliance on translating the written word came to be seen as inadequate to meet the needs of Japan as an economic giant with global markets. It became clear to many of Japan’s leaders that more Japanese people would need to communicate with foreigners in face-to-face situations, and it became equally clear that English was now the global lingua franca. The pressure for change resulted in the 1989 MOE guidelines that required all children to be taught ‘Oral Communication’. What set of circumstances or institutional forces stopped this push for real communication achieving successful results? It is a truism that bureaucracies can be very slow to change, and this applies to institutional organisations at the level of the board of education

conclusion181 and the school as well as the national ministry. Critics argue that, too often, public bureaucracies lack incentive to change their entrenched habits or behaviour. In the case of Japan, it is undeniable that institutions in the public sector charged with improving communicative foreignlanguage teaching have never faced any real negative consequences for failing in their mission. No bureaucrat, teacher or manager has ever been disciplined or punished for ignoring or failing to implement MEXT policies relating to English language education. Those who have, against the odds, worked hard to introduce Oral English successfully into their classrooms have received no reward other than the satisfaction of a job well done. The lack of any sticks or carrots has to be part of the explanation for inertia. However, it cannot be the whole story, since Japanese institutions have overcome inertia and obstruction in other areas, for example the introduction of IT to universities (Bachnik 2003). The belief that Japan is a homogeneous society with one culture and one language shared by all is extremely strong. This fuels a binary attitude wherein a person is either Japanese or foreign. A Japanese person who becomes too good at a foreign language or too familiar with foreign cultural ways is running the risk that they will begin to have their ‘Japanese­ ness’ questioned by their fellow countrymen and women. Measuring something as elusive as an ‘attitude’ is of course very difficult, and some would say that it is merely something rhetorical or anecdotal; in other words not worthy of inclusion in a social scientific study of education policy. However, I have come across too many cases both in my own experience and in the literature on education in Japan to downplay its importance. In one extreme case, encountered after I had been in Japan only a short while, I saw a SHS boy, who was told to answer the teacher’s question in English, reply ‘ore nihonjin da!’ (I am Japanese!). Of course, the threatening nature of English to Japanese identity is not usually expressed as blatantly as this, but there is no question that it is a powerful force. The English language is seen as, in Seargeant’s words, “a living artefact belonging to a foreign culture” (Seargeant 2008: 134). On the other hand, as a counterweight to this cultural attitude is the growing economic incentive to become good at English communication. The almost paranoid attitude of the Ministry of Education displayed by the wording of its Action Plan as one that must create ‘Japanese with English abilities’, however, betrays an official obsession in making sure that the teaching of English to impressionable young people does not undermine their loyalty to Japan. There are serious difficulties inherent in a national policy that exhorts citizens to embrace a foreign language while at the same time looking back over their

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shoulders at a national identity that is made to seem threatened by the very foreign language that is being studied. This book has often stressed the disconnection between national policy directives and everyday classroom practice. There is one area, however, where the governmental level has much in common with the genba, and that is the extremely influential role played by people with no interest or training in the teaching of communicative foreign languages. Two key policy developments that took place after the new emphasis was placed on teaching for communication were the introduction of the JET programme and the extension throughout the university system of the TOEIC exam as a practical test of students’ English aptitudes. As we have seen, the driving forces behind both initiatives were actors who were unqualified in foreign-language teaching. In the case of JET, the main drivers of policy were the Ministry of Home Affairs (which wanted practical help with foreign languages for local government staff), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (which wanted to invite young graduates from the USA and other countries in order to improve Japan’s image abroad), and the prime minister’s office (which was following Nakasone’s direction to find something he could give to President Reagan to counter the attacks being made on the huge Japanese trade surplus of that time). The Ministry of Education was initially opposed to JET, but changed its position when it was clear that the programme was going ahead with or without its approval. The result was hundreds of unqualified Westerners being sent to schools that had not been adequately prepared to host them. In the case of TOEIC, the main drivers were Kitaoka Yasuo and Watanabe Yaeji, two private-sector businessmen with very strong links to the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Once again the Ministry of Education did not get involved until the new policy was a fait accompli. As a consequence TOEIC is currently used as a placement test and a method of measuring individual student progress over short time-spans, two functions it was never designed to fulfil. Meanwhile at the genba, the teaching of English in universities is mostly carried out by people who have no qualifications in TEFL or a related field and whose academic interests lie elsewhere. In addition, the people who create and grade English university entrance exams are usually unqualified in foreign-language testing methodology even though these exams have a large wash-back effect on SHS English. The secondary level (JHS and SHS) is the only level of the education system in Japan where the teachers are thoroughly trained and professional in their approach to foreign-language teaching. Unfortunately, as well as having to serve the

conclusion183 needs of a very flawed university entrance-exam system, these teacher have to cope with huge workplace demands that are not connected to language learning. If secondary-school teachers do try to introduce more communicative language teaching, they have to cope with the still strongly held belief that eigo is different from eikaiwa: the former is serious, important study, the latter is just for fun. Although oral communication has been part of the curriculum since 1989, this widely held prejudice is still evident. This prejudice is at the same time a cause for and a consequence of the fact that communicative language teaching methodology violates some of the principles of ‘good learning’ in Japanese school culture (Aspinall 2006). Thus, many contemporary secondary-school teachers remain wedded to the grammar–translation (yakudoku) approach of previous generations of foreign-language teachers. True change will be impossible to achieve until the day that eikaiwa is no longer regarded as something trivial, but instead is seen as a fundamental component of the mastering of English as a living language. Let us return to the two students we met in the introduction who had succeeded in meeting all the academic requirements of the contemporary Japanese education system but whose experience with English language education had been highly frustrating. In the case of the first student who did not have the confidence or the pronunciation skills to utter even a simple phrase in English, he has clearly experienced English language education during his school years as the teaching of a dead language. His JHS and SHS teachers would probably have used almost no spoken English in their teaching. They would have taught English grammar in a highly abstract and complex way, reinforcing the view that English was too difficult a language to master. His class may have had a rare visit from a nativespeaker ALT. His experience of this would have depended on the skills of the ALT and whether they were ‘aloof’, a ‘cynic’, a ‘missionary’, a ‘careerist’ or a ‘Nipponophile’. It is possible that if the ALT were a ‘missionary’ or a ‘careerist’ and if they could work well with the JTE, then the student may have experienced a good lesson involving genuine exercises in conversation. However, these lessons would have been few and eventually would have come to an end. Anything he may have learned, for example some elementary pronunciation skills, would have been forgotten during the intense study required for entrance exams. During his school career no teacher, parent or career advisor would have had any problem with his inability to speak English. What would be the point since there are no exams in oral English to worry about? When this student graduates he will

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probably get a good white-collar job in a private company. When the telephone at his desk goes one day and he hears a foreign voice on the other end of the line speaking English he will suffer the panic attack of many who have gone before. His boss will shake his head and wonder why the education system continues to fail to produce young people who can cope with speaking with foreigners. In the case of the second student, someone who was able to speak English with confidence, it is highly unlikely that she is a product of the state school system, unless she was able to get experience abroad in an English-speaking country and later return as a kikokushijo. Her confidence in English led her to choose American Literature as her main field of study at university. However, her negative experience of the course, in which only one book was studied the entire time, has alienated her from further interest in English-language literature. In her case she has managed to survive the yakudoku method of teaching at the secondary-school stage, but has fallen under its malign spell at the university level. She was probably taught by professors who were leading Japanese experts in American Literature. Like their Meiji-era forbears, they see their job as making a close analysis of a source of foreign knowledge and then expounding this analysis in Japanese. In order to become qualified as Japanese professors of American Literature, young researchers would be expected to analyse portions of text in great detail and write about it in highly specialised Japanese. This almost certainly influences the way they teach students. They see it as their duty as members of an academic institution to lead their students through a highly detailed, complex and possibly abstract analysis of certain parts of the text. The student in question here found this process very difficult and confusing. If enough students give feedback that the course is too difficult, it may lead the professors to modify their teaching methods, but there is no professional requirement that they do so. Rather they may see the difficulty of the course as a mark of academic virtue. It is difficult to predict what the student in this example will do after graduation, although her skills in spoken English may give her career opportunities not available to the student in the previous example. One thing that is certain is that she has now learned the lesson that most young Japanese learn sooner or later: English is just too difficult for them really to understand. Since the need for greater communicative competence in English was acknowledged by MOE in the 1980s, the main organisational failure on its part has been the failure to overhaul the whole system of language education root and branch. If the comparison can be made again with the reform

conclusion185 of history teaching in England in the 1980s, the issues at stake will become clearer. In England, when the decision was reached to move from a factsbased and chronological approach to history to a more skills-based approach, the entire system of history education for children aged eleven to sixteen was overhauled: the exam was completely changed (to coincide with the replacement of O levels and CSEs by the new GCSE in 1988), the training for new teachers was changed and the system of school inspection was changed. A teacher who wanted to teach according to the old regime of memorising large amounts of facts would not have been permitted to do so by their head of department, by school inspectors or by the parents of children preparing for the new skills-based exam. By contrast, in Japan the old system was not replaced by a completely new one. Teacher training programmes were only slightly changed. Old textbooks were modified and supplemented by new ‘Oral Communication’ texts. The old written exams stayed much the same (with some improvements) and were supplemented by new listening tests. Instead of listening being integrated into the curriculum it was merely attached, almost as an after-thought. One result of this was the extension of the time required to take the English Centre Exam. The Centre Exams take place over a weekend in January. The written English exam is finished at 4: 30 p.m. on the Saturday. Before the introduction of the listening test this was the end of the day for test candidates. However, now that there is a listening test they have to remain at the centre for the English listening exam, which starts at 5: 15 p.m. and ends at 6: 10 p.m. Candidates then have to go home and get some rest before coming back to the test centre the next day (Sunday) for the first exam, which starts at 9: 30 a.m. Clearly this ‘improvement’ in the curriculum has increased fatigue and stress for exam candidates. As has been mentioned at several points in this book, the practical problems inherent in testing oral English has meant that this vital skill is completely excluded from the national testing regime, meaning that it is effec­ tively ignored by teachers, students and parents. Thus the old grammar– translation methods survive in only slightly modified forms. If future reform efforts continue to tinker with the system, the problems outlined in this book are destined to continue. Another underlying reason for the failure of national policy is the refusal to face up to the difficulty of mastering English. The Ministry of Education’s stated goals for the expected levels attained by fifteen-yearolds and eighteen-year-olds are ridiculously overambitious given the time and resources available. Ultraman team-teaching with Superman could not get all their students up to these levels. One way of cutting this Gordian

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knot would be to make English an official language of Japan, meaning that all government documents would have to be made available in English, and English could be used, in principle, for the conduct of any official business. In one stroke Japanese people would have the same advantages as Indians and Filipinos: the whole country would be immersed in English. This suggestion was actually put forward in 2000 by Prime Minister Obu­ chi Keizo’s ‘Commission on Japan’s Goals in the 21st Century’, and it was briefly taken quite seriously by some in the media and academia. How­ ever, strong reactions by nationalists, combined with practical arguments about the huge cost to the taxpayer, meant that the idea was never taken any further. If the notion of English as an official language is removed, then the difficulty of English and the finite amount of time and resources available suggest that the only way forward for English language education in Japan is to allow different tracks of English study at the JHS and SHS levels. This is a very obvious point and something that is not original. As we have seen in our overview of failed reforms, it was suggested in the Diet by Hiraizumi Wataru in 1974 and it was proposed once more by a MEXT panel reporting in 2000. The idea would be to provide every child in Japan with a grounding in all four skills of basic English during their JHS years. If properly trained teachers are made available at the elementary school level, then this basic education could begin earlier. At some point in the JHS years, students could choose to opt for advanced English, to continue with basic English or to drop the study of foreign languages altogether. Different levels of English could be available at the Centre Exam instead of only one. There are already different types of Mathematics exam available, and so this part of the reform would not entail a major organisational change. Students who select advanced English would be able to drop other subjects in order to free up the extra time required. Only students who opt for advanced English would have to take an oral exam, and this could be done at their school rather than at an exam centre. There would need to be a discussion about what exact percentage of students should study advanced English. In 1974 Hiraizumi suggested 5 per cent. In my interview with language education expert Yoshida Kensaku in 2004 he suggested that the percentage today would probably need to be higher, but he added that even getting 5 per cent of each student cohort up to a highly proficient level would mark a considerable improvement on present results (Interview M). One of the biggest objections to this kind of proposal is its ‘elitist’ nature. In fact that was a charge directed at the Ministry of Education’s one successful programme that has been discussed in this

conclusion187 book, the SELHi programme, which focused extra resources on a select number of high schools. If advanced English was made available as a choice, there is certainly the danger that a social elite proficient in English could emerge similar to those in other Asian countries and territories. However, this could also happen without reform, given the cost for families of privately educating their children in communicative English. What is certain is that the existing English language education system is one that spreads misery and failure equally throughout the land. This is a perverse form of egalitarian education indeed.

INTERVIEWS Anonymous Interviews Interview A Japanese owner of private English school for children in Saitama (19 October 2002) Interview B British university professor in national Japanese university in Nagoya (8 November 2002) Interview C American university professor in national Japanese university in Nagoya (8 November 2002) Interview D American university professor in private Japanese university in Tokyo (17 November 2002) Interview E Irish professor in a national university in Nagoya (24 January 2003) Interview F British owner of private English school and former ALT in Saitama (24 March 2003) Interview G Japanese senior high school English teacher in Saitama prefecture (25 March 2003) Interview H American ALT in Saitama (25 March 2003) Interview I British university lecturer in private Japanese university in Nagoya (7 April 2003) Interview J American lecturer in public Japanese community college in Mie (29 April 2003) Interview K Japanese owner of private foreign language school for adults in Nagoya (14 October 2006) Interview L Japanese senior high school English teacher (retired) in Aichi Prefecture (28 March 2008) Non-anonymous Interviews Interview M Yoshida Kensaku, university professor, textbook author and government advisor, Sophia University (19 February 2004) Interview N Huw Oliphant (ALT advisor) and Habu Katayuki (Inter­ national Education Division, Elementary and Secondary Education Bureau) in MEXT (21 February 2005)

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Interview O Tonegawa Keiko, Deputy General Advisor, 1st Supervision Division, Department of School Education, Saitama City Board of Education (28 November, 2005) Interview P Sasaki Ichiro, chair of the executive committee of Meikokyo (Nagoya High School Teachers’ Union) (28 March 2008) Interview Q Takasaki Kazuko, chair of the executive committee of Aikokyo (Aichi Prefecture High School Teachers’ Union) (28th March 2008) Interview R Claudia Ishikawa, Associate Professor and Coordinator NUPACE, Nagoya University (27th June, 2011). Interview S Kumasaka Kayoko, Study Abroad Programme Manager, International Exchange and Cooperation Headquarters Nagoya University (27th June, 2011).

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INDEX Ackermann, Peter 118 Action Plan to Cultivate English with Japanese Abilities 65–66, 86, 123, 131, 181 action research 8, 66 Ad Hoc Council on Education Reform (Rinkyōshin) 18, 30–1 Agency for Cultural Affairs 159 Akita International University 145, 163 amakudari 149 ‘Amerasian’ children 131–2, 134 America, See United States of America American Occupation of Japan 17, 53–56 American literature 3–4, 184 ancient China 41, 77 ancient Greek, See ‘dead’ foreign languages applied linguistics 5, 70, 100, 128 Arudou Debito 114, 174 Asahi Shimbun 75–76, 86 Asia Pacific University 162 assimilation, See minorities Assistant Language Teachers 8, 51, 80–81, 96–98, 103–106, 121–2, 124–5, 183 Bakufu, See Tokugawa regime Bank of Japan, Governor of 57 Bansho Shirabesho 39–40 Beck, Ulrich 21, 23, 25, 27, 28–9, 158, 171, 177 bilingual families 133–34 boards of education 58, 74, 84n, 90, 94, 97, 101, 107, 109 borders, meaning of in a globalised world 25, 27, 143–44, 158, 179–80 British Council 163, 168 British Empire 40 British English Teaching (BET) scheme 82 Bryant, W.C. 57 budgetary screening 75 bureaucracy 81–82, See also individual ministries bureaucratic rationality, See Katō Junko bureaucrats, behaviour of 33–34, 51, 81–82, 85, 151 business community, Japan’s 1, 81, 119–20 Campbell, John C. 18, 33 Cave, Peter 22–23, 92 Central Council on Education 22, 157–58 Chernobyl nuclear disaster 21–22

Childs, Marshall 141n Chōshū samurai 41–2 Christian universities 145–46 Christianity, seen as a threat 44, 45 Clammer, John 20–21 ‘closed country’ policy 37–38, 39 Cold War, end of 26 communicative language teaching 64, 69–70, 90, 94–96, 111–12, 124, 156, 179 Confucian studies 41, 45–46 consensus (on policy) 18 Constitution of Japan 53–5 course of study guidelines 2, 62, 64, 68, 75–76, 140 Cowen, Robert 25, 179 crime committed by foreigners 173–74 cross-cultural skills 172, 175 cultural homogeneity in Japan 10, 131, 143, 164, 170, 181 culture as a flexible construct 143 of resistance 117–8 of the classroom 51, 94–96, 122, 124–5, 128, 164 ‘dead’ foreign languages, ix 6, 50, 78–9, 130, 183 debate, teaching of 64 de Wit, Hans 160, 167 Difficulty of learning English, See English language learning, difficulty Dierkes, Julian 33 Duke, Benjamin 41 Dutch language, study of during Tokugawa era 39, 40n education policy, See Ministry of Education and international education policy Educational Testing Services 151 Ehime University 101 eikaiwa 8, 99, 112, 146–49 as distinct from eigo 129–30, 147, 183 classes 123 industry 109, 146, 148–49 Eiken 65–66, 149–50 egalitarianism 55, 63, 67–68, 86, 95, 123, 126, 130, 139, 187 elementary schools 55, 70–75, 186

204

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English language, as a suggested official language of Japan 185–86 as a medium for university study  162, 164 global dominance of 61, 160, 164–65, 180 ‘inner circle’ varieties of 147–48 English language learning, difficulty of 5–7, 63, 121, 129, 135 focus on translation 62, 68–69, 179–80, 183 immersion programmes 140–1 time required for 6, 56 various reasons for 147, 156 See also communicative language teaching English Language Exploratory Committee (ELEC) 57–58, 102 English language textbooks, See textbooks ‘English only’ policy 85–6, 125 English Teachers in Japan (ETJ) 114 entrance exams 75–77, 77–80, 123–24, 133 the Centre Exam 185, 186 sample questions from 79–80 wash-back effect of 64, 91, 124–25, 140, 182, 183 Examination for Japanese University Admission for International Students (EJU) 161 exams, See entrance exams ‘false beginners’ 112 Finland, education system in 138 foreign language learning 5–7, and motivation 5, 52, 120–22, 126, 128–29, 135 and norms of learning 67–68 and pronunciation 6–7 by young children 70 time required for 5–6, 66, 67 foreign language schools (Meiji period) 43–44 ‘freeters,’ 119–20 French language 40 Fries, Charles C. 57–8 Fujiwara, Masahiko 72 Fukuda Yasuo 161 Fukushima disaster, See nuclear crisis Fukuzawa Yukichi 40–1 Fundamental Code of Education 43 Fundamental Law of Education 54 gaikokujin kyōshi 110 gakushū shidō yōryō, See course of study guidelines

genba 8, 33, 86, 182 Genda Yuji 24, 119 German language 40 Germany, post-war history of 21 ‘Global 30’ project 142, 161, 162–63 globalisation 157–58, 175, 176–77 and education 19, 160 and English language learning 148–49 and market forces 149–51 definition of 18–19 Japanese responses to 25–27, 120, 137–38, 158–59, 163 Goodman, Roger 132–33, 162n Grimes-MacLellan, Dawn 118–19 Harvard University 167–68, 170 Hato Yumi 65–6 Hatoyama Kunio 173–74 Hiraizumi Wataru 62–3, 67, 186 Hirschman, Alfred 119 hikikomori 24 history teaching (in England) 90–91, 184–85 Hokkaido prefecture 146 home-stay programmes 67 Honig, Meredith I. 117 Hood, Christopher 31 Hook, Glenn 21 Horio, Teruhisa 32, 46 Howatt, A.P.R. 51 Hughes, Billy 47 Ibuki, Bunmei 73 ‘imperial internationalism’ 49–50 Imperial Rescript on Education 46 immigrants, See minorities implementation of policy 2, 117, 131, individual, the 22–23 individualisation 46, 120, 157–59 Inoue Tetsurō 46–47 Institute for Research in English Teaching 51–52 integrated studies 70, 71 International Christian University 145–46 international education policy 1, 163 Goals of 1 Pre-war 46–7 International Education Society of Japan (pre-war) 49 international schools 141–44 international students, See study abroad policy International University of Japan, Niigata 163 internationalisation 133, 159, 176–77

index205 Irie, Kay 128 Ito Hirobumi 41 Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT) 113–4 Japan Association of College English Teachers (JACET) 67, 102 Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme 8, 18, 80–85, 96–98, 103–106, 124–25, 148, 159, 182 Japan Center for Michigan Universities 144–45 Japan Council for the Safety of Overseas Students (JCSOS) 173 Japan Times 121, 125 Japanese language 27, 64, 164–65 juku 75–76, 123, 149 junior high schools 55, 62, 64–66, 150, and English language classes 56 students in 6, 120–3 Kagawa, Toyohiko 53 Kagoshima, bombardment of 38–39 Kanno Yasuko 133, 134, 142–43 Kariya Takehiko 25, 26–7, 120, 135, 158–59 katakana 7 Katō Junko 34–5, 82, 85 Kato Gakuen 140–41 Keio Shijuku 40–1 kikokushijo 94, 132–33, 141, 184 Kingston Polytechnic 90 Kinmonth, Earl 127 Kinpachi Sensei 92 Kitaoka Yasuo 151, 182 Knight, Jane 175 kōsen 124 Latin, See ‘dead’ foreign languages League of Nations Covenant 47, 48 Lee-Cunin, Marina 127–8 Leheny, David 174–75 Lehmann, Jean Pierre 4–5 LeTendre, Gerald 122 Liberal Democratic Party 17–18, 29–30, 47, 48, 63 Lincicome, Mark 49–50 linguistic imperialism, See English language, global dominance of listening tests 64, 79, 185 LoCastro, Virginia 96 Maeda Tamon 53 Manchuria 47, 49 Manjiro, John 42 Matsuda Aya 129–30

McConnell, David 80–83, 97, 98, 103–106 McVeigh, Brian 31–32, 53–54, 96, 111–12, 127, 147 media amplification of risk 173–74 Meiji State, creation of 38, 42 and ‘learning from the West,’ 43–45, 46–47, 77, 180 Mejiro Gakuen High School 67, 140 militaristic teachers 52, 53 Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry 148, 161 Ministry of Education 31–35, 110, 127, 130, 155, 164, 168, 176 and English language curriculum 65–67, 71, 186 and Harold Palmer 51–52 and international education policy 1, 26, 158–59, 179 and JET Programme 80–85 and private testing companies 150–51 creation of 42–43 during the U.S. Occupation 54–55, surveys conducted by 85–6, 121 See also Action Plan to Cultivate English with Japanese Abilities, ‘English only’ policy, ‘Global 30’ project, Super English High School (SELHi) programme, Ministry of Finance 42 Ministry of Foreign Affairs 83–85, 105, 182 Ministry of Home Affairs 81–83, 85, 182 Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism 161 minorities 130–34 Mock, John 100, 144–45 Monbushō English Fellow (MEF) programme 82 moral education 49, 54 Mori Arinori 41–2 motivation, See foreign language learning and motivation Moteki Hiromichi 72 Motoda Eifu 45–6 multilingualism 131 Mythen, Gabe 28–29 Nada High School 139–40 Nagasaki 42 Nagano prefecture 43, 97, 104 Nakasone Yasuhiro 17–18, 30, 23, 82–83, 160–61, 182 Nanzan University 146 Napoleon 42 National Police Agency 174

206

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nationalism, change after World War II 53 cultural 11, 12, 131 of Japan’s ruling elite 26–27, 32 Neilson, Roderick 106–7 Neo-liberal theory 19, 20, 23, 138, 155 ‘New Public Management’ model 66 Nishioka Takeo 110 Nishino Takako 90 Nitobe Inoue 48–9, 52, 53 Nitta, Keith 31 Nobel Laureates 167 norms of teaching and learning, See culture of the classroom Nose Kuniyuki 83 nuclear crisis at Fukushima 21, 141, 161, 172 Occupation of Japan 53–6, 145–46, 180 Ochiai Nobuhiko 73 O’Donnell, Kevin 94 Office for the Investigation of Barbarian Books 39–40 Official Development Assistance (ODA) 26 Ogata Sadoko 2 Okinawa prefecture 131–32 Oliphant, Huw 150 oral approach 57 Oral Communication (syllabus) 4, 69–70, 71, 90 oral method (pre-war) 51 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 20, 137–38 reports on Japan 22, 73, 163, 166 Orientalism 9 Otsu Yukio 73 pacifism 53–54 Palmer, Harold 50–52, 102 ‘parasite singles’ 119 Paul, David 113–14 Pempel, T.J. 18, 33 Pennycook, Alastair 147 Perry, Commodore Matthew C. 38 Platt, Brian 43 Platzer, Steven 32–33 policy, See Ministry of Education and international education policy Poole, Gregory 9, 98, 100, 154, 165 Portsmouth, treaty of 47 Postgraduate Certificate of Education (in England) 90 privatisation 138 professors, See teachers in universities

Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 20, 25, 61, 137–38 pronunciation 6–7 racism (from the West against Asians) 47 Rakuten Inc. 165 Rappleye, Jeremy 25, 26–7, 31, 120, 158–59 Reagan, Ronald 83, 182 research and development 166, 167 returnees, See kikokushijo risk 162 and study abroad 170, 171–75 aversion to or avoidance of 34, 63 of choosing an international school 142–44 ‘risk managers,’ 21, 24, 108–109, 156, 168 Risk Society theory 20–22, 120, 156, 157–58, 173–74, 177 limitations of 28–9 Ritsumeikan University 162 Roesgaard, Marie 30, 149 Rohlen, Thomas P. 58, 91, 140 Rokefeller III, John, D. 57 Russo-Japanese war (1904–5) 47 Saitama prefecture 8, 93 Saito Yoshifumi 73 Sakata Junior College, Yamagata 176 Sakoku, See ‘closed country’ policy Satsuma samurai 41–2 Sawayanagi Masatarō 49, 50–51 Schoppa, Leonard 17–18, 30, 32–33, 119–20 Seargeant, Philip 147–48, 156, 181 senior high schools 8, 55, 64–66, 85–86, 123–26, 129–30, 150 commercial high schools 124 in private sector 67, 139–41 prestigious high schools 125, 139–40 students of 6, 123–26 See also Super English Language High School (SELHi) programme Shiga Prefecture 145 Shiga University 127–8, 173n Shimahara, Nobuo 90, 95 Shimonoseki Incident 38–39 Shogunate, See Tokugawa regime Singleton, David 70 Sino-Japanese war (1894–95) 47 social class, in England 117–8 in Japan 133, 135, 137, 139 Sophia University 145 ‘small cultures’ 95, 125 STEP test, See Eiken

index207 Stockwin, J.A.A. 12–13, 17 students, See under type of school study abroad policy, and students from China 162, 174, 176 during the Meiji period 41 for incoming students to Japan 160–64, 175, 176 for Japanese students going abroad 63, 67, 140, 167–75 worldwide trends in 159 Super English Language High School (SELHi) programme 66, 96, 123, 125, 186–87 Supreme Command for the Allied Powers (SCAP) 53–54 Suzuki Takao 47, 101, 165 Switzerland 2 Taguchi, Naoko 90, 91 Takayama, Keita 9–14, 31, 138 Taiwan 74 teacher training, ‘cascade training,’ 73–4 of English teachers 58, 63, 89–91 post-war 55 pre-war 48 teachers (Japanese), and stress 92–3 in junior high schools 57, 91–94 in senior high schools 91–94 in universities 98–101, 164 working with ALTs 96–98 teachers (non-Japanese) 102–114, 122 as native speakers 2–4, 112–13, 129, 147 discrimination against 107–8, 110 teachers’ unions 31, 53, 101–2, 114 Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) 128 qualifications in 108, 111 Temple University 145 Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) 61n, 151, 154, 169, 173n Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) 151–55, 182 Testing oral English 79–80, 185 textbooks, for secondary school English 56, 57–58, 68–70, 94 for elementary school English 74–75 for pre-war middle schools 49 in universities 112–13 Tokugawa regime 37–9, 41

Tokyo University 44, 48, 73, 125, 140 Tokyo Women’s Christian University 48 Tollefson, James 173 Tsuchiya, Yoshiteru 81 Tsuda Yukio 164–65 Tsuneyoshi Ryoko 13, 131, 132–3 tsunami disaster (2011) 141 Uniqlo 165 Universities and ‘inward looking’ attitudes  165–67, 170 and job hunting 169 and TOEIC exam 154 in private sector 127, 162, 166 foreign branches of 144–45 postgraduate courses in 169–70 students in 2–5, 126–129 foreign students in, See study abroad policy United Kingdom 40, 47, 49 United States of America 40, 42, 47, 49, 52, 82–83, 139, See also Occupation of Japan US Department of Defence Dependent Schools 132 visiting scholars 44–45 vocational education 124 Watanabe Shoichi 63–4 Watanabe Yaeji 151–53, 182 Western scholars studying Japan 9–14 Willis, David Blake 143 Willis, Paul 117–18, 121 women in society 24, 119–20 women students 124, 168 World Conference on Education (1923) 49 Wright, Sue 61 yakudoku, See, English language learning, focus on translation Yamagami, Mai 173 Yamagata prefecture 130 Yokohama 42 Yokohama dialect 42 Yomiuri Shimbun 167 Yoneyama Shoko 32 Yoshida Kensaku 71, 99–100, 186 youth culture 118–9 youth unemployment 119–20, 135 yutori kyōiku 25, 72, 138, 139