Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program by David L. McConnell

the English curriculum in the public schools, there has been an increasing feeling that the
public secondary schools themselves must do more to promote the acquisition of English conversational skills.
    The education system, and foreign language instruction in particular,
thus seems to be an area ripe for reform. Moreover, educational reform has
been identified as vital to successful internationalization-however that is
understood. To be sure, Japanese hold deeply ambivalent attitudes toward internationalization." For much of its history Japan has been content to
pursue global integration primarily through arm's-length strategies. These
included training an elite to act as go-betweens with the outside world, educating a general population to digest foreign languages and foreign ideas
from a distance, and on occasion even importing a few technicians and
teachers. Rather than pursuing global integration through exporting ideology, personnel, and educational services (via such institutions as the Peace
Corps or the British Council), Japan has preferred to pursue selective integration through importing ideas, technology, and, to a more limited degree,
people. But now Japan is being asked to go beyond appropriating skills and
knowledge to transforming its entire value system. What foreign criticism
amounts to is a demand that the Japanese reconstitute themselves and
their society so as to make them more compatible with international
norms and institutions. Reforms-driven both by external pressure and by
domestic calls for change-thus also need to address the persistent image
of Japan as a self-centered and parochial society. The JET program is one response.

    With the end of the cold war, the rise of multinational corporations, and
the development of increasingly sophisticated communications technologies, every nation is in the process of adapting to an increasingly global
world. Yet while we hear much about global homogenization and the need
to cultivate a more global outlook on life, we often fail to recognize that
cultural, political, and historical particulars lend each nation its own manner and style of participating in the new world order. The Japanese approach to global integration is distinctive but by no means unique, and we
ignore it at our own peril. Now that Japan has emerged on the world scene,
and Japanese corporations, residential communities, and tourist circuits
have sprung up in our own backyard, the issue of how Japanese cope with
diversity has become more immediate and urgent. An analysis of how Japanese respond to the foreign participants on the JET Program can reveal
the human side of Japan's struggle to come to terms with the profound
changes that one society has undergone in the past few decades.
    METHODOLOGY
    The sheer breadth and scope of the JET program made the traditional anthropological practice of participant observation highly problematic. Arriving in Japan in late summer of 1988, I was bewildered to find that the JET
Program could not be isolated in one geographic location or even in one
spacially bounded organization, like a company or a school. At the national
level alone, the principal actors included the three sponsoring ministries, the administrative office called CLAIR, the embassies of the participating
countries, and the Japanese consulates abroad." To these structural complexities must be added the realities of implementation as the JET Program
unfolded in dozens of prefectures, hundreds of district boards of education,
and thousands of secondary schools across the country.

    I was thus forced to modify the worn-out model of culture as an isolated, bounded entity characterized by internally consistent norms and behavior. While I did not completely jettison the idea that Japanese responses
to the JET Program were culturally patterned, I assumed that alongside the
dominant forces promoting integration were those that reinforced differentiation and