Author: Adamu

Mrs. Adamu now blogging!

I am overjoyed to announce that after years of watching from the sidelines, Mrs. Adamu will now be sharing her thoughts with the world at her new Japanese-language blog, The Bibouroku. She decided to start writing as a way to record her experiences along with profiles and reviews of interesting people in the news, movies, music, and so on. So far she’s got posts on the film Slumdog Millionaire and singer M.I.A., who recently made a spectacle of herself by performing at the Grammys just days before she gave birth to her first child.
While I have to admit a bias here, trust me when I say Mrs. Adamu (writing under the mysterious pen name “Shoko”) offers a unique perspective on these issues thanks to her background studying in the States, traveling through India, and working with the underprivileged in Thailand.

Followers of Mutant Frog will know that Mrs. Adamu is my co-adventurer here in Tokyo. What you might not know is that much of my posting activity would be impossible without her kindness, patience, and support. I hope you’ll all join me in wishing her the best in this new initiative!

PS: You can subscribe to updates at the blog’s RSS feed.

Observations from jogging at the Imperial Palace

Today Mrs. Adamu and I went jogging around the Imperial Palace moat, an activity that is apparently all the rage these days. Mrs. Adamu is training for a half marathon, but I do one slow lap myself just to burn some calories. It is easy to see why the palace area has become a popular place to exercise – it is an unimpeded, smoothly paved path, the view is gorgeous, and it’s easily accessible from Otemachi or other surrounding stations. The downside, of course, is that the jogging traffic has begun to resemble a busy freeway, forcing slowpokes like me to constantly watch my back so as to not get in the way of the more serious athletes. Normal tourists visiting the grounds are also quite visibly inconvenienced by bespandexed Tokyoites rushing by.

But all in all it’s a great experience. Today was particularly eventful:

  • Happy Takeshima Day! The holiday set up by the Shimane Prefectural government in 2005 to remind their fellow citizens that the disputed rocks belong to Japan, not Korea. This is apparently a big deal to right wing groups (see Roy’s earlier post on this), so to commemorate, one decided to use its megaphones outside the Social Democratic Party headquarters to loudly berate them with accusations of treason for close ties to North Korea. BTW, these guys might think their country has a valid claim to the Takeshima rocks, but stamp expert/blogger Yosuke Naito shows us some fairly convincing Korean stamps that say otherwise.
  • Workers were emptying the shuttered Palace Hotel of furniture and other items. The hotel was set up in 1961, just before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics,  on  the site of what was once part of the Imperial Household Ministry and then a GHQ-run hotel “for the exclusive use of buying agents from abroad.” While it must have looked quite modern in 1961, more than 40 years later the design resembles a Holiday Inn and noticeably clashes with the more refined palace across the street. The current building will be torn down, with a renewed Palace Hotel will set to open on the site in 2012.　We started jogging the imperial grounds in mid-January, just weeks before the Palace Hotel shut down. We thankfully at least got to take a peek at the lobby before it was relegated to the history books. The inside looked much grander than the exterior, with obsequious front desk staff, expensive-looking lounges, and old-school carpeting and wood-panel walls. By far the neatest item in the lobby, however, was a wood-carved clock, shaped like a world map with digital displays showing the time in major cities. It was considered cutting-edge at the time it was unveiled at the time of the hotel’s opening. The thing just oozes 1960s modernity – I could picture this on the wall of an enormous workroom full of office ladies working on typewriters (click for full size. Thanks Yomiuri!):
    20090218-280217-1-l
    Amazingly, no one knows who designed or manufactured the clock despite its iconic status, but one thing is for certain – it will live on. Though originally set to be destroyed after the hotel closed, at the last minute a German patent office decided to take it (for no charge except shipping costs) out of the management’s nostalgia for frequent stays at the hotel during business trips to Tokyo.

Best J-E financial glossary ever, available for free by the FSA thanks to the magic of XBRL

Thanks to some technological advances in the area of financial reporting, I am happy to pass along this very handy Japanese<>English financial glossary (3MB, Excel format). This treasure trove contains an extensive bilingual list of the terms used in Japanese financial statements, spanning all sectors and including terminology for investment business and mutual funds.
The file is a list of terms to used in XBRL. Ever heard of it? If you don’t work in investment or the finance department of a corporation, don’t feel bad if you haven’t. It’s a markup language, similar to XML or HTML, customized for the production of financial statements. (watch this awesome Japanese-language Flash animation to learn more).
 
The point is to standardize all aspects of producing the statements. Completely standardized and easily processed statements have all sorts  of advantages, from highly efficient analysis to potentially spotting massive frauds. And the advantages extend beyond mere numbers because the the format standardizes terminology across languages.  I have no clue how they came up with the translations (the FSA site mentions something about the terms being “extracted from past materials”), but from what I have reviewed they are all pretty solid.
Nextgov.com reports (perhaps with some slight overhyping of XBRL’s advantages by the SEC and others) that the system is set to be introduced to 500 of the largest US companies starting in April:

Adding XBRL tags to financial disclosures makes them searchable and much easier to compare. What used to be available only to financial professionals now will be easily accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Investors, and regulators, in theory, will be able to analyze data faster and more easily, and possibly finding anomalies in corporate financial statements and investments.

…

The new rule, while not necessarily helping SEC and investors uncover problems that led to the collapse of the financial industry or discover investment fraud such as that allegedly perpetuated by Bernard Madoff, will improve financial analysis. To do so, XBRL would have to be applied to filings on all types of securities, including asset-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations.

…

The move will bring the United States into alignment with worldwide practices, said Diane Mueller, a member of the XBRL international steering committee and vice president of XBRL development at software vendor JustSystems.

…

Currently, financial disclosure records that public companies and mutual funds file are large, unwieldy documents often thousands of pages long. Only large financial institutions have been able to devote the time and staff necessary to parse through the documents and glean the most pertinent information and figures for analysis.

…

The adoption of XBRL, however, is likely to significantly change the way companies are analyzed. The addition of data tags will allow software to instantly comb through reports and identify the most critical information and figures. XBRL “makes for much easier and timely comparisons between companies,” Moyer said. “Today it’s extraordinarily difficult for investors to compare between balance sheets of two banks. They have different reporting styles, etc. [XBRL] starts to conform balance sheets and give you more comparability.”

Another advantage of XBRL for the commission is regulators will know instantly if a company’s filing is missing any key information because the software will automatically identify what data is missing when corporations electronically file documents and then notify the company and SEC. Previously, regulators had to manually check files to find missing information, Mueller said.

Speaking of worldwide practice, Japan’s Financial Services Agency, the financial regulator, was a step ahead, becoming one of the first major financial centers to mandate XBRL filing starting in April last year. Thanks in part to the Japanese authorities’ desire to be a leader in this area, they have provided an official FSA “XBRL taxonomy,” current as of March 2008, which is the file linked above.  
 
While this isn’t exactly news, it’s the first time I actually bothered to look. I had heard that the transition to XBRL could completely eliminate the need to translate financial statements manually, but wasn’t quite sure what it meant until now. Dig in, and mourn the coming loss of one source of translation work!

Aso adopts a courageous pro-guide dog stance

When you’re the prime minister of Japan,  those in your own party think you’re a joke AND your finance minister resigns in disgrace after makign a drunken ass of himself on the world stage, what should you do to reassure the citizenry that you’re doing a good job?

Simple – change the subject to cute puppies. Here’s a clip from his latest e-mail magazine:

The Prime Minister’s Office usually has only human visitors,
but last week I received a visit from service dogs accompanied by
their users, including this woman.

Service dogs are a type of assistance dog, just like guide dogs for
visually disabled people and hearing dogs for people with hearing
disabilities. The role of service dogs is to help their physically
challenged users with tasks such as opening doors or getting
changed.

I heard that Sherry is able to open the refrigerator downstairs,
take out a plastic drink bottle, close the refrigerator door,
and then bring the bottle upstairs. Also, I saw for myself
how a service dog called Elmo was able to pick up a business card
holder dropped on the floor when his wheelchair-bound user gave
the command, “Take!”

…

I myself have lived with dogs for as long as I can remember. Shiro
and Lucky were the names of my two mongrel dogs — one had been
picked up by the local healthcare center and the other was about to
be used for animal experiments.

When I was a child, it was my daily job to feed them and take them
out for walks. When Shiro died, I could not stop crying as
I recalled how he was when he was healthy, and the way he would
always come rushing out happily to greet me each time I returned
home. This was the time when the importance and preciousness of
life were instilled in my young mind.

Given my own experience, I believe that coming into contact with
animals is highly beneficial in many ways for the development of
children.

…

Assistance dogs are partners for physically challenged people,
acting as extensions of their bodies. The government will step up
its efforts to make assistance dogs more common, through measures
such as putting its weight behind assistance dog training.

At the same time, I would like as many people as possible,
including readers of this e-mail magazine, to know about assistance
dogs. That is my sincere wish.

So, is this some kind of subtle cry for help? Does he want a guide dog of his own? Whatever the case, the image is kind of a step removed from the determination to fix the economy as shown in this attention-grabber:

 aso_pos01g

English teaching in Japan by the numbers

(UPDATE – See my follow-up post for more measures of the industry)

To follow up on my earlier take on eikaiwa as the gaijin community’s whipping boy, I want to try and paint a dispassionate, quantitative picture of the eikaiwa industry itself.  

Back in summer 2006, I noted that the number of participants (newcomers plus extended contracts) in the JET program had been falling steadily after peaking in 2002 at 6,273. A quick check of the MIC website shows that this trend has continued through 2008 (click image and scroll down for better resolution).

 

The 2008 total was 4,682, 25.4% down from the peak. I would expect the pace to slow down a bit, considering they recently extended the maximum contract length from three years to five.

Non-JET ALTs/eikaiwa

In the private sector, METI figures (Excel) show the number of instructors at regulated “foreign language conversations schools” peaked in 2003 at 13,365, but stood at 9,591 as of the end of 2008, down by 28.3% from the peak and 22.4% since the JET Program’s peak.

Figures are less forthcoming about a third segment of the market, non-JET ALTs at schools across the country, but they are available. According to an October 2008 report from the Chunichi Shimbun (thanks Let’s Japan),  the number of non-JET ALTs surpassed JETs in 2006, and by 2007 represented 60% of all ALTs or nearly 8,000 people.

(A quick aside: There is some evidence that the education ministry views the issue of “temporary and contract” ALTs as a considerable problem, as these non-JETs can fall through the cracks in terms of supervision, training, and visa compliance. In February 2005, the ministry issued a letter to boards of education nationwide warning them to ensure that contracts with non-JET ALTs are “appropriate” (apparently in response to unfavorable press coverage) (source).)

Unfortunately, I am having trouble locating the exact figures for non-JET ALTs over time. They can be found by combining the totals of education ministry surveys given to schools asking the status of their English-language education. The only trouble is, the surveys are separated by scholastic level; and they aren’t neatly organized by year.

But I was able to find the total for 2002: 3090. So put together, here is the breakdown of “market share” of instructors in all three segments for 2002 and 2007 (click for full size):

image0011

image0021

Non-JET ALTs appear to be quickly becoming the dominant employment type in the industry. JETs went from outnumbering non-JET ALTs 2:1 from being outnumbered by them 3:2. Possibly on a related note, this ratio (1/3 of all instructors are temp/contract) is consistent with the overall ratio of non-permanent workers in the overall workforce.

The tables were turned for conversation schools vs. ALTs as well. The end of 2007 was right when NOVA collapsed, and before that several other schools went bankrupt. This no doubt pinched the number of private teachers.

Interestingly, the totals of both years indicate that the pie was still growing as late as the end of 2007: the total number of teachers grew 7%, from 21,729 in 2002 to 23,130 in 2007. This growth rate matches the 7.0% growth in US citizen registered foreigners over the same period, though it underperforms the overall 16% growth in the number of registered foreigners (PDF). Japan’s total workforce (seasonally adjusted (Excel)), meanwhile, declined 10.1% during this period.

(Note that there are some considerable limitations to this data, though I think it at leasts provides a good chunk of the overall picture. First, I have included all JETs in the total, out of the consideration (emphasized by Curzon) that ALTs, CIRs, and those special physical education instructors all serve the purpose of “internationalization.” Also, “conversation schools” cover languages other than English, though I think it is safe to say English continues to be the overwhelmingly most popular language. There may be some overlap in the “conversation school” and “non-JET ALT” category as some businesses classified as conversation schools might also list non-JET ALTs as “instructors” resulting in some double-counting. These numbers also do not cover private lessons and unregistered schools, nor does it cover some of the related markets, such as private-sector study abroad, English teachers at universities, full-time foreign English teachers at schools, English teaching services provided by foreign governments such as the British Council, Internet services/podcasts, broadcast lessons such as those given on NHK, and book and CD publishing, all of which could add up to hundreds more teachers.)

Prospects – private sector

Although the supply of teachers grew backed by the surge in non-JET ALTs, eikaiwa as a business appears to be shrinking very fast (Excel). After falling for three years starting in 2003, sales boomed in 2006, whereafter the bottom appears to have fallen out from under the industry (Y axis unit = 1 million yen. Click for full-size):

image0042

This precipitous drop coincides with reports at the time of oversupply in the eikaiwa market as the big schools such as NOVA rushed like mad to open schools in every corner of the country. The following years saw the collapse of several schools including NOVA, the former market leader. (UPDATE: this drop also coincides with legal revisions that made it easier for dissatisfied students to request refunds). Teachers may face some serious difficulty as the excess supply adjusts to match demand. This drop in sales far outpaces that of firms listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, which are expected to face a year-on-year 6.5% drop for FY2008 (final profits are a different story, but without sales there isn’t much hope of making a profit, is there?).

During this time, Japanese households’ discretionary income fell 1.9% (though slightly less in real terms). With the reputation of the industry damaged and Japanese households concerned about their basic livelihoods, it seems hard to expect that the workers’ desires to make their skills more competitive will save any but the highest quality businesses in this industry.

Prospects – public sector

Meanwhile, recent economic turmoil (annualized 12% GDP shrinkage for Oct.-Dec. 2008 makes Japan the hardest-hit G-7 economy) could put pressure on the public sector as well, as described in a previous comment by Aceface:

I have to wonder how many eikaiwa community understand gloomy future ahead of them. Many local government are now facing rapid decline of corporation tax income due to the down sizing of production in Toyota factories, ANd under such circumstances we can no longer justify this 21st century version of “Oyatoi-Gaijin” we know as JET/ALT.
Aichi, Shizuoka, Gihu,  Mie and Gunma need as much Portuguese/Japanese bilingual staffs as possible since there are tons of works must be done starting from job education for the unemployed. And since they have no extra budgets,most likely gone will be “international exchange”related posts.

While I am not sure what the rules are for funding non-JET ALTs (I am assuming schools can choose to use local taxes, or private schools their budgets), the JET program is funded by redistributed local taxes (chihou koufuzei), doled out to prefectures and municipalities at a pre-determined ratio, plus extra for local administrations with particular plans to use the money. The funds come from “the five national taxes” – income tax, corporate income tax, consumption tax, alcohol tax, and tobacco tax.   The income taxes have been on a downward growth trend since the 1990s, while consumption tax has emerged to rival those as a revenue generator. The sin taxes have maintained a consistent, relatively low holding pattern. The redistribution amount peaked in 2001 and has been falling roughly in line with the corporate income tax. Though 2008 tax receipts were forecast to be up slightly (possibly due to the tax bills for earlier profits), original finance ministry estimates appear to have fallen far from the mark, failing to anticipate the dismal corporate earnings, rising unemployment, and stagnant consumption. This means the major tax revenue sources are expected to fall significantly.

Conclusion

English teaching in Japan looks like it is in for a very rough patch. While this exercise hasn’t been exactly a happy one, I hope it’s been informative. It certainly has been for me.

UPDATE: I have posted some more data on the industry in a follow-up.

Let’s stop hurting each other – negative gaijin competition

(Updated below) (Updated again)

When I lived in Washington, DC, one of my part-time jobs was to teach TOEIC strategies mainly to Japanese bureaucrats and businessmen who were stationed in the area for one reason or another. They usually came as invitees of the State Dept. or, in the case of salarymen, sent by their companies to study the US patent system, auto crash test system, or other relevant area depending on their career track.  The school was somewhat unique in that it was specifically set up to cater to Japanese customers, making it effectively an eikaiwa school in the US. 

I was never a particularly good teacher. My experiences studying Japanese (at the time I had two years of study abroad in Kansai and the JLPT Level 1 under my belt) actually got in the way of my being an effective teacher, since I usually became so star-struck and curious about their government roles that it hampered their progress in getting through the TOEIC drills. Despite that (or perhaps because of it), the job was a very instructive experience for me, not least in terms of how adults try and learn second languages.

Students were typically early/mid-career bureaucrats in their late 30s or early 40s with no relevant international experience. Hence, their English levels all tended to hover around a fairly low level (TOEIC of around 500 or so, decent reading skills, next to no speaking and listening skills). This helped create a sense of community among the students, who often congregated for small-talk, safe in the knowledge that they were all in the same boat.

Intermediate students threatened this balance. “Intermediate” in this sense simply means a student who can express himself relatively fluently in some situations and maybe has some cultural fluency as well. Though the lessons were mostly one-on-one, during group lessons with the school’s president the intermediate always gained a reputation as “the fluent one.” As a result, the other students would defer to this more advanced student and consider him the standard for progress. Each time this happened, there was always at least one student who became discouraged and grew reluctant to express himself or really try and move forward on his own terms, especially in the group lessons. At the same time, I could detect a kind of jealousy of the intermediate students for getting ahead of them.

The intermediate students could sense how the others felt about them, and some seemed to even relish their top dog position. They tended to be prideful and resisted my suggestions that they needed help with key concepts. It became pretty frustrating at times because even the intermediate students couldn’t successfully understand our teaching materials, which consisted mainly of old TOEIC tests and NPR archives. Basically, they were riding high on the difference between a 600 TOEIC and a 700 TOEIC, which in reality isn’t all that significant.

In the end, this was a form of negative competition. Even if the people around you are more advanced, that doesn’t mean you have to compare yourself with them (at the school we would try and separate intermediate students if possible). And just as important, if you are ahead of your peers, that is no excuse to sit on your laurels. Since the wider world is much more competitive than your circle of acquaintances, it is important to identify your own strengths and weaknesses, and work from there.

Gaijin Hierarchy

The same thing happens among foreigners in Japan, and I am just as guilty of this behavior as anyone. Typically, even in casual conversation people in the Japanese as a second language community as well as the eikaiwa community will rank each other on their relative prowess in Japanese, and I am sure most readers of this blog have endured the utter awkwardness of the Japanese-language/Japanese culture knowledge “pissing contest.” I noticed this tendency very strongly over the (mostly off-topic) discussion at Japan Probe related to the allegations of fund misuse in the JET Program. Here is a typical example of this need to impose hierarchy (UPDATE: Not really, but it’s a good lead-off for discussion nonetheless. See comments for clarification):

Comment by Darg:

I’m a former JET, although I wasn’t an ALT. I was a CIR (Coordinator of International Relations), and have had this convo many times before. I really think the proper solution should be to put more focus on the international understanding and relations and less on the English teaching, and as a result have more CIRs and less ALTs.

I believe the CIR job is closer to the original intention of the JET program, and that is to promote cultural exchange. The problem is, most people don’t even know what a CIR is and think the JET program is a big waste of money because of the portion of ALTs that come out here and screw things up for the majority who actually try and get something done.

If they required a minimum of teaching experience for ALTs and raised the CIR:ALT ratio, I think a lot more people would appreciate the JET program.

This is objectively false (UPDATE: again, see comments for how I misunderstood what he envisioned CIRs doing). The program is called “Japan Exchange and Teaching Program” for a reason – historically, it was set up to place foreigners inside school classrooms to help with the drive to “internationalize” Japan through better English learning. The job of a CIR, on the other hand, is secondary to that priority – they typically assist with the “international” programs of a local city hall. The only basis for concluding that CIRs are more beneficial to the JET program than the ALTs – and this view appears to be common – seems to be the desire to believe that the advanced Japanese language requirements for CIRs actually mean something, as opposed to those illiterate ALTs who are allowed to come to Japan equipped with nothing but their English skills and the enthusiasm to teach kids.

In fact, while I have heard of a productive role for the Portuguese-speaking CIRs who help facilitate communication in towns with high Brazilian populations, others complain that CIRs are often given the basically pointless jobs of promoting multicultural events and maintaining sister city relationships. That these jobs require some Japanese competency does nothing substantially to improve the objective “worth” of these positions.

It is easy to make Darg’s mistake of dismissing ALTs’ role in supplementing the current, generally poor state of English language teaching and general proficiency, including among Japanese-national English teachers. This won’t go away overnight, and in over 20 years of the JET program not much seems to have changed. Commenter Jake brings this up:

Anyway, my point is that having a warm foreign body in every classroom in the country has become the status quo and nobody seems to be questioning that system itself — just figuring out how to maintain the system while cutting costs (i.e. handing all the contracts over to Interac). Then again, retooling the system to teach English in a manner that enables students to actually speak would also mean retooling the entire test-based educational system, and until that happens, pretty much any new policy implemented is going to be nothing more than a band-aid on a brain tumor.

Suggesting Japan should “retool the system” is MUCH easier said than done. Consider some of the moving parts involved:

  • All schools, from elementary to university level, would have to turn their fundamental principles of education upside down (and have the talent infrastructure to understand and accept this new system); progress in the form of all-English education has been made on this front.
  • Japanese-national teachers would have to become functionally fluent in English.
  • Universities would have to reform their entrance procedures to emphasize English proficiency as it’s understood by most of the world (this is apparently underway).
  • Parents would have to change their expectations for how their children study.

And on and on. Feel free to squabble over the details, but it’s clear enough that in the current environment, parachuting in “warm bodies” seems like a pretty good compromise. So despite all the insults I have dished out in the past, I really don’t think there is anything these ALTs/eikaiwa teachers should be ashamed of. In an imperfect system, they are playing an important role.

Yet I would argue that for the purpose of leading a productive life, it’s necessary to leave the whys and wherefores about eikaiwa aside. To a certain extent, supply and demand are beyond direct human control, and as a result much overarching debate on “the system” ends up being just another extension of the pissing contest.

But this point remains lost on too many with a vested interest in this issue – the teachers and those who look down on them in the milieu of gaijin society. Again and again, jobs that require Japanese in Japan are seen as more worthy than the dreaded English teacher position. Roughly speaking, I see the hierarchy as falling along these lines:

Japanese-speaking corporate executive > Professor > Interpreter > Token gaijin at a large corporation > Translator > Gaijin tarento > JLPT 1 passer > eikaiwa teacher-turned-entrepreneur > Journalist > CIR > Convenience store clerk/electronics salesman > Eikaiwa teacher >  Street performer > Hostess

Relatedly, the group of Western expats who work for foreign companies and generally live in a Little America (think Hiroo in Tokyo or Rokko Island in Kobe) are usually not even included in this universe of possibilities, despite there being substantial overlap in practice.

Could there be anything more arbitrary and meaningless? In every other corner of the word it seems like people understand that people of different skill sets and living situations have different career needs, prospects, priorities, and ways of life, so why do the gaijin need to bitch so much?

The majority of non-soldier Western expats in this country are eikaiwa teachers, so it is an interesting phenomenon to see that many even in the profession see it as pointless and counterproductive to their careers. The people within that group easily end up like my former students — forming a pecking order based on Japanese language ability and overall J-savviness.

Why? For one thing, the gaijin community can be pretty isolated – it is a small subset of wider Japanese society, so if language or cultural barriers have kept you from really assimilating with the mainstream, the only real alternative is to stay with the people with whom you have common ties. A thousand and one Japan bloggers will tell you this can be lonely and frustrating. For another, it cannot be denied that there is some truth to the idea that many people who end up in Japan were either single-mindedly obsessed with Japan from the beginning or simply didn’t give much thought to a career until graduation rolled around. People whose jobs came as an afterthought might welcome a distraction from their own situations.  

But most importantly, placing the eikaiwa teachers or those with poor Japanese on the bottom of the totem pole is a convenient and easy way to make people feel better about themselves. But again, it doesn’t actually help anyone – it’s just another form of negative competition. I hope the people living and working in Japan will step back from these false distinctions.

In terms of careers, eikaiwa teachers should try and think honestly where they are and consider where they would like to be, without worrying about whether their Japanese is up to snuff. Japanese is a lot of work, but it is doable and it will come. Or not. You will have to make the cost/benefit analysis of where your career is headed and whether it is worth it to stay in Japan at all costs or whether you might have better prospects back home, or even in a third country (I had a great time living in Bangkok). The economy isn’t all that great at the moment, but now is a good time to brush up on your strengths or the skills you wish were your strengths, whether they are Japanese language, network engineering, hip-hop dancing, or even English teaching.

Oddly, it’s the people supposedly on the top that might have the most to lose by “winning” this contest.  Even if you have passed JLPT 1 and “escaped” eikaiwa, why not take a look in the mirror and consider your next move? Many of the people who have succeeded somewhat in assimilating did so by going out of their way to avoid contact with other Westerners, out of the fear that overexposure to their native language would hinder the Japanization process. While there is some merit to that, especially at the early stages, at some point you will have to stop seeing other foreigners as competition. You should feel comfortable enough in your position that you’re happy to help others.

Despite all the praise you might get for speaking good Japanese, Japanese language alone does not make a career (and if you want to be a translator/interpreter, it’s harder than it looks). Nor will it make you a very interesting person if that’s all you’ve got. And remember, if you become too self-satisfied with your supposedly lofty achievements you may be in for a rude awakening.

YET MORE UPDATES (No more Chuck Norris…): Here is an updated hierarchy thanks to the comments section (again, this is just a rough estimate based on my assessment of the state of gaijin discourse):

The emperor if he actually has a surfer dude accent > Steven Seagal > all foreign sumo wrestlers except Konishiki and those Russians that got caught with weed > Naturalized Japanese citizen (some overlap here)* > Street performer who hooked up with a famous idol > Japanese-speaking corporate executive > other foreign fighter/athlete> Attorney > Professor >  Interpreter > Token gaijin at a large corporation* > Translator >  Konishiki > Mombusho scholar > first-generation JET/BET who was totally not an English teacher > Translator who pisses on people > Professor who only teaches ESL > Jesus in Toyama > Gaijin tarento > JLPT 1 passer  > JLPT 1 passer who speaks in dialect to show off  > Genki English guy* > NGO Worker > eikaiwa teacher-turned-entrepreneur > Foreign Geisha > Journalist > high school exchange student > Akihabara tour guide (with Son Goku costume)* > Portuguese-speaking CIR > CIR > Convenience store clerk/electronics salesman* > Eikaiwa teacher >Bonsai (or other traditional Japanese craft) master > Bonsai (or other traditional Japanese craft) student > Buddhist convert > Shinto convert > Headhunter >  Eikaiwa teachers who are milking the system > Street performer > Hostess > guy handing out event fliers in Roppongi > Foreign psychic > Evangelical Christian

* Position in hierarchy in dispute.

Haruki Murakami on walls and eggs in the holy land

Great speech to give in front of the Israeli president (via Ikeda Nobuo)!

So I have come to Jerusalem. I have a come as a novelist, that is – a spinner of lies.

Novelists aren’t the only ones who tell lies – politicians do (sorry, Mr. President) – and diplomats, too. But something distinguishes the novelists from the others. We aren’t prosecuted for our lies: we are praised. And the bigger the lie, the more praise we get.

The difference between our lies and their lies is that our lies help bring out the truth. It’s hard to grasp the truth in its entirety – so we transfer it to the fictional realm. But first, we have to clarify where the truth lies within ourselves.

Today, I will tell the truth. There are only a few days a year when I do not engage in telling lies. Today is one of them.

When I was asked to accept this award, I was warned from coming here because of the fighting in Gaza. I asked myself: Is visiting Israel the proper thing to do? Will I be supporting one side?

I gave it some thought. And I decided to come. Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I’m told. It’s in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can’t trust anything they haven’t seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. So I chose to see. I chose to speak here rather than say nothing.
So here is what I have come to say.

If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg.

Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals.

I have only one purpose in writing novels, that is to draw out the unique divinity of the individual. To gratify uniqueness. To keep the system from tangling us. So – I write stories of life, love. Make people laugh and cry.

We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it’s too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us – create who we are. It is we who created the system.

I am grateful to you, Israelis, for reading my books. I hope we are sharing something meaningful. You are the biggest reason why I am here.

One arm of the JET program possibly misappropriating funds

Very interesting post at Japan Probe on possible quasi-corruption at CLAIR, the affiliate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in charge of its share of the JET program:

The Council of Local Authorities for International Relations (CLAIR), the governmental organization responsible for the JET Program, could be in trouble. Popular Osaka governor Toru Hashimoto has started questioning CLAIR’s use of funds and has announced that the Osaka government may reduce its financial backing to CLAIR next year　(90% of CLAIR’s financial backing comes from money paid by local governments, and Osaka pays a big slice).

The JET program is one of those rare Japanese government programs in which overlapping ministries successfully cooperate – the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is in charge of most of the administrative details of selecting applicants, the education ministry places them in schools, and the internal affairs ministry coordinates with local governments. Well, it looks like part of the compromise reached between the ministries was that at least the internal affairs side gets to set up a swank suite of perks for retired bureaucrats.

As I have done before, I am cross-posting my comment at Japan Probe to encourage discussion of the issue on my comments section. I began in response to earlier commenters who apparently take any mention of the JET program to debate on the JET program’s merits and the usefulness of eikaiwa teachers in general (of course I would never do that):

Did you notice that this issue has NOTHING to do with the merits of the JET program itself? The problem is that the bureaucrats have turned parts of the program into their own slush fund, which enriches their post-retirement accounts and improves their golf scores at the expense of the Japanese taxpayers and maybe even people who didn’t get accepted to the JET program (since part of the acceptance cutoff is no doubt due to budget constraints). It’s so laughable for them to have overseas offices since they don’t even process the applications – that is the foreign ministry’s job.

This misappropriation issue isn’t any reason to end the JET program. In fact, considering all the extra money they are raking in it looks like they could be accepting even more JETs. I have argued elsewhere that it may have outlived whatever functionality it had as an English teaching program, but as Yomiuri documented around its 20th anniversary the program itself has by and large been extremely beneficial to the teachers who come and have a once in a lifetime experience (or get a foothold for a life in Japan), the schools who want foreign English teachers, and Japan’s soft power as the program generates massive goodwill and a niche workforce of Japan-savvy English speakers.

But if one of the organizations involved is being exploited for no real reason but to provide an excuse for internal affairs bureaucrats to get post-retirement salaries and live the Japanese dream of endless enkai and golf with their coworkers, then Hashimoto is right to use his spending authority to try and put an end to it. As much of a showboat as he can be, that’s an example of real leadership and sticking up for what’s right.

I understand the motivation for post-retirement income, but what I will never get is why these oyaji seem to love drinking in their work suits and basically never leaving the damn office. If you are going to misappropriate funds, at least do what American politicians do and get sweet renovations to your house!

They have 12.7 billion yen a year in unused funding! I propose using that money to send free cookies to every woman who gets pregnant. It will help alleviate the low birth rate AND I’ll only overcharge the government 50 billion yen 5 billion yen a year — big savings!

The Japanese art of non-debating, by Asst. Prof. Hiroshi Yamaguchi

Hiroshi Yamaguchi is an Associate Professor of Global Media Studies at Komazawa University. I am translating his rant-ish essay below because it is such an illustrative look at how the media tends to move debate forward in this country. He applies this general frame work to some older scandals such as the earthquake safety scandal of 2005 and the Livedoor scandal of 2006, but you can see this process playing itself out anytime you turn on one of those panel debate shows.

2009/02/11
Responsibility does not add up to 100% — reposted

I feel a little bad about repeating the same ideas, but often in a different context the same words might have a different meaning. So anyway, I am going to repost what I wrote on my blog around two years ago. Please understand that I am not just being lazy. This passage can also be found in my book currently in stores Risk’s True Form (リスクの正体) but I think the same things could be applied to the recent so-called “self-responsibility” debate.
***
* I don’t think responsibility adds up to 100%
Problems develop one after the other in our society, but I feel like the flow of debate over those problems is always similar. I have always wondered why this is so, and I have concluded that the common thought process is something like this:

Views on “responsibility” (責任 sekinin; the same word is used in Japanese to mean “liability”)
The common flow of debate is as follows. First, a problem occurs. Let’s assume A causes damage to B. Almost simultaneously, an argument springs up over “responsibility.” In fact, many many types of responsibility:

  • – A is wrong. A has responsibility.
  • – No, in fact there is a fixer C pulling the strings behind A.
  • – The ministry of X regulates this issue. The ministry has responsibility as the regulator.
  • – This problem was brought upon us by the Koizumi administration’s policies.
  • – A has connections with a senior official in the Y Party. There’s got to be something to that.
  • – The mass media’s reporting of this problem has been terrible.
  • – Isn’t it actually B’s own responsibility?
  • – This is a conspiracy by the Americans!
  • – It was better in the past, but the youth these days are no good!
  • – It’s the education system’s fault. Schools these days don’t teach anything worthwhile.
  • – A made too much money. We should take this opportunity humble him.
  • – There are people in this world who have it tougher than this. It makes no sense to ignore them just to help B.

There may be more, but I think that’s about right. It’s actually quite a substantial list. It is strange that no matter what happens, there are always those who blame the prime minister or the United States (there are some who even try to blame corporate accounting fraud on the prime minister, but I wonder if they are really serious), but in many cases this is no laughing matter. What comes next is a battle of criticism falling somewhere along this range of opinions:

  • – I cannot believe people would say it’s B’s own responsibility.
  • – It is too simplistic to only criticize A. We have to go after C who is pulling the strings.
  • – A has no capacity to pay damages. The government should do something.
  • – I don’t think it makes sense to blame everything on bureaucrats and the government.
  • – Don’t bring up generational conflict in this case!
  • – The idea of a fixer behind the scenes is hogwash.
  • – Don’t turn this into a political fight.

Then, this sort of debate gets bogged down and leads to a stalemate situation, people lose interest and eventually forget about it. Then, a similar problem occurs. I have been wonder just why it’s always, always like this.
Essentially, the root cause it that people are confused about the word “responsibility.”

There are several types of responsibility. People often talk of the difference between the “responsibility to compensate” and “the responsibility to explain,” but there are others, such as “the responsibility to adopt countermeasures” and “the responsiblity to seek the truth” and even something like “the responsibility to quietly accept the results.” If these are mixed up, then then discussions will never reach a conclusion. When debating, often what you emphasize will differ from what others emphasize, but if all the different kinds of responsibility are mixed up, it becomes impossible to understand the other side’s way of thinking. You’ll react, “Why would you say such a thing? That’s not what’s important!” But really, both sides’ arguments are important.

So, if the argument is mixed up, everything will lead to the conclusion that “the person responsible should compensate for damages.” In other words, the point of view becomes such that responsibility always adds up to 100%, and the argument is over how to divide that up. [In reality,] the responsibility to explain does not always lead to liability to compenate for damages, and in many cases those responsible for adopting countermeasures are different from those who are liable to pay compensation. But if someone argues that C is in the wrong, to the people arguing that A is in the wrong it will seem like that person is trying to lessen A’s responsibility. That is these intense debates develop. Or at least that’s how I see it.

Responsibility is not the sort of thing that adds up to 100%. Of course, the responsibility to compensate for damages does add up to 100%, so there is a specific amount of damages and the argument is over how to determine who is responsible for what portion. That is fine. However, when it comes to other types of responsibility, such as the responsibility to explain or the responsibility to seek the truth, or the responsibility for creating the foundation that caused the ensuing situation, or the responsibility for not helping the victims even when you could have helped, or any other kind of responsibility, shouldn’t all the responsible persons each take 100% responsibility? We should ask not “who has responsibility” but rather “what is your (or my) responsibility in this case?”

There is an argument over “the general penitence of the 100 million” (NB. 一億総ざんげ ichioku souzange, the argument that the Japanese public bears collective responsibility for the Japanese aggression/destruction in WW2), and some counter that this thinking minimizes the responsibility of the leadership. I cannot say since I do not know the circumstances of the time, but I do not think this is a very fruitful argument. Regardless of the leadership’s responsibility, I think [the “penitence” position] was meant to say that “the 100 million” aka the Japanese people all should be aware of their own responsibility. In light of the recent earthquake safety fraud scandal (added Jan. 22, 2006: In fact, the case of Livedoor’s violations of securities laws could apply here), separate from the issue of who should pay for the costs, shouldn’t we debate who should have done what and what should be done in the future? Of course, this is an issue of what “you yourself” should do. Such debate would do nothing to lessen the compensation liabilities of the businesses that committed the fraud, nor would it free the government from its responsibilities to explain and adopt countermeasures. Added up, I am sure it would come to 200 or even 300%.
*****

Allow me to supplement the above for the current context. Regarding issues such as the firing of temporary workers, economic disparity, and the “lost generation” (NB. young people who came of age during the “lost decade” of the 1990s), I am not saying that there are never any cases where the employees in question should be held responsible at least a little. Similarly, I am not saying that there are never any cases in which the corporations, the government or the generations that grew up before the lost decade should be held responsible at least a little. Reality is much more vague, complicated, and diverse than that. This should be obvious if you think about it rationally.

Most of the people involved in this debate are probably fully aware of this. That must be why they are in fact arguing that someone has more responsibility than someone else, under the title “who has responsibility?” There are times when that is fruitful. Such a determination is required when considering what countermeasures to take.

However, looking at the overal picture, I don’t think we have reached that stage yet. At the very least, society at large is most likely looking at these debates in terms of a conflict between Faction A and Faction B, in other words the winner will be either “the people 100% on Faction A’s side” or “the people 100% on Faction B’s side.” In fact, what is said between those two factions is more like criticism than debate, and this is in fact going on in the various media outlets. Any work they are doing to find common ground is not being sufficiently communicated.

We are called upon not to determine “who” should act but “what should be done.” The bigger the issue, the fewer people there are who can dismiss it as having nothing to do with them. John F. Kennedy once famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” I think this quote applies in this context, but at the same time and in the same way, we should think not about making demands of the temporary employees who were fired or the members of the lost generation, but rather what we can do for them.

Simultaneously, we have to think about what things got to be the way they are. There may be some disreputable temporary staffing agencies. There might be some common practices in the temporary staffing industry that should be reformed. But just because that’s so, arguments that fundamentally reject the temporary staffing business go too far. This business was born out of a societal need, and plays a major role in our society. This is the exact converse of the notion that fired temp workers and the lost generation cannot totally be held personally accountable for their circumstances. If you want to change the present, you must turn your eyes to the factors that led to the present situation.

I repeat: responsibility does not add up to 100%. Quite the contrary, each of us has 100% responsibility for ourselves. To acknowledge this is to take the first step toward escaping the endlessly repeating zero-sum game of asking “who is in the wrong?”