Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program

by David McConnell

In 1987, the Japanese government inaugurated the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) program in response to global pressure to "internationalize" its society. This ambitious program has grown to be a major government operation, with an annual budget of $400 million (greater than the United States NEA and NEH combined) and more than six thousand foreign nationals employed each year in public schools all over Japan.

How does a relatively homogeneous and insular society react when a buzzword is suddenly turned into a reality? How did the arrival of so many foreigners affect Japan's educational bureaucracy? How did the foreigners themselves feel upon discovering that English teaching was not the primary goal of the program? In this balanced study of the JET program, David L. McConnell draws on ten years of ethnographic research to explore the cultural and political dynamics of internationalization in Japan. Through vignettes and firsthand accounts, he highlights and interprets the misunderstandings of the early years of the program, traces the culture clashes at all levels of the bureaucracy, and speculates on what lessons the JET program holds for other multicultural initiatives.

This fascinating book's jargon-free style and interdisciplinary approach will make it appealing to educators, policy analysts, students of Japan, and prospective and former JET participants.

346 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

David McConnell has been writing and thinking about the written word his entire life. Self-taught, he created his own curriculum of ancient literature. His fictionalized memoir, The Firebrat, came out in 2003 and was nominated for a Violet Quill Award.
He is now working on a true crime non-fiction project entitled GAY PANIC: True Stories of Straight Men Who Kill Gay Men. He is also continuing a twenty-year project, an unfinished poem in an invented syllabic form, The Square.

McConnell was born in 1959 in Cleveland, Ohio, attended The Hawken School, Choate/Rosemary Hall, Shaker Heights High Schooland lasted a year at Columbia College in New York City.

While living in upstate New York, he published a literary magazine with Nora Wright, the poet Tory Dent and James Cheney.

Peripatetic for a while, McConnell lived in a white high rise overlooking Lake Erie, then sublet the painter Joe Brainard's Green Street loft in New York City, then moved to Hudson, New York, for a single year, then relocated to Paris, France, for five.

After returning to New York, he got a pilot's license and, for a short time, taught elementary math to prisoners on Riker's Island. He now lives with sometime Mississippi businessman Darrell Crawford in a West Chelsea townhouse where he has been the host of countless parties honoring his many literary friends and their works.

Read more about him at www.DavidMcConnell.com"