With this first JPN HEO blog post of April 2008, I am using this forum to publish an article that was delivered as a paper at the SEAAIR conference in Langkawi, Malaysia, in September 2006. It will serve as something of a retrospective on happenings in higher education during the Koizumi years of 2000-6 and the preceding years that set up the reforms of what now could be called a political era for Japan.
News posts on the demographic crisis and reasons for the failure of English education will follow in the remaining days of April.
Japan's Tertiary Education System: Developments in the Koizumi Era of Reform
Charles Jannuzi
Abstract
This paper will survey the major developments and changes that have taken place during the past decade in Japan's tertiary education system and put them into international (comparative) and historical perspectives. It also will attempt to assess critically the impact of major reforms on the national and public universities (and the response of the more numerous private universities to these reforms as well). For example, as of 1 April 2004, Japan's 87 national universities were 'denationalized' and incorporated into 'autonomous institutions' (or 'juridical persons') giving them, at least in theory, wider discretionary powers over personnel management, teaching and research assignments, program and curriculum development. The new status was supposed to result in more local autonomy within each institution over the allocation of money for their mandated missions in teaching, conveying public services to their regions, and conducting basic and applied research in science and technology. Have such top-down reforms proven effective, and have their effects matched the government's stated intentions? It is the author's contention that, not only are the reforms a classic case of reform over-reach, but that Japan's overbuilt university system will face demographic, financial and socio-cultural crises that the current Koizumi era of reform, now coming to its close, has utterly failed to address.
Introduction
This year, as the Koizumi period of politics comes to its close, pundits are already skeptically evaluating the accomplishments of his administrations. The PM had promised that his reforms would spare no part of the national government and political economy. He even threatened to destroy his own long-ruling party, the LDP, in order to effect the changes.
Much of the electorate, when asked, said they supported the reform agenda of the popular PM, but in the long run they did not really understand his rationales or his priorities. For example, the profitable postal system (which includes huge, world-class savings and insurance divisions) was not in any state of crisis, however much it might have been the envy of struggling banks and insurance companies. It had already accepted and assimilated reforms that improved its business plans and operations. If anything, the financial health of the postal system showed that government-run companies can compete profitably in a capitalist political economy. Yet the full privatization (and eventual public listing) of the postal system dominated debate in last year's election. Meanwhile, the main opposition to postal reform came from within Koizumi's own ruling LDP. More than anything it would seem Koizumi's desire to 'reform' the postal system reflected a personal vendetta he had against the bureaucrats in charge of it.
Ironically, while the PM was often at war with his own party and the bureaucrats of his own government, his divisive leadership ultimately prevailed, delivering--as much by accident as by design--a landslide victory late last year in a lower house election, defeating a united opposition party (the DPJ) that advocated far more liberal, pro-business reforms! On the other hand, Koizumi's inattention to any sort of foreign policy independent of the US and his open displays of conservative nationalism and unquestioningly pro-US policies alienated much of the rest of Asia, most importantly the emergent economic powerhouse of China.
In one area of government-society relations though, Koizumi and his cabinet pushed for the most radical of reform plans under consideration--the conversion of the country's system of national universities and colleges into individual, autonomous national university corporations (NUCs) in 2003-2004. However, this has to be qualified: the corporatization plan put into effect 1 April (the start of the fiscal and school years in Japan) of 2004 was not so much a break from the previous two decades of developments in tertiary education than a bold culmination in continuity with it.
Overview of Higher Education in Japan
Compulsory education takes in students up to grade 9 (the third year of junior high school), but continuance rates for senior high school are a very high - 95%, with graduation from them almost a matter of course for college-bound students (though the drop-rate from vocational schools is high). A common perception of colleges and universities in Japan is that they are selective and therefore entrance is only gained after passing rigorous examinations; however, continuance rates from the secondary to the tertiary level are now approaching 60%-70%--if one is flexible about what constitutes 'higher education'. Considering the declining populations of secondary level cohorts and the very low failure rate of matriculated students, it is possible to argue that Japanese tertiary education has for quite some time been in an era of open admissions and rivals the U.S. in at least the level of young adults' participation in higher education.
There are currently nearly 1300 accredited colleges and universities in Japan, divided approximately half and half between 2 and 4-year institutions (contrast this with the U.K's totals of 89 universities and 69 colleges of higher education). Even as it became clear that irreversible demographic trends meant fewer students in the future, Japan was still adding new schools well into the 1990s. Such a large number of schools creates a considerable tertiary sector unsurpassed in the non-anglophone world and second only to the US's in developed countries. If the various "senmon gakko" (sometimes akin to the European polytechnic, most usually like the American business college) are also included, the tertiary sector expands to an enormous scope taking in thousands of universities, colleges, and institutes.
Demographic decline and the extended economic recession of the 1990s forced change on Japan, and education has hardly escaped such effects; this includes the tertiary sector of education. One of the possible sources of Japan's economic running in place is demographics: as the society increasingly ages and retires but with a birth rate as low as Italy's, every year there are significantly fewer and fewer children entering the school systems of most prefectures and cities of Japan. Japan's high school graduate population of 2 million in 1992 is predicted to drop to 1.2 million by the year 2010. The question for debate and consideration is this: Can even higher levels of high school graduates enrolling in higher education compensate for the overall decline in numbers? In combination with their nascent efforts at adult life-long learning programs, many colleges and universities are hoping so. For the better run institutions, such hopes may not be entirely unfounded: there are fewer and fewer full-time white-, blue- and grey- collar jobs for high school diploma holders. Therefore, a college education has come to be seen more than ever as the basic award helping one to gain entrance to the adult world of full-time employment. However, even if schools can sustain their enrollments, it is certain that they will have to change in order to meet the needs of (1) high school graduates less academically prepared for sustained, higher level work and (2) older, non-traditional students who may not fit in with the youth culture that now prevails at this level of education.
University Reform: The Prominent Case of the National Universities
In sharp contrast to Japan's image as a nation known for a frenetic commitment to business, modernization and development, most of its national universities have seemed like relatively sleepy oases of teaching and research. Except for a handful of internationally known universities (such as Tokyo Daigaku and Kyoto Daigaku), the national university system had consisted mostly of small, provincial institutions scattered across the country. The national universities and colleges have, since the start of the post-war period, come under the direct control of the Ministry of Education. However the day-to-day running could be called 'collegial', largely managed by co-operating (but also competing) faculties, departments, committees, research labs and academic cliques. Now these universities find themselves at a historic crossroads, one which has brought them under heavy public scrutiny as part of expectations for broad social and institutional reform. In July of 2003, the Japan Diet finally enacted--after much debate--legislation which re-established its 87 national colleges and universities (consolidated earlier from a total of 99 institutions) as 'independent administrative agencies or 'national university juridical persons'; the term now used most often to refer to them is 'national university corporations' (NUCs). Parallel legislation also reorganized under one national agency 59 technical colleges--five-year institutions which combine the last three years of high school with a specialized, two-year tertiary degree. It should be noted here that there is also a parallel system of some 80 public and metropolitan institutions across Japan which are now being forced into a similar set of reforms as the national universities have undergone.
This new autonomy, however, could paradoxically mean potential for more arbitrary control from outside. The universities and colleges have been given their new independent status in order to revitalize research and teaching programs through more centralized administration and the need to prove their qualification for bloc grants while competing more and more for diminishing subsidy from the national government. This creates the first paradox of independence, because the national government and its education ministry can control the central review committees assigned to evaluate the institutions and their programs. Furthermore, the faculty, some of whom may eventually be forced to give up lifelong employment for a system of limited, competitive tenure, have doubts about the criteria by which their own job performances will be judged. University executives and management now have the responsibility of coming up with 'mid-term' six-year plans covering all details of administration, planning, operations, research and teaching.
Revitalizing and Enlivening Higher Education
The transition from a highly selective university system to one for mass education occurred in Japan in the 1970s-1980s. The country now has nearly 1300 universities, junior colleges, and technical colleges (with over 600 being four-year universities). There are over 3 million students enrolled in these institutions, with over 60% of senior high graduates continuing their education into higher levels. Japan's system is only exceeded in size and scope in the developed world by the US's, and is, in terms of its impact on society and the workplace, unsurpassed in the non-anglophone world.
The last decade and a half could be called the first real era of reform for Japan's mass university education system. An often-stated ambition of educational reformers in Japan has been the re-vitalization of the university system with 30 'world-class' institutions at the top. That is, reformers want a tertiary system that can compete with the US's in terms of (1) taught programs beyond the undergraduate level, (2) quantity and quality of basic and applied research, and (3) independence and diversity in financial resources. This goal is far from being realized, though an elite core of around 50 universities and institutes has emerged as better placed historically and geographically to flourish in the liberalized, competitive environment.
Until the early 1990s, because the numbers of high school graduates had always exceeded university admissions slots, matriculation was a reason for celebration. Despite the view that a university education was a four-year vacation from working life, graduation with marginal grades from even the middling universities conferred sufficient cachet to ensure recruitment into lifetime employment. That is no longer the case. Lifetime employment, never guaranteed for women or workers at the thousands of smaller companies anyway, isn't even a serious point of discussion for today's university-leaving job-seekers.
After more than a decade of an over-valued currency and the consequent weak economic performance, related political turmoil, and reform overshoot, more and more Japanese express a loss of faith in old institutions and ways of doing things. There is largely a consensus, though, that there must be reform, though consensus is lacking on what that systematic change should consist of, how it should be carried out, or who should bear the brunt of the immediate consequences. Typical of societies with developed economies and large middle classes, publicly subsidized education has become a major focus of reform, though consistency and coherence of vision is a problem Japan shares with the rest of the developed world.
Some of the goals of the reform being imposed on the national university system (where most university-based research takes place) are felt to be urgent, necessary, and a key component of Prime Minister Koizumi's reform administration. They include the following:
(1) Saving the debt-ridden national government money. This will most obviously be done by eliminating and combining programs, college-/school-level divisions, and even entire universities.
(2) Launching the universities into local self-governance with strict fiscal accountability to the center. Once independent, these institutions may well have to compete for funding among themselves or with other public and private universities. In fact, private universities support the reform of national universities because they hope such changes to the system will free up more public subsidy to go their way. However, given the current fiscal problems facing the national and local governments, it seems that in the long term, the situation will be many more universities competing for a declining pool of national government money. Clearly, universities that hope to survive, regardless of their original foundation (former national, former public, private non-profit, but also now private for profit), will have to find alternative sources of funding and endowment.
(3) Enlivening teaching through effective evaluation of teachers' performance and curriculum development. Many Japanese educators contend that Japanese universities do not foster creativity or flexible approaches to problem-solving in their students, and teacher-centred lectures are often cited as one of the main reasons.
(4) Through competitive tenure the institutions are supposed to become more internationally competitive in scientific and technological research. As already stated, one goal is to take the many small universities and combine them into larger, more cost-efficient operations. It is also hoped that this will result in synergies in basic and applied research that will create at least a handful of world-class universities among the few that will remain. Another reform that is already having an effect is the change in the civil servant status of national university professors, scientists and medical doctors which allows them to form research and business tie-ups with the private sector. Perhaps most importantly the former national and now former public universities are supposed to be put into a competitive dynamic with the more numerous private universities which, up until now, have survived on less government subsidy and higher tuition rates.
Reforming Research
Japan's decade-long recession and deflationary economy have significantly diminished its private industry's ability to finance research in science and technology. Despite slumping tax revenues, ballooning budget deficits, and deteriorating credit ratings, the national government has recently devised strategies attempting to compensate for the decline of private sector R&D. In so doing, it has also intertwined its agenda for increasing research expenditures with its agenda for effective educational reform, especially at the tertiary level. For example, in January 2001, its Science and Technology Agency (STA) was merged with its Ministry of Education (Mombusho) to form the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), an entity that gets a whopping 8% of the national budget. The government also hopes to focus and steer research toward social outcomes to fill future needs more efficiently than it thinks the diverse private sector can. The government's experiences at leading industry-wide R&D consortia reveal that the private sector's research activities are often not basic enough, or they are redundant rather than complementary. Government-co-ordinated efforts involving a large number of companies lack sufficient mutual trust across closely competing companies for there to be real co-operation and collaboration. Also, the national government feels it has to set policy for the 'big picture' of the political economy just coming into focus in ways that make macroeconomic sense if it hopes to foster international competitiveness. It is also widely thought that government policy and spending must galvanize the development of technical solutions to cope adequately with such problems as Japan's graying society or future energy supply shortages.
According to MEXT, in 2001 the national government budgeted over $35 billion for spending falling under the general category of 'science and technology'.Under its second 'Science and Technology Basic Plan' (now in effect), the national government is attempting to fund scientific and technological research at an amount worth 1% or more of GDP each year during a five-year period (from 2001-2005). If broader definitions of what constitutes scientific R&D are used (such as IT , AI and software research), that already large figure could be pushed upward to the $45-55 billion range. In order to help manage qualitatively this huge quantity of money, the second Basic Plan identifies four priorities for funding: life sciences, information technology, the environment, and materials science/nano-technology. Though only a fraction of the amount spent in the private sector on R&D, the bulk of scientific and technological research being conducted in tertiary education in Japan takes place at its 89 national universities (which get the bulk of the $17 billion given annually to university-based research).
The importance of research at these universities is evidenced by the relatively large faculties they have compared to other public or private universities, since many of the full-time employees of the national universities are engaged more in research than teaching. However, national universities invariably reported lack of space on urban campuses with run-down buildings and obsolete equipment. To fix these problems, MEXT had in place a 'Five-year Plan for Urgent Development of Facilities of National Universities'. Such funding efforts were actually a part of the larger Science and Technology Basic plan of the 1990s. In addition to paying for more space and new equipment for research, the goals of this expenditure were specifically (1) to expand graduate schools (including doctoral programs), (2) to promote, identify and reward centers of excellence in research (including 10,000 post-doctoral positions), and (3) to re-organize and develop the former medical colleges as university-annex hospitals capable of clinical research while offering advanced in- and out-patient medical care. These, along with many other goals being discussed, were felt to be necessary if Japan is to create at least 30 universities 'international standard'.
One question repeatedly asked about this 'top 30' goal, however, is: Does it pay anything more than lip service to the improvement of the teaching of undergraduate students--the traditional responsibility of many of the regional national universities? Although comparative studies of test performance in primary and secondary education consistently put Japan's education at or near the top of the OECD countries, international ranking of university systems based on multiple criteria puts its universities consistently at or near the bottom. The national government and MEXT have insisted that, among other things, their reforms for the national universities are intended to promote excellence not only in research but also in all levels of teaching and learning as well, by (1) allowing greater flexibility in admissions criteria (both for undergraduate and graduate programs), (2) focusing on the teaching abilities of academics through both internal and external evaluations, (3) granting national universities independent administrative status (corporatisation), (4) implementing a strict grading system for university students, (5) promoting fixed-term employment so that professors and researchers can transfer easily among universities and colleges, (6) increasing competitive grants for both individual researchers and for entire universities, and (7) establishing more professional and graduate programs up through the doctoral level .
Centres of Excellence (COE) Program
Not willing merely to de-regulate and re-structure, the national government has tried to help institutions attain world class status. For example, there is the government-funded, nationwide establishment of research-oriented 'Centers of Excellence' (COEs), mostly at the national universities and a few elite private ones. Any university or institute that hoped for future top-30 ranking might have helped its case by winning the right to host one or more of the COEs. There are some striking aspects to the plan which seem to raise more questions than they answer, leading to great controversy among national university faculties and administrations. First, there is the 'scrap and build' issue. The plan is supposed to ramrod the reduction and consolidation of the number of national universities, yet such efforts seem stalled because many universities administrations and faculties oppose forced mergers with larger institutions and/or departments, or they are uncertain how to proceed once a merger has been proposed.
Next, there is the related issue of the 'corporatization' of the national universities. The language of the plan says that management methods of the private sector will be introduced. Does this mean that the former national universities should be run along the lines of currently existing private ones, many of which are on the verge of bankruptcy, even as they charge fees 2-3 times greater than public universities? Or is what is meant by private sector management methods something along the lines of for-profit companies? The plan does not really specify just what are the management methods best adaptable to the needs of the national universities as they transition to forcibly merged independent entities of much larger size with multiple, dispersed campuses. Are current administrators supposed to bring in outside advisers and consultants, and, if so, where from--government, government corporations, government-backed NGOs, private corporations, business co-operatives, or third sector non-profits? And if they do, might not such measures actually increase management costs rather than lead to savings?
Questions about Revitalizing Scientific Research
The national government and its MEXT seem unrealistic in expecting two complex processes to be carried out at the same time in anticipation of immediate savings for the national education and science budgets (i.e., one, restructuring and mergers; two, transition to administrative independence). The third major point of the COE plan emphasizes a shift to a competitive system for awarding grants, with outside, peer review of grant proposals. This would seem to indicate that the national government is getting ready to reduce the annual bloc grants given to national universities, much of which support existing research as well as taught programs and subsidized tuition fees. On this third issue, the language of the COE program reflects the earlier call for a 'top 30' set of universities. Yet the plan confusingly calls for grants to go to the best 10-30 universities in each of the following disparate fields: life sciences, chemistry, materials science,information, electrical science, electronics, human literature, interdisciplinary subjects, and 'new areas'.
One obvious question concerning this last priority of the COE program is: Why don't the designated fields match more closely with the specific priorities set down in the Science and Technology Basic Plan? Also, it is not really clear just how definitive the qualifications of the 'expert committee' in charge of evaluating the grant proposals are, especially given the topical range of the actual submissions. Nor is it clear how objective, thorough, or peer-reviewed the actual process of selection was. What is clear is that for FY 2002, around $152 million was promised to be spent over 5 years on a total of 113 research projects scattered almost equally across all the fields listed above, at national, public and private universities located all over Japan.
What is also obvious is that there is as yet no obvious pattern for creating through competition and incentives a 'top 30' of universities or 100 'centers of excellence' in research. Moreover, the money going out through the COE program seems more to be rewarding already existing research programs rather than providing seed money to the new areas of research thought vital to economic and social revitalization. As if the current state of over diversification was not enough, the COE program promised that in FY 2003 it would make selections in still yet five more fields: medicine, mathematics/physics/Earth Science, machinery/civil engineering/construction/other engineering, the social sciences, and 'interdisciplinary' areas.
The COEs now in place across the nation are supposed to focus their activities on doctoral and post-doctoral research and scholarship--that is, if they are active at all. Capable researchers already at work in the relative safety of existing 'laboratories' (co-operating research and teaching groups) have proven reluctant to commit to the new centers. After all, the COEs have no long record of results and often lack a familiar sempai (older mentor) for a younger researcher to work under. Meanwhile, post-doctoral researchers from abroad with only survival level Japanese, such as those on EU stipends, have found many of the centers unable to operate with English as a common language for communication.
Other Types of Co-operative Research
One bottom-up variation of co-operative research that is starting to take hold is the non-profit organization (NPO), a type of entity only recently given official corporate status under national law. Academics from universities or researchers from newly independent institutes can form and run an NPO with a specific mission in collaboration with private companies, receiving aid from both the public and private sectors. Another recent revision to the laws allows academics and researchers at national and public institutions to serve directly on the boards of for-profit, joint stock companies and high tech start-ups (e.g., biotechnology) hoping to go public in order to further co-operative research, both in order to draw in funding from the private sector (much of it venture capital) for promising targeted research and for the purpose of speeding up the commercial pay-offs for such applied research. Finally, as academics move into the world of business, it seems quite likely that the world of business will come to them: As part of a nation-wide, bottom-up deregulation campaign, a Tokyo company involved in education and training has submitted a request to be allowed to start up a university and graduate school; legislative changes to existing laws governing education now allow for-profit entities to set up and run schools, including at the tertiary level.
Venture Businesses
Only universities and institutes that can conduct research and scholarship at the doctoral and post-doctoral levels can host a COE. So universities of all types (quasi-national,quasi-public, and private, including those with no chance for a COE) are now trying a more bottom-up strategy to raise funds and earn sustainable income: venture businesses (VBs). By 2004 close to a thousand such university- and research-institute- linked VBs were in operation, with a record 179 created in 2003 alone. Clusters of VBs have sprung up in the urban areas, such as Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto and Osaka. Unwilling to leave things to geographic chance, the national government has also funded 45 'venture business laboratories' nationwide, with most at regional second- and third-tier universities and institutes with faculties of science and technology.
Many of the VBs are joint ventures between a university and a group of investors or a company. Up until recently co-operation between universities and private enterprise usually put a top university in Japan into a tie-up with a top company in Japan. The key scientists and the companies often profited, but universities had no way to get their share if the research led to a marketable idea yielding profits. One recent change to benefit the universities has been the establishment of intellectual property offices on campuses. These can help academics and researchers file for patent, copyright and trademark protections while also assuring that universities get a share of profits from licensing agreements and money-making enterprises which commercialize the intellectual property.
Conclusion
As the Koizumi period of politics draws to its close, critics have already started to downplay the long-term impact of his mostly half-measure or stop-gap reforms. In one area of government-society relations, though, Koizumi and his cabinets clearly pushed for the most radical of reform plans under consideration and got what they wanted: in 2003-2004, the conversion of the country's system of 87 national universities and colleges into individual, autonomous national university corporations (NUCs). However, this has to be qualified somewhat. The plans for university incorporation that were put into effect 1 April (the start of the fiscal and school years) of 2004 were not so much a break from the previous two decades of developments and planned changes in tertiary education as they were a bold culmination in continuity with them. On the other hand, it must remembered that much of Japan's era of reform has been a panicked response to an economic crisis brought about by US policies that led to, among other serious problems, a severe over-valuation of the Japanese yen.
Those two prior decades of changes in tertiary education leading up to the creation of the NUCs comprised many profound developments, such as the following:
-the establishment of a handful of new research universities and institutes, decision-making at which flows from a central administration--in sharp contrast with traditions at national and public universities that are based on consensual, collegial relations across often rival departments and laboratories;
-the expansion of graduate program and their enrollments, including American-style professional schools of business, law, and accounting;
-growth in doctoral and post-doctoral programs, including in newer disciplines, e.g., IT, bio-technology, nano-technology, life sciences, and cross-disciplinary studies;
-a steady increase in the number of international students hosted, to over 120,000 annually, about 25% enrolled in graduate schools;
-more public funding of the entire tertiary sector, including private institutions, which outnumber national and public ones, with a target of 1% of GDP;
-increased funding for research (including more basic research) to compensate for its decline in private industry, with an accompanying shift towards competitive awards, with a target of 7-8% of annual national budgets, and a national goal of 3% of GDP for ALL scientific R&D (with national government spending accounting for 1% of GDP);
-legislative and regulatory changes that allowed the national universities to tie up with other entities to pursue research and expand course offerings, including tie-ups with other universities (of all types, national, public and private), research institutes, local governments, and private industry;
-parallel changes that allowed national university academics to serve on the boards of NPOs and for-profit corporations;
-internal and external systems of evaluation, independent of national government certification, going beyond minimal accreditation, and including accreditation for graduate programs and field-specific accreditation.
However, we predict here that these reforms will not be sufficient to save the tertiary sector in Japan from crisis and partial collapse. The demographic realities are harsh and inescapble. There simply will not be enough senior high graduates after the year 2010 to support the over-built higher education sector. Attempts at maintaining enrollments with international students (there are now over 120,000 studying in Japan) will reach a peak because of the language barriers, since Japanese universities are incapable of providing significant amounts of curriculum in English. An elite group of 50-100 institutions will emerge, while hundreds of colleges and universities will disappear--either absorbed by more successful ones or completely gone from bankruptcy and disestablishment. It is also unlikely that the government will reach its goal of thirty world-class institutions. If even ten institutions make lists of world rankings by the year 2020, and if these institutions are not necessarily limited to old imperial-national universities, these results will, in historical perspective, have been a major accomplishment.
18 April 2008
29 March 2008
Why English learning fails in Japan: Reason #3
Why English learning fails in Japan: Reason #3
Note: This is the third of a series that will run for at least ten parts. However, readers' comments are welcomed and, where relevant, will be added as reasons in the main series, with full credit given.
Reason #3: Japanese is not written with an alphabet
Japanese is not written with an alphabet.
The writing system used to represent Japanese in continuous text is notorious for its complexity. Chinese characters (called kanji in Japanese) have been adopted and adapted to write Japanese. But one problem with Chinese characters is that they don't fit nicely onto Japanese. Chinese is a group of languages characterized, in part, as being 'mono-syllabic'. That is, one content morpheme of one spoken syllable in length is usually written in text with one character. However, Japanese is, unlike Chinese, highly inflected and multi-syllabic. Using Chinese characters to represent Japanese leads to syllabic and lexical opacity--one character might stand for one, two, three or more spoken syllables.
To make matters worse in terms of the complexity of written Japanese, Chinese characters are typically used to stand for different words or morphemes that may (or may not) cover some of the same semantic areas. For example, the same character might be used to represent two words or morphemes that are synonymous, even though their pronunciations are totally different. This explanation only hints at some of the complexities in adapting such a mismatched writing system to Japanese.
As written Japanese evolved, the Chinese writing system was modified and enhanced to make it more useful for full-blown Japanese texts. In order to help solve the opacity issue, two syllabaries have been put to use to complement the use of Chinese characters. These are called hiragana and katakana.
As these sets of written syllables are used today in written Japanese, hiragana (a cursive set of syllables) is used to write much of the multi-syllabic inflections and particles of the language. It is also often preferred over the use of the kanji for many high-frequency, everyday words and phrases. Clearly, the idea of using a word-level graph (such as a kanji) to write a language comes to Japan from China. But the use of syllabic graphs might come from India through the diffusion of literacy practices associated with Buddhism.
The other syllabary, katakana, captures in written form the same simplified, idealized syllables abstracted from spoken Japanese and captured in hiragana, but it is written with elements derived from kanji and displays the same sort of angularity. Katakana is typically used to write foreign loan words, especially non-Chinese ones. It is also used to represent the elements of Japanese vocabulary that imitate aural, other physical, and mental phenomena (what is called roughly 'onomatopoeia' in English, though it is much more extensive and developed in Japanese). It can also be employed to show emphasis, analogous to the way all caps or italics might be used in English.
Full-blown written Japanese will typically show mostly kanji and hiragana, with a smattering of katakana (unless the text was about foreign loan words, or was a menu at a western restaurant). A text of Japanese might also have quite a number of items in the roman alphabet (called romaji in Japanese) and Arabic numerals (though Chinese numerals are also often used).
But roman letters are rarely used to romanize Japanese, except in the case of synonyms like 'UN' or 'NATO' (which do have their own Japanese pronunciations in the spoken language). Romanization does happen in advertising and on shop signs. You are most likely to see words written in the roman alphabet in academic discussions where an English or other foreign word or phrase is placed in the text and then explained in Japanese.
Since most Japanese--the sort of language that would be spoken informally but also formally--is rarely put into alphabetic form (romanization). Most native speakers of Japanese are literate in their own language, which is largely not alphabetically written. They lack much familiarity or fluency with the writing and spelling conventions of English.
For example, most university students will struggle with a dictionary laid out in traditional alphabetical order (A to Z) because Japanese language dictionaries are typically put into a syllabic order. And one hindrance to personal computer use in Japan has been learner reluctance to interface with a computer using an alpha-numeric keyboard that looks totally alien in terms of the salient features of Japanese literacy. In other words, units of written Japanese refer to words and syllables, not sub-syllabic elements, like letter-to-sound correspondences.
Even though the JIS computer keyboard in use all over in Japan does incorporate aspects of Japanese literacy, it is still most quickly used for input in computing by those who can touch type using alphabetic units (which are then converted bottom-upwards to syllables and then, when necessary by convention, to Chinese characters). The majority of Japanese can not touch type and find the idea of alphabetically analytic input of language to be alien to their feel and grasp of their own written language in situations that require interaction with a computer or word processor program.
Japanese English learners, especially visually oriented ones, might feel that written English is simply too exotic and strange for them to process visually or analyze into meaningful language. English speakers often have the same reaction to written Japanese. Written English's complex spelling conventions are largely outside the writing practices of Japanese literacy, and, to the extent that those spelling conventions actually reflect a phonetic, phonological or morphological reality, they largely do not reflect anything similar to be found in Japanese.
Complicating this are some of the the linguistic peculiarities of English. In the previous installment, I asserted that it could be argued that English is a Germanic language in terms of its pronunciation, but its spelling makes it look like a Romance language. Well, both of these aspects are foreign to Japanese learners of English. Their language's phonology is not similar to a Germanic one, and their approach to writing and spelling conventions is not a Latin or Romance one.
Connecting with e-mail and to the world wide web only really took off in Japan once G2 and G3 mobile phones became ubiquitous. Little wonder then that the Japanese quickly took to web site addresses that are read like digital bar codes instead of ponderously typed in the standard http:// form.
Also, the interface of Japanese mobile phones is set up for quick syllabic level input and conversion of the content words to kanji. Roman letters are a tertiary system, beneath and much more limited than features for handling kanji and the two syllabaries. However, the linguistic habits of many Japanese have adapted to the need for speed in text messaging. For one thing, this has led to the increased use of roman-lettered acronyms to stand for conventionally shared and frequently used phrases.
Some people have even started complaining because these acronyms are taking on pronounced forms and invading the spoken language. Parents are often shocked when they listen to their teenage sons and daughters conversing in mobile phone acronymic 'short hand' at the dinner table. Such developments are interesting for the ongoing evolution of Japanese as a vital, modern native and national language of international importance in the high tech era. However, these changes will have little or no positive impact on English learning in Japan.
Note: This is the third of a series that will run for at least ten parts. However, readers' comments are welcomed and, where relevant, will be added as reasons in the main series, with full credit given.
Reason #3: Japanese is not written with an alphabet
Japanese is not written with an alphabet.
The writing system used to represent Japanese in continuous text is notorious for its complexity. Chinese characters (called kanji in Japanese) have been adopted and adapted to write Japanese. But one problem with Chinese characters is that they don't fit nicely onto Japanese. Chinese is a group of languages characterized, in part, as being 'mono-syllabic'. That is, one content morpheme of one spoken syllable in length is usually written in text with one character. However, Japanese is, unlike Chinese, highly inflected and multi-syllabic. Using Chinese characters to represent Japanese leads to syllabic and lexical opacity--one character might stand for one, two, three or more spoken syllables.
To make matters worse in terms of the complexity of written Japanese, Chinese characters are typically used to stand for different words or morphemes that may (or may not) cover some of the same semantic areas. For example, the same character might be used to represent two words or morphemes that are synonymous, even though their pronunciations are totally different. This explanation only hints at some of the complexities in adapting such a mismatched writing system to Japanese.
As written Japanese evolved, the Chinese writing system was modified and enhanced to make it more useful for full-blown Japanese texts. In order to help solve the opacity issue, two syllabaries have been put to use to complement the use of Chinese characters. These are called hiragana and katakana.
As these sets of written syllables are used today in written Japanese, hiragana (a cursive set of syllables) is used to write much of the multi-syllabic inflections and particles of the language. It is also often preferred over the use of the kanji for many high-frequency, everyday words and phrases. Clearly, the idea of using a word-level graph (such as a kanji) to write a language comes to Japan from China. But the use of syllabic graphs might come from India through the diffusion of literacy practices associated with Buddhism.
The other syllabary, katakana, captures in written form the same simplified, idealized syllables abstracted from spoken Japanese and captured in hiragana, but it is written with elements derived from kanji and displays the same sort of angularity. Katakana is typically used to write foreign loan words, especially non-Chinese ones. It is also used to represent the elements of Japanese vocabulary that imitate aural, other physical, and mental phenomena (what is called roughly 'onomatopoeia' in English, though it is much more extensive and developed in Japanese). It can also be employed to show emphasis, analogous to the way all caps or italics might be used in English.
Full-blown written Japanese will typically show mostly kanji and hiragana, with a smattering of katakana (unless the text was about foreign loan words, or was a menu at a western restaurant). A text of Japanese might also have quite a number of items in the roman alphabet (called romaji in Japanese) and Arabic numerals (though Chinese numerals are also often used).
But roman letters are rarely used to romanize Japanese, except in the case of synonyms like 'UN' or 'NATO' (which do have their own Japanese pronunciations in the spoken language). Romanization does happen in advertising and on shop signs. You are most likely to see words written in the roman alphabet in academic discussions where an English or other foreign word or phrase is placed in the text and then explained in Japanese.
Since most Japanese--the sort of language that would be spoken informally but also formally--is rarely put into alphabetic form (romanization). Most native speakers of Japanese are literate in their own language, which is largely not alphabetically written. They lack much familiarity or fluency with the writing and spelling conventions of English.
For example, most university students will struggle with a dictionary laid out in traditional alphabetical order (A to Z) because Japanese language dictionaries are typically put into a syllabic order. And one hindrance to personal computer use in Japan has been learner reluctance to interface with a computer using an alpha-numeric keyboard that looks totally alien in terms of the salient features of Japanese literacy. In other words, units of written Japanese refer to words and syllables, not sub-syllabic elements, like letter-to-sound correspondences.
Even though the JIS computer keyboard in use all over in Japan does incorporate aspects of Japanese literacy, it is still most quickly used for input in computing by those who can touch type using alphabetic units (which are then converted bottom-upwards to syllables and then, when necessary by convention, to Chinese characters). The majority of Japanese can not touch type and find the idea of alphabetically analytic input of language to be alien to their feel and grasp of their own written language in situations that require interaction with a computer or word processor program.
Japanese English learners, especially visually oriented ones, might feel that written English is simply too exotic and strange for them to process visually or analyze into meaningful language. English speakers often have the same reaction to written Japanese. Written English's complex spelling conventions are largely outside the writing practices of Japanese literacy, and, to the extent that those spelling conventions actually reflect a phonetic, phonological or morphological reality, they largely do not reflect anything similar to be found in Japanese.
Complicating this are some of the the linguistic peculiarities of English. In the previous installment, I asserted that it could be argued that English is a Germanic language in terms of its pronunciation, but its spelling makes it look like a Romance language. Well, both of these aspects are foreign to Japanese learners of English. Their language's phonology is not similar to a Germanic one, and their approach to writing and spelling conventions is not a Latin or Romance one.
Connecting with e-mail and to the world wide web only really took off in Japan once G2 and G3 mobile phones became ubiquitous. Little wonder then that the Japanese quickly took to web site addresses that are read like digital bar codes instead of ponderously typed in the standard http:// form.
Also, the interface of Japanese mobile phones is set up for quick syllabic level input and conversion of the content words to kanji. Roman letters are a tertiary system, beneath and much more limited than features for handling kanji and the two syllabaries. However, the linguistic habits of many Japanese have adapted to the need for speed in text messaging. For one thing, this has led to the increased use of roman-lettered acronyms to stand for conventionally shared and frequently used phrases.
Some people have even started complaining because these acronyms are taking on pronounced forms and invading the spoken language. Parents are often shocked when they listen to their teenage sons and daughters conversing in mobile phone acronymic 'short hand' at the dinner table. Such developments are interesting for the ongoing evolution of Japanese as a vital, modern native and national language of international importance in the high tech era. However, these changes will have little or no positive impact on English learning in Japan.
23 March 2008
Why English learning fails in Japan: Reason #2
Why English learning fails in Japan: Reason #2
Note: This is the second of a series which is supposed to be planned for at least ten short installments (Ten reasons why...). However, readers' comments are welcomed and will be added as reasons in the main series, with full credit given.
Reason #2: Japanese is not closely related to English
Japanese is not closely related to English.
Language families
What people usually mean by this is that English and Japanese are not from the same language family groups, and that Japanese does not belong to the Indo-European super-family of languages. It is fairly common knowledge among Japanese as well as the foreigners who flock to study Japanese (Japanese as a Foreign Language, JFL) that Japanese is not closely related to any other languages. Actually, what some recent linguistics says is that Japanese and Ryuukuan are members of the larger 'Japonic' family. So technically, modern Japanese (and all its dialects) has a relative, the Ryuukuan language (and all its dialects). At a popular level in Japan, Ryuukuan is often equated with Okinawan, and Okinawan is thought of as one of the many spoken dialects of Japan. The fact that most Okinawans also speak and are literate in standard forms of Japanese only reinforces the popular view, since the same thing could be said about most Japanese. That is, they speak a local and individual variation of a regional dialect, and learn and use standard forms of Japanese for education, business, literacy, etc.
Clearly, we can say English is not closely related to Japonic or Japanese. English is often referred to as a Germanic language. This makes it a sister language of Dutch, Flemish, German, Icelandic, etc. Others might note the close lexical and typographical resemblances modern English has with Romance languages, such as French, Italian and Spanish. You might say that modern English SOUNDS like a Germanic language, but LOOKS like a Romance one because of the Latinate vocabulary and the fossilized French-looking spelling conventions.
Comparing and contrasting Japanese and English
In foreign language education in Japan, English and Japanese often get placed side-by-side for comparison and contrast. This is true of much of the content of EFL classes in Japan, from junior high/middle school to university-level. You could call this the type of linguistic analysis for pedagogical purposes that is thought to support the learning of English, but it is also for the purpose of comparative cultures. In the realm of comparative cultures and cross-cultural learning, reference is most often made to 'American' (but also 'British') English as a standard form for learning EFL. Such an emphasis can be misleading, but it is understandable enough given the relative importance of English as a 'global language' and the global impact of American culture. The fact that the US has a population that is much larger than the UK's, Canada's, Australia's, New Zealand's and Ireland's also deserves consideration.
Unlike modern English, which is demonstrably related to known groups of languages, modern Japanese can be called a language 'isolate' of somewhat obscure origins. Origins of modern languages can be very obscure in the absence of literacy and textual artifacts. And even these have a distorting effect, since we still can not recover fully the spoken language. Such is the case of Japanese. More technically, it should be said that 'Japonic' is the actual family and isolate, and that Japonic consists of Japanese (and all its dialects) and Ryuukyuan (and all its dialects).
English can be classified into relationships with west Germanic languages as well as the larger Germanic grouping. This then allows English to be put into a relationship with a 'super-family' that has penetrated the popular consciousness of language, the Indo-European languages. This means that it can be said that English shares ancestry with German, but also Latin and Greek. However, this also means English shares a line of linguistic descent that stems from an historic super-family of languages that also has lines of descent in Russian and other Slavic languages, as well as languages considered 'exotic' by many Americans or British, such as Albanian, Farsi, Kurdish, Pashtun, Indo-Persian, Hindi and Urdu.
Reinforcing this view that there is a 'Indo-European' nature to English is English's history. English has a long history of language-changing contact with other languages, but the most extensive contacts have been with other Indo-European languages (Celtic, North Germanic, Norman French, literary Latin, etc.)
Like English, Japanese is a 'contact' language. In the case of Japanese, though, the exact nature of the cross-linguistic contact is obscure until literacy practices, a writing system and large amounts of vocabulary were adopted from China. Modern Japanese is most likely a literary creole that is in its origins the results of contact (or waves of contacts) due to human migrations to the archipelago. (Much the same could be said about how modern English was formed.) In the case of proto-Japanese, migrations were followed by cross-cultural consolidations across speakers of N.E. Asian (non-Chinese) languages, S. Asian (non-Chinese) ones, Pacific ones, and ones already spoken on the Japanese islands before the migrations.
Outside of sheer coincidences in typology and traits, Japanese has marked similarities with other NE Asian isolates, like Ainu and Korean--namely, word order (S-O-V), lexical morphology, and phonology. And, like these N.E. Asian isolates, it has been related for the purpose of hypothetical discussion with another broad grouping, namely the Altaic super-family, especially the Tungusic branch of E. Siberia but also the central Asian ones falling under the label 'Mongolian'. This is because just about all the languages being discussed here are typologically speaking, synthetic and agglutinative. However, in terms of its phonology, syllable structure, and morphology, and lexicon, Japanese has also been usefully compared to the super-group of Malayo-Polynesian languages.
Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition
Linguistics existing to support language teaching (LT) and learning (LL) is often referred to as 'Applied Linguistics' (AL). AL is often linked to sub-field called 'Second Language Acquisition'(SLA), even though SLA doesn't contain the sort of content with which linguistics is identified (that is, linguistic description and explanation). The relationship of AL and SLA to LT and LL is attenuated by AL's and SLA's theoretical and conceptual abstraction while its research agenda is often separated from LT by different professional agendas (since applied linguists are based at universities). Perhaps the biggest issue is that most of the research results of academic AL and SLA are not generalizable to larger sets of learners (such as, all EFL students worldwide, or EFL students in E. Asia, or EFL students in Japan, etc.).
However, one common-sense notion that is shared across AL, LT and LL is centered on the relationships of the first/native language (L1) with the second or foreign language (L2, especially when the second or foreign language is not acquired from very early childhood. The idea is simple: If a given L1 (e.g., Japanese) is not historically or genetically related to a given L2 (e.g., English), the acquisition or learning of that language will be more cognitively difficult and take longer.
This idea of language difference in terms of issues in acquisition has been academicized somewhat in AL. AL has at least two ways of realizing the idea in its discourse of theory and research. These are often referred to as 'Contrastive Analysis' (CA) and 'Error Analysis' (EA).
Let us look at Contrastive Analysis first. For CA, the L1's and L2's language systems (e.g., phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax) are compared and contrasted in detail, and the differences are used to PREDICT issues in learning the L2. For example, in phonology, Japanese is said to have no distinction between an /l/ and an /r/. So CA would predict that Japanese learners of English would have a hard time distinguishing English /l/ and /r/, both in terms of perception of speech and in production. On the other hand, Japanese /r/, at least for an English speaker, actually sounds phonetically similar to English /l/, /r/ and /d/. So /r/ sounds could also be an issue for English speakers learning JFL, marking an accent but actually interfering with intelligibility of their Japanese. Imagine such issues multiplying across differences in terms of phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax. The implications are complex, to say the least.
Perhaps the issues that arise with CA predicting errors that don't occur while not predicting errors that do is the fault of linguistics and language description. If the language descriptions and concepts you are using to carry out a contrastive analysis are inadequate and faulty, then the errors you predict might be nonsense. They might not reflect any language reality, including the developmental language of learners (often referred to as 'inter-language' in AL. Also, languages are supposed to share some traits almost universally while other traits mark a language as unique. So these marked traits could be difficult for any beginning learner, no matter what the linguistic background. For example, English is an Indo-European language that, perhaps due to significant language contact with other languages, has lost much of its inflectional system. This has huge implications for how tense, mood and aspect are actually achieved when one communicates in English. Therefore, regardless of the language background of the EFL or ESL learner, one can predict that the 'grammar' of the English 'verb' will be a source of a lot of confusion and learners' errors.
Then there is Error Analysis. EA came about because some people noticed that CA predicted errors that didn't occur among L2 learners, but at the same time, L2 learners seemed to experience and produce errors that CA didn't predict. So EA looks in detail at the actual L2 performance of learners and attempts to produce a systematic analysis of their L2 errors and learning difficulties.
Which is not to say that EA is a perfect corrective or supplement to the inadequacies of CA. First, a distinction should be made between random MISTAKES that do not reflect the actual state of the L2 learner's language competence and the ERRORS that do indicate some sort of persistent issue. Second, EA is supposed to generalize to a large group (such as the entire population of Japanese learning English at the beginning level). So the hope would be to detect errors that characterize most if not all of that population. But EA is largely behaviorist in its assumptions, so error behaviors could be linguistically or psychologically misinterpreted by the researcher or classroom teacher using such an approach.
Implications for learning a foreign language
Still, there is a commonly accepted feeling or intuition that, if two languages are not related (such as, they have a different word order or are pronounced very differently), it takes longer to learn the L2. This is not to say that Japanese is so unique in relation to English that Japanese learners of English should have more difficulty than any other language group of learners whose native language is not related to English. There is nothing in the conceptual apparatus of AL or ELT that would support this.
However, since Japanese and English are not closely related at all, this lack of linguistic affinity is something to consider in terms of planning for language teaching and language learning at schools. Unfortunately, it is not addressed adequately. Part of this is the damaging effect that results from Japan drawing on English-speaking countries for the theories, concepts and practices that embody the dominant ideology, technology and infrastructure of LT and LL.
Re-stating the issue
Which brings us back to reason #2 for why English learning fails in Japan. Because of the differences in language typology, the beginning stages of LL will take longer and involve more cross-linguistic and learning issues. These cross-linguistic and cross-discourse issues could range anywhere from phonetics and phonology through vocabulary and syntax and overlap with how to structure a a paragraph, essay, or research report. If we think of learning a FL as a classic 'bootstrap' dilemma, perhaps the core issue here will become clearer. It takes a lot of patience, hard work, repetition, review, and attention to the details of the FL in order for a learner to get beyond the helpless beginner stage. Once beyond this helpless beginner stage, the learner enters a new phase: they will have learned enough of the L2 to succeed at learning it further, perhaps up to mastery, if they are patient enough.
The problem with English in Japan is most Japanese never get beyond the helpless beginning bootstrap phase. They don't learn enough English to learn how to learn it. Unfortunately, if they depend on their schools, universities or the commercial ELT industry to help them, most will not make much progress. For one thing, this is because much of the ELT industry, institutions and programs have failed to acknowledge how and why English is difficult to learn if your native language is Japanese (or, in the case of more and more foreign students, Chinese). They have also failed to appreciate just how difficult it is to teach such a large population of beginning learners. To conclude, this should give you more than a hint of the reasons that will follow (e.g., ELT industry, government policies, institutional management of foreign language education, teacher training, etc. ).
Note: This is the second of a series which is supposed to be planned for at least ten short installments (Ten reasons why...). However, readers' comments are welcomed and will be added as reasons in the main series, with full credit given.
Reason #2: Japanese is not closely related to English
Japanese is not closely related to English.
Language families
What people usually mean by this is that English and Japanese are not from the same language family groups, and that Japanese does not belong to the Indo-European super-family of languages. It is fairly common knowledge among Japanese as well as the foreigners who flock to study Japanese (Japanese as a Foreign Language, JFL) that Japanese is not closely related to any other languages. Actually, what some recent linguistics says is that Japanese and Ryuukuan are members of the larger 'Japonic' family. So technically, modern Japanese (and all its dialects) has a relative, the Ryuukuan language (and all its dialects). At a popular level in Japan, Ryuukuan is often equated with Okinawan, and Okinawan is thought of as one of the many spoken dialects of Japan. The fact that most Okinawans also speak and are literate in standard forms of Japanese only reinforces the popular view, since the same thing could be said about most Japanese. That is, they speak a local and individual variation of a regional dialect, and learn and use standard forms of Japanese for education, business, literacy, etc.
Clearly, we can say English is not closely related to Japonic or Japanese. English is often referred to as a Germanic language. This makes it a sister language of Dutch, Flemish, German, Icelandic, etc. Others might note the close lexical and typographical resemblances modern English has with Romance languages, such as French, Italian and Spanish. You might say that modern English SOUNDS like a Germanic language, but LOOKS like a Romance one because of the Latinate vocabulary and the fossilized French-looking spelling conventions.
Comparing and contrasting Japanese and English
In foreign language education in Japan, English and Japanese often get placed side-by-side for comparison and contrast. This is true of much of the content of EFL classes in Japan, from junior high/middle school to university-level. You could call this the type of linguistic analysis for pedagogical purposes that is thought to support the learning of English, but it is also for the purpose of comparative cultures. In the realm of comparative cultures and cross-cultural learning, reference is most often made to 'American' (but also 'British') English as a standard form for learning EFL. Such an emphasis can be misleading, but it is understandable enough given the relative importance of English as a 'global language' and the global impact of American culture. The fact that the US has a population that is much larger than the UK's, Canada's, Australia's, New Zealand's and Ireland's also deserves consideration.
Unlike modern English, which is demonstrably related to known groups of languages, modern Japanese can be called a language 'isolate' of somewhat obscure origins. Origins of modern languages can be very obscure in the absence of literacy and textual artifacts. And even these have a distorting effect, since we still can not recover fully the spoken language. Such is the case of Japanese. More technically, it should be said that 'Japonic' is the actual family and isolate, and that Japonic consists of Japanese (and all its dialects) and Ryuukyuan (and all its dialects).
English can be classified into relationships with west Germanic languages as well as the larger Germanic grouping. This then allows English to be put into a relationship with a 'super-family' that has penetrated the popular consciousness of language, the Indo-European languages. This means that it can be said that English shares ancestry with German, but also Latin and Greek. However, this also means English shares a line of linguistic descent that stems from an historic super-family of languages that also has lines of descent in Russian and other Slavic languages, as well as languages considered 'exotic' by many Americans or British, such as Albanian, Farsi, Kurdish, Pashtun, Indo-Persian, Hindi and Urdu.
Reinforcing this view that there is a 'Indo-European' nature to English is English's history. English has a long history of language-changing contact with other languages, but the most extensive contacts have been with other Indo-European languages (Celtic, North Germanic, Norman French, literary Latin, etc.)
Like English, Japanese is a 'contact' language. In the case of Japanese, though, the exact nature of the cross-linguistic contact is obscure until literacy practices, a writing system and large amounts of vocabulary were adopted from China. Modern Japanese is most likely a literary creole that is in its origins the results of contact (or waves of contacts) due to human migrations to the archipelago. (Much the same could be said about how modern English was formed.) In the case of proto-Japanese, migrations were followed by cross-cultural consolidations across speakers of N.E. Asian (non-Chinese) languages, S. Asian (non-Chinese) ones, Pacific ones, and ones already spoken on the Japanese islands before the migrations.
Outside of sheer coincidences in typology and traits, Japanese has marked similarities with other NE Asian isolates, like Ainu and Korean--namely, word order (S-O-V), lexical morphology, and phonology. And, like these N.E. Asian isolates, it has been related for the purpose of hypothetical discussion with another broad grouping, namely the Altaic super-family, especially the Tungusic branch of E. Siberia but also the central Asian ones falling under the label 'Mongolian'. This is because just about all the languages being discussed here are typologically speaking, synthetic and agglutinative. However, in terms of its phonology, syllable structure, and morphology, and lexicon, Japanese has also been usefully compared to the super-group of Malayo-Polynesian languages.
Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition
Linguistics existing to support language teaching (LT) and learning (LL) is often referred to as 'Applied Linguistics' (AL). AL is often linked to sub-field called 'Second Language Acquisition'(SLA), even though SLA doesn't contain the sort of content with which linguistics is identified (that is, linguistic description and explanation). The relationship of AL and SLA to LT and LL is attenuated by AL's and SLA's theoretical and conceptual abstraction while its research agenda is often separated from LT by different professional agendas (since applied linguists are based at universities). Perhaps the biggest issue is that most of the research results of academic AL and SLA are not generalizable to larger sets of learners (such as, all EFL students worldwide, or EFL students in E. Asia, or EFL students in Japan, etc.).
However, one common-sense notion that is shared across AL, LT and LL is centered on the relationships of the first/native language (L1) with the second or foreign language (L2, especially when the second or foreign language is not acquired from very early childhood. The idea is simple: If a given L1 (e.g., Japanese) is not historically or genetically related to a given L2 (e.g., English), the acquisition or learning of that language will be more cognitively difficult and take longer.
This idea of language difference in terms of issues in acquisition has been academicized somewhat in AL. AL has at least two ways of realizing the idea in its discourse of theory and research. These are often referred to as 'Contrastive Analysis' (CA) and 'Error Analysis' (EA).
Let us look at Contrastive Analysis first. For CA, the L1's and L2's language systems (e.g., phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax) are compared and contrasted in detail, and the differences are used to PREDICT issues in learning the L2. For example, in phonology, Japanese is said to have no distinction between an /l/ and an /r/. So CA would predict that Japanese learners of English would have a hard time distinguishing English /l/ and /r/, both in terms of perception of speech and in production. On the other hand, Japanese /r/, at least for an English speaker, actually sounds phonetically similar to English /l/, /r/ and /d/. So /r/ sounds could also be an issue for English speakers learning JFL, marking an accent but actually interfering with intelligibility of their Japanese. Imagine such issues multiplying across differences in terms of phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax. The implications are complex, to say the least.
Perhaps the issues that arise with CA predicting errors that don't occur while not predicting errors that do is the fault of linguistics and language description. If the language descriptions and concepts you are using to carry out a contrastive analysis are inadequate and faulty, then the errors you predict might be nonsense. They might not reflect any language reality, including the developmental language of learners (often referred to as 'inter-language' in AL. Also, languages are supposed to share some traits almost universally while other traits mark a language as unique. So these marked traits could be difficult for any beginning learner, no matter what the linguistic background. For example, English is an Indo-European language that, perhaps due to significant language contact with other languages, has lost much of its inflectional system. This has huge implications for how tense, mood and aspect are actually achieved when one communicates in English. Therefore, regardless of the language background of the EFL or ESL learner, one can predict that the 'grammar' of the English 'verb' will be a source of a lot of confusion and learners' errors.
Then there is Error Analysis. EA came about because some people noticed that CA predicted errors that didn't occur among L2 learners, but at the same time, L2 learners seemed to experience and produce errors that CA didn't predict. So EA looks in detail at the actual L2 performance of learners and attempts to produce a systematic analysis of their L2 errors and learning difficulties.
Which is not to say that EA is a perfect corrective or supplement to the inadequacies of CA. First, a distinction should be made between random MISTAKES that do not reflect the actual state of the L2 learner's language competence and the ERRORS that do indicate some sort of persistent issue. Second, EA is supposed to generalize to a large group (such as the entire population of Japanese learning English at the beginning level). So the hope would be to detect errors that characterize most if not all of that population. But EA is largely behaviorist in its assumptions, so error behaviors could be linguistically or psychologically misinterpreted by the researcher or classroom teacher using such an approach.
Implications for learning a foreign language
Still, there is a commonly accepted feeling or intuition that, if two languages are not related (such as, they have a different word order or are pronounced very differently), it takes longer to learn the L2. This is not to say that Japanese is so unique in relation to English that Japanese learners of English should have more difficulty than any other language group of learners whose native language is not related to English. There is nothing in the conceptual apparatus of AL or ELT that would support this.
However, since Japanese and English are not closely related at all, this lack of linguistic affinity is something to consider in terms of planning for language teaching and language learning at schools. Unfortunately, it is not addressed adequately. Part of this is the damaging effect that results from Japan drawing on English-speaking countries for the theories, concepts and practices that embody the dominant ideology, technology and infrastructure of LT and LL.
Re-stating the issue
Which brings us back to reason #2 for why English learning fails in Japan. Because of the differences in language typology, the beginning stages of LL will take longer and involve more cross-linguistic and learning issues. These cross-linguistic and cross-discourse issues could range anywhere from phonetics and phonology through vocabulary and syntax and overlap with how to structure a a paragraph, essay, or research report. If we think of learning a FL as a classic 'bootstrap' dilemma, perhaps the core issue here will become clearer. It takes a lot of patience, hard work, repetition, review, and attention to the details of the FL in order for a learner to get beyond the helpless beginner stage. Once beyond this helpless beginner stage, the learner enters a new phase: they will have learned enough of the L2 to succeed at learning it further, perhaps up to mastery, if they are patient enough.
The problem with English in Japan is most Japanese never get beyond the helpless beginning bootstrap phase. They don't learn enough English to learn how to learn it. Unfortunately, if they depend on their schools, universities or the commercial ELT industry to help them, most will not make much progress. For one thing, this is because much of the ELT industry, institutions and programs have failed to acknowledge how and why English is difficult to learn if your native language is Japanese (or, in the case of more and more foreign students, Chinese). They have also failed to appreciate just how difficult it is to teach such a large population of beginning learners. To conclude, this should give you more than a hint of the reasons that will follow (e.g., ELT industry, government policies, institutional management of foreign language education, teacher training, etc. ).
11 March 2008
Why English learning fails in Japan: Reason #1
Note: This is the first of a series that is supposed to make it to at least ten short installments (Ten reasons why...). However, readers' comments are welcomed and will be added as reasons in the main series, with full credit given.
Reason #1: Japan is linguistically and culturally self-sufficient
Japan is linguistically and culturally self-sufficient.
That is an overstatement because modern, developed Japan clearly imports and assimilates ideas, cultural products, technology, etc. from the rest of the world. It does this in much the same way many developed countries do. However, that does not mean I agree with the long-held view that Japan (and other Asian cultures) are simply imitators, not originators. That is one of those numerous self-swallowing, clichéd assumptions held by many that one could waste a lifetime arguing against because one has to assume it is true simply to discuss it.
So let us look at some basic facts. Japan has a population of just under 128 million; that makes it one of the world's 'populous' countries. It is also the world's number two political economy in terms of size and always ranks high in per capita measurements and development indicators.
Most of Japan's relatively large population is considered 'native-born' Japanese. This description also could be used to include the single largest ethnic group, 'Korean'. Despite considerable dialect variation in the spoken language (including Okinawan, which could be considered a separate language or group of dialects) , most native-born Japanese learn and use a standard dialect of Japanese for education, literacy, and formal social relations (such as the conduct of business).
Unlike a country with a relatively small population, Japan's national language is not threatened--not even perturbed--by such phenomena as 'global English'. Most Japanese do not need to access directly information, news and innovative ideas from outside their culture through the use of global English. Instead, most Japanese live in a country that uses translation and interpretation on an enormous, commercial scale in order to bring in outside information.
In addition to translation and interpretation, there is another important process that keeps Japan using Japanese almost exclusively. The Japanese language brings in a large amount of vocabulary from foreign languages. The first main source is Chinese. The impact of Chinese on modern Japanese is something like that of Norman French and Latin on modern English.
The second main source providing new vocabulary (and sound sequences too) is English. A good indication of the level to which Japanese 'nativizes' the English it borrows is the role elements acquired from English's lexicon now play in the derivation of new words for the lexicon of Japanese. This is sometimes called 'Japlish'.
Some of these new Japanese Japlish terms have even made it back into English, at least amongst the people who are interested in Japan: OL, salaryman, anime, etc. This sort of phenomenon is hardly unique. First, the Japanese language has already done it quite prominently with morphemes got from long-term contact with Chinese (for example, the Japanese term for 'automobile', 'ji-dou-sha'). Second, look at how new terms in English are derived from discrete elements from Latin and Greek (sometimes the two different types are joined together based on English's own rules for lexical derivation).
Despite the concern of language conservatives that foreign influences are overwhelming Japanese, one could plausibly argue the exact opposite: Because Japanese so readily adopts and adapts vocabulary and morphemes originally from English, the language has become enriched, nuanced and even more capable of expressing ideas and information. Therefore, loan words help to make Japan and Japanese linguistically self-sufficient and lessen the need for most Japanese to engage meaning directly in a foreign language.
Now some proponents and enthusiasts of globalization have said that translation and interpretation can not keep up with the proliferation of new knowledge in order to integrate and assimilate it across cultures and languages. So the concept of 'global English' has been enlisted in support of the larger mission of globalization. A basic formulation is the following: Japan must drastically raise its overall low level of English in its population in order to compete with developed and newly industrialized countries. Some in the government and education have even called for the adoption of English as Japan's official second language.
But most people are going to be practical about knowledge and learning EFL. If they need English to get knowledge, they will try to learn English. That can be stated even more specifically. If they need English to get USABLE knowledge and information for their jobs and personal lives, they will try to learn English.
Another important factor is the non-linguistic aspect of cross-cultural, cross-linguistic contact: that is the social side, or human relations. Since most human relations are created and maintained in Japan using a form of Japanese, there is very little need for inter-personal communication in English.
A good indicator of Japan's relative cultural and linguistic self-sufficiency is its ability to export cultural products, such as J-Pop music, films, television dramas, manga/comics, and anime/animated films.
Reason #1: Japan is linguistically and culturally self-sufficient
Japan is linguistically and culturally self-sufficient.
That is an overstatement because modern, developed Japan clearly imports and assimilates ideas, cultural products, technology, etc. from the rest of the world. It does this in much the same way many developed countries do. However, that does not mean I agree with the long-held view that Japan (and other Asian cultures) are simply imitators, not originators. That is one of those numerous self-swallowing, clichéd assumptions held by many that one could waste a lifetime arguing against because one has to assume it is true simply to discuss it.
So let us look at some basic facts. Japan has a population of just under 128 million; that makes it one of the world's 'populous' countries. It is also the world's number two political economy in terms of size and always ranks high in per capita measurements and development indicators.
Most of Japan's relatively large population is considered 'native-born' Japanese. This description also could be used to include the single largest ethnic group, 'Korean'. Despite considerable dialect variation in the spoken language (including Okinawan, which could be considered a separate language or group of dialects) , most native-born Japanese learn and use a standard dialect of Japanese for education, literacy, and formal social relations (such as the conduct of business).
Unlike a country with a relatively small population, Japan's national language is not threatened--not even perturbed--by such phenomena as 'global English'. Most Japanese do not need to access directly information, news and innovative ideas from outside their culture through the use of global English. Instead, most Japanese live in a country that uses translation and interpretation on an enormous, commercial scale in order to bring in outside information.
In addition to translation and interpretation, there is another important process that keeps Japan using Japanese almost exclusively. The Japanese language brings in a large amount of vocabulary from foreign languages. The first main source is Chinese. The impact of Chinese on modern Japanese is something like that of Norman French and Latin on modern English.
The second main source providing new vocabulary (and sound sequences too) is English. A good indication of the level to which Japanese 'nativizes' the English it borrows is the role elements acquired from English's lexicon now play in the derivation of new words for the lexicon of Japanese. This is sometimes called 'Japlish'.
Some of these new Japanese Japlish terms have even made it back into English, at least amongst the people who are interested in Japan: OL, salaryman, anime, etc. This sort of phenomenon is hardly unique. First, the Japanese language has already done it quite prominently with morphemes got from long-term contact with Chinese (for example, the Japanese term for 'automobile', 'ji-dou-sha'). Second, look at how new terms in English are derived from discrete elements from Latin and Greek (sometimes the two different types are joined together based on English's own rules for lexical derivation).
Despite the concern of language conservatives that foreign influences are overwhelming Japanese, one could plausibly argue the exact opposite: Because Japanese so readily adopts and adapts vocabulary and morphemes originally from English, the language has become enriched, nuanced and even more capable of expressing ideas and information. Therefore, loan words help to make Japan and Japanese linguistically self-sufficient and lessen the need for most Japanese to engage meaning directly in a foreign language.
Now some proponents and enthusiasts of globalization have said that translation and interpretation can not keep up with the proliferation of new knowledge in order to integrate and assimilate it across cultures and languages. So the concept of 'global English' has been enlisted in support of the larger mission of globalization. A basic formulation is the following: Japan must drastically raise its overall low level of English in its population in order to compete with developed and newly industrialized countries. Some in the government and education have even called for the adoption of English as Japan's official second language.
But most people are going to be practical about knowledge and learning EFL. If they need English to get knowledge, they will try to learn English. That can be stated even more specifically. If they need English to get USABLE knowledge and information for their jobs and personal lives, they will try to learn English.
Another important factor is the non-linguistic aspect of cross-cultural, cross-linguistic contact: that is the social side, or human relations. Since most human relations are created and maintained in Japan using a form of Japanese, there is very little need for inter-personal communication in English.
A good indicator of Japan's relative cultural and linguistic self-sufficiency is its ability to export cultural products, such as J-Pop music, films, television dramas, manga/comics, and anime/animated films.
10 March 2008
Teaching as a Foreign National at Japanese Universities
Teaching as a Foreign National at Japanese Universities:
Shifting Terms of Institutional Status, Employment, Work Conditions and Related Concerns
Charles Jannuzi
Introduction
The Japanese tertiary system consists of some 1250 national, public, and private four- and two-year institutions. At these degree-awarding universities and colleges, the terms 'foreign lecturer' or 'foreign instructor' refer to any non-Japanese personnel teaching below the status of professor. Most typically though the terms refer to full-time foreign language teachers who are 'native speakers' of the language they teach.
The vast majority of these foreign nationals teach English as a foreign language (EFL), but the number teaching other important languages, especially Asian ones, such as Mandarin Chinese, has also risen significantly during the past two decades. The non-Japanese teaching EFL in Japan are often assigned general English classes as part or all of their teaching duties. General English refers to service course English required as part of general education requirements of tertiary education.
Even when foreign nationals teach classes for a major or specialty or as a general education elective, their assigned courses tend to focus on 'English communication', which is often equated with oral English, such as listening and speaking/conversation. However, it is also quite common to find them teaching writing/composition, an expressive skill that requires literacy in the foreign language.
Foreign lecturer status at the national universities
The term 'foreign lecturer' ('gaikokujin kyoushi') in particular had also been the official name for a position within a program that was established by the ministry of education which, in effect, placed foreign nationals into Japan's national universities for the purposes of foreign language teaching and internationalization. While not integrated into the career structure or the collegial organization of the former national university system, the roles of the 'gaikokujin kyoushi' as language teacher, 'cultural informant', and permanent outsider are strikingly parallel to the JET Programme and the Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs) it places in the secondary school system nationwide.
However, while the JET Programme continues to expand and entrench in lower and upper secondary education, the old foreign lecturer system of the national universities has been phased out. This system has roots going back to the Meiji Era, despite a hiatus between the wars, because at one time most of the teaching and research staff at Japan's elite imperial universities were foreigners. The special foreign lecturerships have disappeared subsequent to the top-down government reforms in 2004 that forced the 87 national universities to become 'national university corporations' (NUCs). Surviving foreign lecturers--along with the foreign nationals hired to supplement the foreign lecturer system back in the 1990s--have either been integrated into the new competitive career structures of the post-reform university corporations (that is, tenure track, but not necessarily tenured), or they have joined the growing ranks of adjunct and contractual teachers and researchers. Many of the adjunct faculty and contract workers have joined since the NUCs were created.
Foreign lecturers and EFL
Since the first waves of 'massification' of the university in Japan in the 1970s, most foreign nationals have been hired to teach EFL. It should be remembered that EFL is an area of the curriculum that does not fit with traditional academic subjects, even in liberal arts and humanities. In the case of the many Japanese nationals assigned to teach EFL (because so many required courses have to be run for ALL students), most come from what are supposed to be related fields--English education (TEFL courses of study for future high school teachers), linguistics and literature. Even if a foreign national has a background in fields such as these, they will be expected to teach courses and in styles that COMPLEMENT what the Japanese faculty and adjunct personnel do.
There is, however, a problem with any analysis that says there is a clear expectation of some sort of complementary role. The problem is the lack of specific and explanatory documentation of just what it is most foreign nationals or their more numerous Japanese faculty counterparts actually do in class. The content of presentations at language teaching conferences in Japan (e.g., JALT and JACET) might be only a partial and even misleading indicator because applied linguistics (AL) and second language acquisition (SLA) studies produce a 'meta-discourse' about language teaching and language learning, much of it alienated from the actual goings-on of the classroom. AL and SLA have academic priority for most who study beyond a bachelor's degree or pursue publication in TEFL. So there is not much esteem accorded those who give presentations on the actual conduct of classes and course design.
Still, you might wonder if the actual dichotomy could be the following: Foreign nationals are native speakers who teach EFL communicatively and they use a lot of oral pair work. Meanwhile, Japanese nationals find it difficult to use a lot of English in their EFL classes because the natural means of communication amongst Japanese is the standard national language, especially in a formal setting such as a university class. The other problem with such an expectation is that Japanese faculty give much more emphasis to teaching of upper level and graduate school courses, the sort of which lends itself to scholarship in their their declared specialties (in foreign language pedagogy, linguistics or literature).
General English, EFL content teaching, and English for Specific Purposes
Another trend over the past decade or so has been for Japanese universities and colleges of all types to hire foreign nationals to teach regular subjects in English. Though many of the academics and scientists (not EFL/ELT specialists) hired to do such courses may not be aware, this really is content teaching for EFL. Here the boundaries amongst general EFL, English for Specific Purposes (ESP), English for Academic Purposes (EAP), English for Science and Technology (at the numerous colleges of science), and content teaching all blur. However, it can not be emphasized enough that English really is a FOREIGN language for most Japanese, and not a means of regular communication in either oral or written forms. Therefore, content teaching in a foreign language in which most students have no proficiency is an uncomfortable fit with most academic programs.
Content classes in a foreign language are circumscribed by the need for well-planned language support and a scaled-down syllabus for the content that a course is supposed to cover. The teaching duties and classroom management for such content courses are often limited by the low-level English proficiencies of the students, so the courses have to be taught with stripped-down syllabi and the sort of structured language support that makes them, in effect, beginning level EFL classes, especially in terms of expression skills (speaking, writing, presentation skills, etc.). And given the average TOEIC scores of university populations (in a range of 400-500, at best), even a carefully planned, well-implemented approach to content teaching in EFL could very quickly prove worthless if most of the students in the class simply do not have the English proficiency required to learn a full-blown subject in a foreign language.
Remember this point, if you want to teach in Japan
It can not be emphasized enough that the main reason why there are a large number of jobs (both full-time and part-time) teaching EFL at universities and colleges in Japan is that so much English is a required subject. This is true of intensive programs, where some degree of mastery of English and other foreign languages might be expected (such as teacher training and cross-cultural studies courses). But it is also the case in the pervasive general education and liberal arts studies curricula, where EFL courses are more for familiarization and cross-cultural appreciation than for intensive study and or evaluated progress of language acquisition.
The national university system and the 'gaikokujin kyoushi' system
In addition to Japan's huge system of nearly 1000 private universities and colleges, the country has a system of 287 national and public (prefectural and municipal) four-year and two-year institutions. Of this total, the 87 national universities and 55 national technical colleges are in a period of imposed, top-down reform, reactive turmoil and even a transitional crisis, all of which would appear to be affecting the working conditions and career paths of their foreign personnel.
Full-time foreign nationals comprise only about 2-3% of the total full-time teaching staff at national universities and technical colleges, but the reforms affecting them are system-wide and could well usher in changes that will set precedents for the end of life-time employment for ALL the Japanese nationals teaching, researching and doing everyday administration at these institutions. In order to understand how the treatment of foreign nationals at the national universities might anticipate the changes that await ALL their personnel, a basic review of the system and the reforms it has undergone in the last decade might be useful.
An era of reform over-reach and a confusion of results
Prior to full corporatization, the national university system was reduced and consolidated in size from 99 to the current 87 universities (often through the merger of smaller national medical colleges and hospitals with the local national university). Because such mergers are still so recent, it remains unclear just how well integrated are the administration and operations of these forcibly joined pieces. For example, at one national university that was merged with a nearby medical college, the administration and faculty of the college of medicine have refused to allow lecturers and professors from the other parts of the university (a college of education and a college of engineering) to teach their students in many of the shared general education requirements, such as science, maths, Japanese, and EFL.
In addition to dissension over teaching and courses, combined finances are more complex and potentially more volatile. For example, the hospitals that come attached to the former medical colleges are often so heavily burdened with high-cost business operations that they could bankrupt the new NUCs. Without immediate reform, increased government subsidy, or an expanded ability to issue debt, the red ink at some of these hospitals could overwhelm the finances of the newly fledged combined institutions. This might give them such a bad credit rating that they couldn't issue bonds. So the NUCs which now have colleges and faculties of medicine have to establish 'firewalls' with the hospital operations while they try to move the provision of medical services into profit.
Most importantly, as of 1 April 2004, the national universities were 'denationalized' and incorporated into 'autonomous institutions' (or 'juridical persons'). The former national universities are now referred to in Japanese by a term that means something like 'national university juridical persons' but this translates better as 'National University Corporations'. The NUCs, at least in theory, have wider discretionary powers over personnel management, teaching and research assignments, program and curriculum development, and in the allocation of money for their mandated missions in teaching, conveying public services to their regions, and conducting basic and applied research in science and technology. This includes the already heated issue of being able to set tuition rates, which were, in the first year of independence, allowed to rise by a limit of up to 10%). Because of extensive--though diminishing-- national subsidy, the tuition rates (about US $5000) are currently about 64% of the average of private universities (about US $7800). In the next decade the most likely trend is that public and national universities will lose more and more of their government subsidies. Their tuition will increase to a level closer to the private universities--even as the more numerous private universities will be under pressure to reduce their rates to compete for fewer and fewer students.
Government goals: cut civil servant payrolls, save money, spin off
universities
Denationalization was intended to rationalize, streamline, centralize, and inject executive decision-making into the national universities by empowering presidents to act as the chief officers in charge, with new entities for accountability and evaluation. Traditionally, many aspects of governance in the national and public tertiary systems have amounted to a cumbersome, consensual, collegial process of department meetings, committees, faculty meetings, and votes across the professoriates (or full faculty councils) of the several colleges that comprise a university. This bottom-up, consensual set of processes, then, has had to be co-ordinated with or give way to the priorities and prerogatives of the national government and its ministry of education. Or, in the case of public universities, collegial management had to be reconciled with prefectural and municipal governments, including local assemblies or legislatures. Of course, one important goal which looms over the university reforms is to make the institutions cost MUCH LESS as QUICKLY as possible. If they become more self-financing, the debt-ridden national government can further reduce its subsidy to them.
Personnel policies have been characterized as particularly wasteful and inflexible (that is, costly), and two strategies were immediately floated to make the NUCs more financially 'flexible': predictably enough, they are raising tuition while cutting staff. National universities and technical colleges only educate about 22% of the tertiary system's total 3.1 million students, yet they account for almost 40% of the sector's 176,000 full-time 'educators' (a share inflated, however, by the many faculty being assigned to scientific research as well as day-to-day administrative duties).
Much of the excess for which the universities are blamed, though, is really the national government's fault: during the last ten years, it encouraged the universities to hire more researchers and support personnel in order to staff their expanding research infrastructure, and, when it consolidated its separate, bloated system of national research centers in the 1990s, it shunted unproductive researchers (many with no teaching experience) to the colleges of science and engineering at the national universities.
Also, with corporatization has come the loss of civil servant status of the university faculty and with it one of the elements of job protection that full-time public employees universally receive in Japan. At the national universities, academic tenure was never the same as what might be found at an American university. That is, at least for Japanese nationals hired for full-time teaching and/or research, a permanent position and incremental rises in stature came by virtue of their full-time civil servant status and seniority, so tenure was neither very competitive nor limited to a select fraction but rather extended to most everyone. However, although national university faculty were allowed to form and join unions, collective bargaining was always severely circumscribed by law, since civil servants are not permitted to strike.
Now that the faculty are no longer civil servants, the unanswered question is whether or not their unions and representatives at collective bargaining will reconstitute themselves in forms strong and unified enough for effective industrial action. Certainly many Japanese nationals at the NUCS and PUCs, having lost their civil servant status, are becoming more aware of many of the employment and career issues that foreign nationals have long had to struggle with.
For example, for years Japanese faculty seemed unconcerned about the hiring of 'dispatch' instructors to run general education service courses such as 'General English'. As full-time civil servants, such moves to outsource really didn't affect or threaten them. Once they lost their civil servant status, however, many could see the issue as a sort of 'thin edge of the wedge'. If departments and faculties give up their obligation to manage the evaluation of applicants and hiring of teachers in English, then why not outsource other areas as well? Little wonder then that the faculties and now the Ministry of Education have found agreement on this issue, and there has been a move to stop dispatch hiring and outsourcing. Still, since this is 'guidance' ('daigaku kijun') suggesting what is and what is not acceptable, the only way it could change the picture at the more numerous private universities would be strong enforcement. That would require the Ministry of Education to take radical steps, such as threatening to de-certify the private institutions which refuse to follow its guidance against dispatch teachers and outsourcing.
Varied results of reforms spell trouble for foreign nationals
It is still too early to tell just how centralized and top-down the former national universities' administrations have actually become. However, inconsistencies in the restructuring, re-hiring and/or termination of foreign personnel might indicate that the reform liberalization and corporatization have actually created a power vacuum. For example, the national government and its education ministry had already withdrawn a lot of support for its nationwide 'gaikokujin kyoshi' system in the 1990s, which resulted in many older foreign nationals losing their posts because they were deemed to be too expensive to be paid full-time salaries until their retirement. So as soon as the national universities had been re-established as corporations, the ministry signaled that the 'autonomous' universities should phase out all their 'gaikokujin kyoshi' positions in two years and adopt their own policies and systems in keeping with their own teaching and research requirements and finances. At the same time, down-sizing and restructuring the civil service was achieved through these reforms to the national university system, even before the more famous privatization of the postal system. The NUCs' management of personnel shifted from being a function of the national government's civil servant system (the cabinet-level National Personnel Authority) to the much weaker oversight of the Bureau of Labor Standards (under the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare).
However, rather than there being an adoption of one unified policy across a centrally administered university, what is often evident is from the period of 2004-7 is localization and divergence taken to confusing extremes: foreign lectureship posts were phased out or re-assigned in different ways even within single departments and programs! Multiply these varying results across several departments and then again by several faculties, and it becomes obvious that there really is little agreement or top-down authority at many former national universities regarding how to phase out, renew and restructure the foreign lectureship system. Ironically, one reason for the flurry of centrifugal results might be the worry that a systematic reorganization of foreign personnel could possibly set a policy precedent that would then be applied vigorously to the Japanese nationals.
Because of the ongoing proliferation of arrangements for ending the current 'gaikokujin kyoshi' system, it is as yet very difficult to highlight one trend from all the former national universities that would enable a prediction about what is going to happen in the future. Some foreign personnel have been offered lectureships and assistant and associate professorships in such specialties as 'foreign language teaching', with reduced salaries but long-term career structure (whatever that might now mean given the loss of civil servant status). Others are being forced out as their posts become contractual and not renewable, although some have been offered the chance to compete for a new post if one is created. Or the 'gaikokujin kyoushi' type job could be filled by internationals taking up instructorships, lecturerships and assistant professorships, but, in effect, kept to three-year limits with unwritten, 'implicit' contracts, possibly renewed once (for a maximum of six years). Another phenomenon appears to be fewer full-time foreigners teaching such subjects as EFL and cultural studies, with their teaching duties more and more taken over by cheaper part-time personnel or 'dispatch' workers from commercial English conversation schools.
A new system for ALL emerging?
A controversial consolidation and downsizing at a public university might hold the key to detecting a pattern in all this apparent divergence of outcomes. There are 86 public universities and 47 two-year colleges in Japan run and funded by prefectural and municipal governments. These lesser known public universities and colleges have often been established to extend certain types of subsidized higher education to relatively remote regions where private institutions are too expensive or do not exist. They also may be situated near national universities but provide educations that complement the science, engineering and teacher training programmes of national universities with ones in the social sciences, business, and in some vocations, such as agriculture, fisheries, and nursing and medical technician programs.
Because of the political popularity of 'reform' during times of economic troubles and the reality of even worsening finances at many local governments, public tertiary institutions have been forced into corporatization, with the national universities as a model. Starting in 1 April 2005 many began the tedious and time-consuming process of being re-established along the lines of the NUCs, although separation is from a lower, smaller level of government. For example, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government has proposed the establishment of a new public university through the consolidation of four existing institutions into one; the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Technology, Tokyo Metropolitan University of Health Sciences, and Tokyo Metropolitan College would all be merged with the prestigious Tokyo Metropolitan University.
Nationwide the main problem that emerged with the corporatization of the public universities was that there was no one central authority from which power could be 'devolved'. The national government, through its ministry of education, certainly has more authority over public universities than it does the much more extensive private system because the public universities are dependent on government funding. But much of the funding is directed through a further layer of local government rather than there being any direct relationship between the institutions and a national ministry. Because of the relatively weak and diffuse authority of local governments in Japan, privatization of the public universities has not gone as quickly or smoothly as reform advocates would have liked.
Many of the faculty at all the institutions affected by the consolidation and reform of institutions under the control of Tokyo Metropolitan Government have objected vociferously and effectively to the proposed imposition of performance-based pay and five-year contracts. Those who objected refused to sign agreements for course assignments, which the administration needs in order to apply to the national government for approval in establishing the new public university. The professors and lecturers demanded, among other things, that faculty councils retain control of teaching appointments and that full-time teachers not be forced to submit to the five-year contracts. At the heart of the conflict between the administration and the faculty was the desire of the former to restructure faculties in order to offer new courses of study at both undergraduate and graduate levels focused on 'urban' themes which might appeal to a demographically declining pool of applicants (i.e., urban liberal arts, urban environment sciences, system design, and health services). Many of the affected faculty objected to the proposed heavier load of introductory level classes with larger numbers of students to teach and evaluate.
Foreign lecturers become the test case at one former national university
Although the national universities were forced to lead the way in privatization and corporatization, the plan to combine public institutions in Tokyo is considered a model case which could be applied as 'best practice' for management in the reorganization and streamlining of both public and former national universities nationwide. The proposals for five-year contracts and merit pay for teachers has drawn special attention.
The contract-and-competitive-tenure system that the Tokyo Metropolitan government is now attempting to impose on the teaching faculties of its universities and colleges has its antecedents. The plan comes from an idea put forward at national research centers and at the former national universities in order to 'invigorate' government-funded research. It most likely originally comes from private industry and private universities (who were the first to use the status for educators). This is the so-called 'tokunin' system whereby researchers sign contracts (usually five years for researchers, but often three years for teachers). Renewal--leading to a possible career track position--depends upon review processes and documentation of 'successful results', such as the development of patents and commercial applications stemming from the initial period of research. However, it is questionable whether such a system is the most appropriate for the professional development of university teachers, nor is it clear how their performance under such a 'tokunin' system can be effectively and objectively evaluated.
The administrations of the still-new NUCs, however, have appeared to be reluctant to propose such a system for their teaching personnel. That reluctance may have changed recently, and the largely powerless foreign lecturers became the test case. As of April 2005, University of Kobe, a former national university now a NUC, adopted a 'tokunin kyoin' system for its former 'gaikokujin kyoshi', limiting them to a three-year contract and no automatic renewal (though they will be allowed to try for the position should it be re-opened to new candidates).
Some concluding remarks about more numerous private universities
The employment conditions of foreign nationals within Japan's more extensive private system of universities and two-year colleges (together totaling some 996 institutions) vary a lot. This makes concise generalizations nearly impossible, except to say that there is a broad range of policies and practices. Let us take a lot at what such a vague statement might actually mean if you are going to teach at a private university or college in Japan.
At one extreme, the bad one, discrimination is obviously rampant: unlike their Japanese counterparts, foreign personnel might (1) face arbitrary dismissal, (2) have short-term contracts with strict renewal limits imposed, (3) receive lower salaries, no bonuses and more severe pay cuts, (4) be barred from meetings where decisions are made, and (5) be denied health insurance and retirement benefits (since employers avoid paying their share of the national insurance).
Any charge of chauvinist prejudice, however, has to be qualified because the administrations of some private universities and colleges are so dictatorial and their unions so weak that even Japanese nationals can face arbitrarily imposed employment conditions and unfair labor practices, such as the abuse of contracts or unjustified job termination. Moreover, the very numerous part-time personnel (who often do more teaching than full-time faculty), regardless of nationality, have very little control over their situations and fewer employment rights or benefits.
At the other end of the spectrum for management-employee relations at private institutions, internationals teaching EFL (or content courses in EFL) might receive equal treatment, on par with Japanese nationals. This entails things like tenure-track leading to permanent positions, full benefits such as health insurance, retirement and bonuses, and perhaps most importantly, the extension of collegiality in decision-making.
At the internationalized end of the range of private universities, such enviable conditions seem to be most noticeable in their rarity, often limited to universities or colleges with full-blown foreign language and cultural studies program and the financial resources and business plans to support them. Now there is a need for input from qualified and committed foreign nationals in an era when the numbers of open slots for matriculation exceed applicants and each new enrollment is hotly contested by a rival institution or program. A producer-consumer relationship, however, can be a problematic one for normal academic achievement. It might prove an even more troubled one for low-ranked teachers with no job protection assigned large general education classes of beginning-level students who only study a foreign language like English because it is required.
Shifting Terms of Institutional Status, Employment, Work Conditions and Related Concerns
Charles Jannuzi
Introduction
The Japanese tertiary system consists of some 1250 national, public, and private four- and two-year institutions. At these degree-awarding universities and colleges, the terms 'foreign lecturer' or 'foreign instructor' refer to any non-Japanese personnel teaching below the status of professor. Most typically though the terms refer to full-time foreign language teachers who are 'native speakers' of the language they teach.
The vast majority of these foreign nationals teach English as a foreign language (EFL), but the number teaching other important languages, especially Asian ones, such as Mandarin Chinese, has also risen significantly during the past two decades. The non-Japanese teaching EFL in Japan are often assigned general English classes as part or all of their teaching duties. General English refers to service course English required as part of general education requirements of tertiary education.
Even when foreign nationals teach classes for a major or specialty or as a general education elective, their assigned courses tend to focus on 'English communication', which is often equated with oral English, such as listening and speaking/conversation. However, it is also quite common to find them teaching writing/composition, an expressive skill that requires literacy in the foreign language.
Foreign lecturer status at the national universities
The term 'foreign lecturer' ('gaikokujin kyoushi') in particular had also been the official name for a position within a program that was established by the ministry of education which, in effect, placed foreign nationals into Japan's national universities for the purposes of foreign language teaching and internationalization. While not integrated into the career structure or the collegial organization of the former national university system, the roles of the 'gaikokujin kyoushi' as language teacher, 'cultural informant', and permanent outsider are strikingly parallel to the JET Programme and the Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs) it places in the secondary school system nationwide.
However, while the JET Programme continues to expand and entrench in lower and upper secondary education, the old foreign lecturer system of the national universities has been phased out. This system has roots going back to the Meiji Era, despite a hiatus between the wars, because at one time most of the teaching and research staff at Japan's elite imperial universities were foreigners. The special foreign lecturerships have disappeared subsequent to the top-down government reforms in 2004 that forced the 87 national universities to become 'national university corporations' (NUCs). Surviving foreign lecturers--along with the foreign nationals hired to supplement the foreign lecturer system back in the 1990s--have either been integrated into the new competitive career structures of the post-reform university corporations (that is, tenure track, but not necessarily tenured), or they have joined the growing ranks of adjunct and contractual teachers and researchers. Many of the adjunct faculty and contract workers have joined since the NUCs were created.
Foreign lecturers and EFL
Since the first waves of 'massification' of the university in Japan in the 1970s, most foreign nationals have been hired to teach EFL. It should be remembered that EFL is an area of the curriculum that does not fit with traditional academic subjects, even in liberal arts and humanities. In the case of the many Japanese nationals assigned to teach EFL (because so many required courses have to be run for ALL students), most come from what are supposed to be related fields--English education (TEFL courses of study for future high school teachers), linguistics and literature. Even if a foreign national has a background in fields such as these, they will be expected to teach courses and in styles that COMPLEMENT what the Japanese faculty and adjunct personnel do.
There is, however, a problem with any analysis that says there is a clear expectation of some sort of complementary role. The problem is the lack of specific and explanatory documentation of just what it is most foreign nationals or their more numerous Japanese faculty counterparts actually do in class. The content of presentations at language teaching conferences in Japan (e.g., JALT and JACET) might be only a partial and even misleading indicator because applied linguistics (AL) and second language acquisition (SLA) studies produce a 'meta-discourse' about language teaching and language learning, much of it alienated from the actual goings-on of the classroom. AL and SLA have academic priority for most who study beyond a bachelor's degree or pursue publication in TEFL. So there is not much esteem accorded those who give presentations on the actual conduct of classes and course design.
Still, you might wonder if the actual dichotomy could be the following: Foreign nationals are native speakers who teach EFL communicatively and they use a lot of oral pair work. Meanwhile, Japanese nationals find it difficult to use a lot of English in their EFL classes because the natural means of communication amongst Japanese is the standard national language, especially in a formal setting such as a university class. The other problem with such an expectation is that Japanese faculty give much more emphasis to teaching of upper level and graduate school courses, the sort of which lends itself to scholarship in their their declared specialties (in foreign language pedagogy, linguistics or literature).
General English, EFL content teaching, and English for Specific Purposes
Another trend over the past decade or so has been for Japanese universities and colleges of all types to hire foreign nationals to teach regular subjects in English. Though many of the academics and scientists (not EFL/ELT specialists) hired to do such courses may not be aware, this really is content teaching for EFL. Here the boundaries amongst general EFL, English for Specific Purposes (ESP), English for Academic Purposes (EAP), English for Science and Technology (at the numerous colleges of science), and content teaching all blur. However, it can not be emphasized enough that English really is a FOREIGN language for most Japanese, and not a means of regular communication in either oral or written forms. Therefore, content teaching in a foreign language in which most students have no proficiency is an uncomfortable fit with most academic programs.
Content classes in a foreign language are circumscribed by the need for well-planned language support and a scaled-down syllabus for the content that a course is supposed to cover. The teaching duties and classroom management for such content courses are often limited by the low-level English proficiencies of the students, so the courses have to be taught with stripped-down syllabi and the sort of structured language support that makes them, in effect, beginning level EFL classes, especially in terms of expression skills (speaking, writing, presentation skills, etc.). And given the average TOEIC scores of university populations (in a range of 400-500, at best), even a carefully planned, well-implemented approach to content teaching in EFL could very quickly prove worthless if most of the students in the class simply do not have the English proficiency required to learn a full-blown subject in a foreign language.
Remember this point, if you want to teach in Japan
It can not be emphasized enough that the main reason why there are a large number of jobs (both full-time and part-time) teaching EFL at universities and colleges in Japan is that so much English is a required subject. This is true of intensive programs, where some degree of mastery of English and other foreign languages might be expected (such as teacher training and cross-cultural studies courses). But it is also the case in the pervasive general education and liberal arts studies curricula, where EFL courses are more for familiarization and cross-cultural appreciation than for intensive study and or evaluated progress of language acquisition.
The national university system and the 'gaikokujin kyoushi' system
In addition to Japan's huge system of nearly 1000 private universities and colleges, the country has a system of 287 national and public (prefectural and municipal) four-year and two-year institutions. Of this total, the 87 national universities and 55 national technical colleges are in a period of imposed, top-down reform, reactive turmoil and even a transitional crisis, all of which would appear to be affecting the working conditions and career paths of their foreign personnel.
Full-time foreign nationals comprise only about 2-3% of the total full-time teaching staff at national universities and technical colleges, but the reforms affecting them are system-wide and could well usher in changes that will set precedents for the end of life-time employment for ALL the Japanese nationals teaching, researching and doing everyday administration at these institutions. In order to understand how the treatment of foreign nationals at the national universities might anticipate the changes that await ALL their personnel, a basic review of the system and the reforms it has undergone in the last decade might be useful.
An era of reform over-reach and a confusion of results
Prior to full corporatization, the national university system was reduced and consolidated in size from 99 to the current 87 universities (often through the merger of smaller national medical colleges and hospitals with the local national university). Because such mergers are still so recent, it remains unclear just how well integrated are the administration and operations of these forcibly joined pieces. For example, at one national university that was merged with a nearby medical college, the administration and faculty of the college of medicine have refused to allow lecturers and professors from the other parts of the university (a college of education and a college of engineering) to teach their students in many of the shared general education requirements, such as science, maths, Japanese, and EFL.
In addition to dissension over teaching and courses, combined finances are more complex and potentially more volatile. For example, the hospitals that come attached to the former medical colleges are often so heavily burdened with high-cost business operations that they could bankrupt the new NUCs. Without immediate reform, increased government subsidy, or an expanded ability to issue debt, the red ink at some of these hospitals could overwhelm the finances of the newly fledged combined institutions. This might give them such a bad credit rating that they couldn't issue bonds. So the NUCs which now have colleges and faculties of medicine have to establish 'firewalls' with the hospital operations while they try to move the provision of medical services into profit.
Most importantly, as of 1 April 2004, the national universities were 'denationalized' and incorporated into 'autonomous institutions' (or 'juridical persons'). The former national universities are now referred to in Japanese by a term that means something like 'national university juridical persons' but this translates better as 'National University Corporations'. The NUCs, at least in theory, have wider discretionary powers over personnel management, teaching and research assignments, program and curriculum development, and in the allocation of money for their mandated missions in teaching, conveying public services to their regions, and conducting basic and applied research in science and technology. This includes the already heated issue of being able to set tuition rates, which were, in the first year of independence, allowed to rise by a limit of up to 10%). Because of extensive--though diminishing-- national subsidy, the tuition rates (about US $5000) are currently about 64% of the average of private universities (about US $7800). In the next decade the most likely trend is that public and national universities will lose more and more of their government subsidies. Their tuition will increase to a level closer to the private universities--even as the more numerous private universities will be under pressure to reduce their rates to compete for fewer and fewer students.
Government goals: cut civil servant payrolls, save money, spin off
universities
Denationalization was intended to rationalize, streamline, centralize, and inject executive decision-making into the national universities by empowering presidents to act as the chief officers in charge, with new entities for accountability and evaluation. Traditionally, many aspects of governance in the national and public tertiary systems have amounted to a cumbersome, consensual, collegial process of department meetings, committees, faculty meetings, and votes across the professoriates (or full faculty councils) of the several colleges that comprise a university. This bottom-up, consensual set of processes, then, has had to be co-ordinated with or give way to the priorities and prerogatives of the national government and its ministry of education. Or, in the case of public universities, collegial management had to be reconciled with prefectural and municipal governments, including local assemblies or legislatures. Of course, one important goal which looms over the university reforms is to make the institutions cost MUCH LESS as QUICKLY as possible. If they become more self-financing, the debt-ridden national government can further reduce its subsidy to them.
Personnel policies have been characterized as particularly wasteful and inflexible (that is, costly), and two strategies were immediately floated to make the NUCs more financially 'flexible': predictably enough, they are raising tuition while cutting staff. National universities and technical colleges only educate about 22% of the tertiary system's total 3.1 million students, yet they account for almost 40% of the sector's 176,000 full-time 'educators' (a share inflated, however, by the many faculty being assigned to scientific research as well as day-to-day administrative duties).
Much of the excess for which the universities are blamed, though, is really the national government's fault: during the last ten years, it encouraged the universities to hire more researchers and support personnel in order to staff their expanding research infrastructure, and, when it consolidated its separate, bloated system of national research centers in the 1990s, it shunted unproductive researchers (many with no teaching experience) to the colleges of science and engineering at the national universities.
Also, with corporatization has come the loss of civil servant status of the university faculty and with it one of the elements of job protection that full-time public employees universally receive in Japan. At the national universities, academic tenure was never the same as what might be found at an American university. That is, at least for Japanese nationals hired for full-time teaching and/or research, a permanent position and incremental rises in stature came by virtue of their full-time civil servant status and seniority, so tenure was neither very competitive nor limited to a select fraction but rather extended to most everyone. However, although national university faculty were allowed to form and join unions, collective bargaining was always severely circumscribed by law, since civil servants are not permitted to strike.
Now that the faculty are no longer civil servants, the unanswered question is whether or not their unions and representatives at collective bargaining will reconstitute themselves in forms strong and unified enough for effective industrial action. Certainly many Japanese nationals at the NUCS and PUCs, having lost their civil servant status, are becoming more aware of many of the employment and career issues that foreign nationals have long had to struggle with.
For example, for years Japanese faculty seemed unconcerned about the hiring of 'dispatch' instructors to run general education service courses such as 'General English'. As full-time civil servants, such moves to outsource really didn't affect or threaten them. Once they lost their civil servant status, however, many could see the issue as a sort of 'thin edge of the wedge'. If departments and faculties give up their obligation to manage the evaluation of applicants and hiring of teachers in English, then why not outsource other areas as well? Little wonder then that the faculties and now the Ministry of Education have found agreement on this issue, and there has been a move to stop dispatch hiring and outsourcing. Still, since this is 'guidance' ('daigaku kijun') suggesting what is and what is not acceptable, the only way it could change the picture at the more numerous private universities would be strong enforcement. That would require the Ministry of Education to take radical steps, such as threatening to de-certify the private institutions which refuse to follow its guidance against dispatch teachers and outsourcing.
Varied results of reforms spell trouble for foreign nationals
It is still too early to tell just how centralized and top-down the former national universities' administrations have actually become. However, inconsistencies in the restructuring, re-hiring and/or termination of foreign personnel might indicate that the reform liberalization and corporatization have actually created a power vacuum. For example, the national government and its education ministry had already withdrawn a lot of support for its nationwide 'gaikokujin kyoshi' system in the 1990s, which resulted in many older foreign nationals losing their posts because they were deemed to be too expensive to be paid full-time salaries until their retirement. So as soon as the national universities had been re-established as corporations, the ministry signaled that the 'autonomous' universities should phase out all their 'gaikokujin kyoshi' positions in two years and adopt their own policies and systems in keeping with their own teaching and research requirements and finances. At the same time, down-sizing and restructuring the civil service was achieved through these reforms to the national university system, even before the more famous privatization of the postal system. The NUCs' management of personnel shifted from being a function of the national government's civil servant system (the cabinet-level National Personnel Authority) to the much weaker oversight of the Bureau of Labor Standards (under the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare).
However, rather than there being an adoption of one unified policy across a centrally administered university, what is often evident is from the period of 2004-7 is localization and divergence taken to confusing extremes: foreign lectureship posts were phased out or re-assigned in different ways even within single departments and programs! Multiply these varying results across several departments and then again by several faculties, and it becomes obvious that there really is little agreement or top-down authority at many former national universities regarding how to phase out, renew and restructure the foreign lectureship system. Ironically, one reason for the flurry of centrifugal results might be the worry that a systematic reorganization of foreign personnel could possibly set a policy precedent that would then be applied vigorously to the Japanese nationals.
Because of the ongoing proliferation of arrangements for ending the current 'gaikokujin kyoshi' system, it is as yet very difficult to highlight one trend from all the former national universities that would enable a prediction about what is going to happen in the future. Some foreign personnel have been offered lectureships and assistant and associate professorships in such specialties as 'foreign language teaching', with reduced salaries but long-term career structure (whatever that might now mean given the loss of civil servant status). Others are being forced out as their posts become contractual and not renewable, although some have been offered the chance to compete for a new post if one is created. Or the 'gaikokujin kyoushi' type job could be filled by internationals taking up instructorships, lecturerships and assistant professorships, but, in effect, kept to three-year limits with unwritten, 'implicit' contracts, possibly renewed once (for a maximum of six years). Another phenomenon appears to be fewer full-time foreigners teaching such subjects as EFL and cultural studies, with their teaching duties more and more taken over by cheaper part-time personnel or 'dispatch' workers from commercial English conversation schools.
A new system for ALL emerging?
A controversial consolidation and downsizing at a public university might hold the key to detecting a pattern in all this apparent divergence of outcomes. There are 86 public universities and 47 two-year colleges in Japan run and funded by prefectural and municipal governments. These lesser known public universities and colleges have often been established to extend certain types of subsidized higher education to relatively remote regions where private institutions are too expensive or do not exist. They also may be situated near national universities but provide educations that complement the science, engineering and teacher training programmes of national universities with ones in the social sciences, business, and in some vocations, such as agriculture, fisheries, and nursing and medical technician programs.
Because of the political popularity of 'reform' during times of economic troubles and the reality of even worsening finances at many local governments, public tertiary institutions have been forced into corporatization, with the national universities as a model. Starting in 1 April 2005 many began the tedious and time-consuming process of being re-established along the lines of the NUCs, although separation is from a lower, smaller level of government. For example, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government has proposed the establishment of a new public university through the consolidation of four existing institutions into one; the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Technology, Tokyo Metropolitan University of Health Sciences, and Tokyo Metropolitan College would all be merged with the prestigious Tokyo Metropolitan University.
Nationwide the main problem that emerged with the corporatization of the public universities was that there was no one central authority from which power could be 'devolved'. The national government, through its ministry of education, certainly has more authority over public universities than it does the much more extensive private system because the public universities are dependent on government funding. But much of the funding is directed through a further layer of local government rather than there being any direct relationship between the institutions and a national ministry. Because of the relatively weak and diffuse authority of local governments in Japan, privatization of the public universities has not gone as quickly or smoothly as reform advocates would have liked.
Many of the faculty at all the institutions affected by the consolidation and reform of institutions under the control of Tokyo Metropolitan Government have objected vociferously and effectively to the proposed imposition of performance-based pay and five-year contracts. Those who objected refused to sign agreements for course assignments, which the administration needs in order to apply to the national government for approval in establishing the new public university. The professors and lecturers demanded, among other things, that faculty councils retain control of teaching appointments and that full-time teachers not be forced to submit to the five-year contracts. At the heart of the conflict between the administration and the faculty was the desire of the former to restructure faculties in order to offer new courses of study at both undergraduate and graduate levels focused on 'urban' themes which might appeal to a demographically declining pool of applicants (i.e., urban liberal arts, urban environment sciences, system design, and health services). Many of the affected faculty objected to the proposed heavier load of introductory level classes with larger numbers of students to teach and evaluate.
Foreign lecturers become the test case at one former national university
Although the national universities were forced to lead the way in privatization and corporatization, the plan to combine public institutions in Tokyo is considered a model case which could be applied as 'best practice' for management in the reorganization and streamlining of both public and former national universities nationwide. The proposals for five-year contracts and merit pay for teachers has drawn special attention.
The contract-and-competitive-tenure system that the Tokyo Metropolitan government is now attempting to impose on the teaching faculties of its universities and colleges has its antecedents. The plan comes from an idea put forward at national research centers and at the former national universities in order to 'invigorate' government-funded research. It most likely originally comes from private industry and private universities (who were the first to use the status for educators). This is the so-called 'tokunin' system whereby researchers sign contracts (usually five years for researchers, but often three years for teachers). Renewal--leading to a possible career track position--depends upon review processes and documentation of 'successful results', such as the development of patents and commercial applications stemming from the initial period of research. However, it is questionable whether such a system is the most appropriate for the professional development of university teachers, nor is it clear how their performance under such a 'tokunin' system can be effectively and objectively evaluated.
The administrations of the still-new NUCs, however, have appeared to be reluctant to propose such a system for their teaching personnel. That reluctance may have changed recently, and the largely powerless foreign lecturers became the test case. As of April 2005, University of Kobe, a former national university now a NUC, adopted a 'tokunin kyoin' system for its former 'gaikokujin kyoshi', limiting them to a three-year contract and no automatic renewal (though they will be allowed to try for the position should it be re-opened to new candidates).
Some concluding remarks about more numerous private universities
The employment conditions of foreign nationals within Japan's more extensive private system of universities and two-year colleges (together totaling some 996 institutions) vary a lot. This makes concise generalizations nearly impossible, except to say that there is a broad range of policies and practices. Let us take a lot at what such a vague statement might actually mean if you are going to teach at a private university or college in Japan.
At one extreme, the bad one, discrimination is obviously rampant: unlike their Japanese counterparts, foreign personnel might (1) face arbitrary dismissal, (2) have short-term contracts with strict renewal limits imposed, (3) receive lower salaries, no bonuses and more severe pay cuts, (4) be barred from meetings where decisions are made, and (5) be denied health insurance and retirement benefits (since employers avoid paying their share of the national insurance).
Any charge of chauvinist prejudice, however, has to be qualified because the administrations of some private universities and colleges are so dictatorial and their unions so weak that even Japanese nationals can face arbitrarily imposed employment conditions and unfair labor practices, such as the abuse of contracts or unjustified job termination. Moreover, the very numerous part-time personnel (who often do more teaching than full-time faculty), regardless of nationality, have very little control over their situations and fewer employment rights or benefits.
At the other end of the spectrum for management-employee relations at private institutions, internationals teaching EFL (or content courses in EFL) might receive equal treatment, on par with Japanese nationals. This entails things like tenure-track leading to permanent positions, full benefits such as health insurance, retirement and bonuses, and perhaps most importantly, the extension of collegiality in decision-making.
At the internationalized end of the range of private universities, such enviable conditions seem to be most noticeable in their rarity, often limited to universities or colleges with full-blown foreign language and cultural studies program and the financial resources and business plans to support them. Now there is a need for input from qualified and committed foreign nationals in an era when the numbers of open slots for matriculation exceed applicants and each new enrollment is hotly contested by a rival institution or program. A producer-consumer relationship, however, can be a problematic one for normal academic achievement. It might prove an even more troubled one for low-ranked teachers with no job protection assigned large general education classes of beginning-level students who only study a foreign language like English because it is required.
08 March 2008
Getting Information on Japan's Higher Education IN ENGLISH
Getting Information on Japan's Higher Education IN ENGLISH
by Charles Jannuzi
If you are limited to researching Japan's higher education (or any other topic about Japan) in English, you will be able to access only a fraction of the information that is available in Japanese on the Japanese WWW. Information in English tends to be out-of-date and incomplete, which leads to the duplication and proliferation of errors in the western/global media.
Still, I have concentrated on English-language sources in my links from this blog out to the wider web, and I have been consistently surprised by the amount of news, information and analysis that is available if you know where and how to look.
Perhaps the most useful are the topical, fresh translations from the Japanese press that make it into the handful of Japan's English-language newspapers and news services. More recently, the web-based news aggregation sites (such as Japan Probe, Japan Today, NewsOnJapan, and Japan Herald) help to make that information even more accessible and discoverable through search of the WWW or news (such as YahooNews).
However, if you wish to pursue more systematic and in-depth research (such as for academic purposes or your own journalism or blog), then the single best source of information on education in Japan is the English-language sections of the website of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). One problems is that its website is sprawling and confusing to navigate at first. A second weakness is the English-language content is not near as deep or up-to-date as the body of it in Japanese.
The main reason why MEXT's site is a treasure trove of information that goes beyond a lot of other ministries or government departments, both inside and outside Japan, is MEXT's scale. It really is a 'super-ministry', a combination of cabinet-level management of education with huge science budgets and policies.
Here is a list of some of the best English-language pages to search and read for topics related to higher education / tertiary education / further education in Japan.
1. Education English-language front page of MEXT
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/a01.htm
2. Front English-language page of MEXT for Higher Education.
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/koutou/index.htm
3. Stats on Universities and Junior Colleges
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/statist/index11.htm
4. Stats on Colleges of Technology
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/statist/index10.htm
5. Stats on Specialized Training Colleges
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/statist/index12.htm
6. Stats on Miscellaneous Schools
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/statist/index13.htm
7. Stats on Science and Technology
(which MEXT oversees in the national government)
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/kagaku/index.htm
8. Japan's Education at a Glance 2006
(Guide on entire education system,
previous editions can be download as compiled pdfs)
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/statist/07070310.htm
9. Overview of the structure of the MEXT 'super-ministry'
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/org/index.htm
10. Monthly index of MEXT press releases
(the limited English-language ones, not too frequent unfortunately)
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/news/index.htm
11. Database of Statistics on Japan's Higher Education
at the website of the Research Institute for Higher Education,
Hiroshima University (a high-ranked national university).
http://en.rihe.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/data_category.php
by Charles Jannuzi
If you are limited to researching Japan's higher education (or any other topic about Japan) in English, you will be able to access only a fraction of the information that is available in Japanese on the Japanese WWW. Information in English tends to be out-of-date and incomplete, which leads to the duplication and proliferation of errors in the western/global media.
Still, I have concentrated on English-language sources in my links from this blog out to the wider web, and I have been consistently surprised by the amount of news, information and analysis that is available if you know where and how to look.
Perhaps the most useful are the topical, fresh translations from the Japanese press that make it into the handful of Japan's English-language newspapers and news services. More recently, the web-based news aggregation sites (such as Japan Probe, Japan Today, NewsOnJapan, and Japan Herald) help to make that information even more accessible and discoverable through search of the WWW or news (such as YahooNews).
However, if you wish to pursue more systematic and in-depth research (such as for academic purposes or your own journalism or blog), then the single best source of information on education in Japan is the English-language sections of the website of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). One problems is that its website is sprawling and confusing to navigate at first. A second weakness is the English-language content is not near as deep or up-to-date as the body of it in Japanese.
The main reason why MEXT's site is a treasure trove of information that goes beyond a lot of other ministries or government departments, both inside and outside Japan, is MEXT's scale. It really is a 'super-ministry', a combination of cabinet-level management of education with huge science budgets and policies.
Here is a list of some of the best English-language pages to search and read for topics related to higher education / tertiary education / further education in Japan.
1. Education English-language front page of MEXT
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/a01.htm
2. Front English-language page of MEXT for Higher Education.
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/koutou/index.htm
3. Stats on Universities and Junior Colleges
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/statist/index11.htm
4. Stats on Colleges of Technology
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/statist/index10.htm
5. Stats on Specialized Training Colleges
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/statist/index12.htm
6. Stats on Miscellaneous Schools
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/statist/index13.htm
7. Stats on Science and Technology
(which MEXT oversees in the national government)
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/kagaku/index.htm
8. Japan's Education at a Glance 2006
(Guide on entire education system,
previous editions can be download as compiled pdfs)
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/statist/07070310.htm
9. Overview of the structure of the MEXT 'super-ministry'
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/org/index.htm
10. Monthly index of MEXT press releases
(the limited English-language ones, not too frequent unfortunately)
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/news/index.htm
11. Database of Statistics on Japan's Higher Education
at the website of the Research Institute for Higher Education,
Hiroshima University (a high-ranked national university).
http://en.rihe.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/data_category.php
02 March 2008
From university research centers to international research hubs?
From university research centers to international research hubs?
by Charles Jannuzi
In the post-bubble Japan of the 1990s, the private sector's ability to finance scientific research and development went into stagnation and then decline. So from 1995 on the government has pursued an expanded role in the management and funding of scientific R&D at annual levels that equal or exceed 1% of GDP. In great part this has been through the dominant role of its super-ministry, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and its five-year 'Science and Technology Basic Plans'.
In order to increase public subsidy of scientific research-- while at the same time forcing research universities and research institutes to compete for funds--MEXT established a 'Centers of Excellence' program. However, this turned out to be a fairly diffuse program, paying for the construction of dozens of new research facilities all over the country at the former national universities and a handful of elite private ones. While this did a lot to help refurbish the appearance of the visibly deteriorated national universities, its actual boost to important scientific results is questionable.
It seems that the ministry was betting on being able 'to seed' indiscriminately a rather large number of projects in many different fields. Critics pointed out that in the process there had been a lack from the top down of any selectivity or a sense of priorities. The MEXT's even-handed beneficence (at least towards its former national universities and some top private institutions, such as Keio U. and Waseda U.) led to the scatter-shot construction of dozens of relatively small-scale facilities hosted by second-tier institutions.
The subsequent dilution of focus and, more importantly, the total amounts of funding did not impress the greater world community of Big Science. Most of the money went into the physical construction of the facilities as opposed actually to funding research. Moreover, it has been difficult for the colleges of science and technology at many universities to staff the new research centers appropriately because they lack long track records of achievement in research. This lack of a history combined with contractual employment seem to be too risky and potentially unstable for many junior careerists.
Under the prerogatives of its third Science and Technology Basic Plan (begun 2006), the MEXT sought to address the issues of a lack of priorities and inadequacy of scale. Most significantly it announced a long-term, deep-pocketed but highly selective program it calls the 'World Premier International Research Center Initiative' (WPIRCI). The WPIRCI was to be a contest that rewarded only FIVE institutions in fiscal year 2007. But the winners will get at least ten years of support (with five year renewals based on documented results). And the funding totals could approach a figure close to USD $60 million. Most importantly, since some support has to come from the host institutions, much of the new funding may actually go towards high-priority research and not be completely exhausted on the construction of new facilities.
The results of the competition were announced and explained in late 2007, with some updates appearing last month (Feb. 2008) . For those who follow scientific research at the (former) national universities and (the former) national research institutes in Japan, the results were quite predictable. Japan's top-ranked research universities, whose establishment goes back to the old imperial system, are the winners. They are Tokyo University, Kyoto University, Tohoku University and Osaka University. The former national research institute, The National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), will also host a new center. NIMS's work in nano-technology and nano-architechtonics is done in partnership with still yet another former national university, University of Tsukuba (a new science university that does not have imperial system roots).
Although the new centers will be hosted by long-established research institutions, they are supposed to break from tradition in at least two ways. First, research and operations will have English as their official language (even if this proves to be impossible in Japan). And they must hire at least 20% foreign nationals. Most likely many of these will be chosen from the foreign nationals already at the institutions doing doctoral or post-doctoral work. Presumably even some Japanese nationals will be forced into a contractual personnel system, with contracts being 5 or 7 years.
According to updated information recently posted at the website of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) <http://www.jsps.go.jp/english/index.html>
the results are:
1. Tohoku University - WPI Advanced Institute for Materials Research
2. The University of Tokyo - Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe
3. Kyoto University - Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences
4. Osaka University - Immunology Frontier Research Center
5. National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) - International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics
by Charles Jannuzi
In the post-bubble Japan of the 1990s, the private sector's ability to finance scientific research and development went into stagnation and then decline. So from 1995 on the government has pursued an expanded role in the management and funding of scientific R&D at annual levels that equal or exceed 1% of GDP. In great part this has been through the dominant role of its super-ministry, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and its five-year 'Science and Technology Basic Plans'.
In order to increase public subsidy of scientific research-- while at the same time forcing research universities and research institutes to compete for funds--MEXT established a 'Centers of Excellence' program. However, this turned out to be a fairly diffuse program, paying for the construction of dozens of new research facilities all over the country at the former national universities and a handful of elite private ones. While this did a lot to help refurbish the appearance of the visibly deteriorated national universities, its actual boost to important scientific results is questionable.
It seems that the ministry was betting on being able 'to seed' indiscriminately a rather large number of projects in many different fields. Critics pointed out that in the process there had been a lack from the top down of any selectivity or a sense of priorities. The MEXT's even-handed beneficence (at least towards its former national universities and some top private institutions, such as Keio U. and Waseda U.) led to the scatter-shot construction of dozens of relatively small-scale facilities hosted by second-tier institutions.
The subsequent dilution of focus and, more importantly, the total amounts of funding did not impress the greater world community of Big Science. Most of the money went into the physical construction of the facilities as opposed actually to funding research. Moreover, it has been difficult for the colleges of science and technology at many universities to staff the new research centers appropriately because they lack long track records of achievement in research. This lack of a history combined with contractual employment seem to be too risky and potentially unstable for many junior careerists.
Under the prerogatives of its third Science and Technology Basic Plan (begun 2006), the MEXT sought to address the issues of a lack of priorities and inadequacy of scale. Most significantly it announced a long-term, deep-pocketed but highly selective program it calls the 'World Premier International Research Center Initiative' (WPIRCI). The WPIRCI was to be a contest that rewarded only FIVE institutions in fiscal year 2007. But the winners will get at least ten years of support (with five year renewals based on documented results). And the funding totals could approach a figure close to USD $60 million. Most importantly, since some support has to come from the host institutions, much of the new funding may actually go towards high-priority research and not be completely exhausted on the construction of new facilities.
The results of the competition were announced and explained in late 2007, with some updates appearing last month (Feb. 2008) . For those who follow scientific research at the (former) national universities and (the former) national research institutes in Japan, the results were quite predictable. Japan's top-ranked research universities, whose establishment goes back to the old imperial system, are the winners. They are Tokyo University, Kyoto University, Tohoku University and Osaka University. The former national research institute, The National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), will also host a new center. NIMS's work in nano-technology and nano-architechtonics is done in partnership with still yet another former national university, University of Tsukuba (a new science university that does not have imperial system roots).
Although the new centers will be hosted by long-established research institutions, they are supposed to break from tradition in at least two ways. First, research and operations will have English as their official language (even if this proves to be impossible in Japan). And they must hire at least 20% foreign nationals. Most likely many of these will be chosen from the foreign nationals already at the institutions doing doctoral or post-doctoral work. Presumably even some Japanese nationals will be forced into a contractual personnel system, with contracts being 5 or 7 years.
According to updated information recently posted at the website of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) <http://www.jsps.go.jp/english/index.html>
the results are:
1. Tohoku University - WPI Advanced Institute for Materials Research
2. The University of Tokyo - Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe
3. Kyoto University - Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences
4. Osaka University - Immunology Frontier Research Center
5. National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) - International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics
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