However, it makes the common mistake of dismissing the value of the cultural exchange. It is in fact the cultural exchange–having over 50,000 non-Japanese who now have some sort of generally positive lifetime connection with Japan–that makes the JET Program worth the investment to Japan.

As I’ve pointed out in various posts and comments, there are now JET alums in a whole variety of established positions in government, business, education, translation, etc. that continue to provide very positive returns to Japan.

The JET alumni community is in many ways a sort of substitute ex-pat population for Japan.

To learn more about this, read some of the JET Return on Investment (JET ROI) posts here: http://jetwit.com/wordpress/category/jet-roi/

I appreciate a healthy debate and honest questioning of the “JET Threat” issue. And it will be much more helpful if JETs and JET alums are fully informed and aware when they participate in this discussion whether here on JetWit or in other forums or contexts.

If they decide that Japan can turn in on itself and falling English standards are no problem, they should just axe JET and all the dispatch companies in one swoop. I say this, because the dispatch companies are without doubt part of the current landscape, and they are a national disgrace, and have no place in any public education system, with or without JET. It would be tempting for the committees to conveniently ignore the pirates as they are saving local boards of education a fortune, so they might be tempted to replace JET AETS with dispatch ones. But they should have the courage of their convictions and opt for legality by making indirect hiring in the public education system illegal.

If they decide, on the other hand, that they want to improve the standard of English in Japan, they should start by enforcing all the laws that would outlaw the dispatch companies presently operating illegally. They should then reform JET i.e. it could become a means of direct hire of English teachers, not cultural ambassador/bouncy fresh-faced foreigners. This should involve trained and qualified English teachers/trainers, with a specific training role i.e. few contact hours teaching English, mostly working on JTE development. They should do this by bringing practising EAL (English as an Additional Language) teachers from a range of English speaking countries to Japan, and seconding selected JTE’s to schools in other countries to teach a combination of Japanese as a foreign language and work as language assistants with trained EAL teachers in EAL classes. I have worked with a teacher who did this on her own initiative, and she was blindingly good – she had the lingo, she had the techniques, she was motivating, simply a combination of all the best qualities you could find in a teacher.
These kind of secondments are generally earned by dedicated and hardworking teachers on both sides who have demonstrated long-term commitment to language education in their respective countries, and they can bring all this back with them and pass it around with colleagues on return to Japan. That’s a way to working towards reforming Japanese education from the inside, and god does it need it!

Well meaning fluffy statements about how life-changing JET was for participants personally is just great, but people should do that at their own expense. As non-professionals, what they have to offer, while well-meaning, is going to have limited impact on English language education, which is what the government needs to focus on. Twenty years after the bubble burst, all that fluffy internationalisation claptrap needs to go. It always was claptrap, but too many people have had fingers in the pie to actually stand up and say the truth.

If they want to cut something cut the pointless US bases that the Japanese public do not want anyway and save education from the ax. This would help reduce the US’s spending and strengthen the dollar becoming a win/win for both nations and it is better than simply buying more US debt.

Spending money on English education and cultural exchange is not a waste of money. Japan’s foreigners are basically either military temporaries or teachers. Japan has very few outreaches to the world and suffers from it.

I have never seen the actual budget line for the JET Program, and I doubt that there is a single line. The government conveniently spreads the program out over several entities and ministries, which may partly mask the full cost. However, the government does provide local contracting organizations money well in excess of the annual JET salary (approximately double, I’ve been told), and even a little basic arithmetic with this figure multiplied by the 5000 or 6000 JET participants every year offers a rough guess at how much JET is costing. JET likely costs in excess of 350 billion yen every year.

So, educationally, is Japan getting its yen’s worth? Nope. Japan’s level of English education is still deplorable. Compared to Korea, China, and other countries, the English abilities of Japan’s students lag badly. The JET Program’s ALTs could probably do more, but doing so would require massive structural changes to the educational system to put less emphasis on exams, more emphasis on immersion from a young age, less emphasis on arcane rules, and more emphasis on the ability to use and produce language in practice.

For the money being spent, Japan would get more return by hiring professionally trained ESL teachers. A bachelor’s degree is not typically any qualification to teach, and most JETs spend six months or a year fumbling around to discover basic effective teaching practices. Some take even longer. Even when ALTs do figure out what might work well, they are often hampered by not having the authority at the school or in the classroom to make changes, and by the reality that they may only see a class of students once per week or less. Professional ESL teachers who taught solo and full-time in the classroom and had a degree of control over the curriculum are what is needed.

For that matter, Japan could probably get more bang for its yen by sending its Japanese English teachers overseas for one or two years of intensive English and TESOL training. The teachers would return more confident in their English skills and brimming ideas for more effective models of teaching English.

JET’s primary success is as an internationalization and exchange program. Educationally, in terms of language alone, the program is a waste, but it does accomplish cultural exchange fairly well. JETs themselves are the biggest recipients of this exchange, and the tens of thousands of ex-JETs scattered throughout the world are probably strong ambassadors for Japan…and probably also strong critics of Japan in some regards. Japanese students and communities also gain good exposure to foreigners through the program. The ALTs in many rural communities are probably the only foreigners that many children would be introduced to outside of television, movies, music, and the internet. If Japan’s education ministry cannot quantify this effect, then it is not gathering the right data. Surveys of knowledge about and attitudes toward foreigners and foreign countries in schools and communities with JETs and in demographically similar communities without should illustrate the effect of internationalization and exchange vividly. Unfortunately, everybody seems to measure English test scores, and almost nobody bothers with this other important data.

This really cuts to a problem of the JET Program from its inception. JET was initiated during Japan’s boom years at the end of the 1980s. “Internationalization” was more of a catch-word than an actual plan or practice, and JETs were really little more than a gaudy display, not unlike a Canada Land theme park (or any number of other nationally or culturally themed parks that sprung up across Japan, funded by government largesse), than a consciously planned piece within a larger pedagogy. Sending JETs to local communities was a good way to make rural parts of Japan feel like they were cosmopolitan like Tokyo, even if in some limited way, and the program has transferred trillions of yen over the years to rural communities. (It’s probably also transferred trillions of yen back to JETs’ home countries, but that’s a separate issue.) The program is part and parcel of larger LDP policies that sent wealth to local authorities in a bid to retain party power, and it worked until people realized that Japan is broke, and that its pensions now risk failing. The fears several years ago when the government lost track of a number of people’s pensions helped fuel distrust in the LDP, and it’s hardly surprising that the DPJ wants to dismantle the mechanisms that the LDP used to retain power. The JET Program is part of that LDP machine.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your view of the JET Program, the DPJ just suffered serious election losses, and it’s not clear how long the party will be able to retain power, or even what it will be able to accomplish while the party is guaranteed to keep power. Change always happens slowly in Japan, and murky, turbulent political waters are probably going to slow efforts at austerity even more.

Also, if we end the JET, people in rural areas will lose the oppotunities to expose to foreign cultures.

Reforms in the JET Program are not uncalled for, but throwing out the baby with the bathwater would be a massive mistake, and one I feel Japan would eventually live to regret.

@Brian W, I completely agree with you that we have more of a chance at saving this program if we involved Japanese students and teachers who benefit from their interactions with JETs. If the pressure comes from within Japan I think it will be more effective. I, for one, plan to reach out to my ex-students, friends, and teachers from Japan and make sure they are aware of the situation and weigh in to the Japanese government.