‘A Tale of Two Programs’: Interrogating ‘open(closed)ness’ and ‘cultural diversity’ through critical observations of two Japanese University English language programs

Abstract

Japan is known to be a country that manicures its socio-cultural borders. In this article I will examine discourses regarding openness, closedness and cultural diversity in relation to policies and practices that draw heavily on mythologies of English language as an inroad to greater openness and diversity. To do this I will examine two English language programs at two different Japanese universities where I have worked as an English teacher. My analysis will be done within a larger backdrop of discourses, histories and epistemologies depicting: (1) Japan as a monolingual and monocultural nation where cultural diversity has been systemically and strategically resisted (Befu, 2001; Lee, 2006); (2) contestations over claims, meanings, renditions and suppressions of internationalization and cultural diversity in contemporary Japan; and (3) current practices surrounding English teaching, recent changes at policy level enabling content courses to be taught in English, and their implications for understandings of cultural diversity given the plurality of cultures and canons identifiable with English. Through critical observations of English as a Foreign Language and English as a Lingua Franca programs, I will demonstrate how different epistemological assumptions and ideological agendas behind the programs influence understandings, renditions and enactments of what I call open(closed)ness and cultural diversity. I will also observe how subtleties, inconsistences and incongruities related to such open(closed)ness can in turn exert a wash back effect on policy decisions.

Keywords

Language Policy Cultural Diversity Critical Pedagogy

Introduction

Japan is not a country known to be associated with linguistic and cultural openness or diversity. However, time and again there have been attempts at policy shifts toward accommodating greater cultural diversity within Japanese institutions. In this article I will critique the, at times, controversial issues related to such policy shifts by examining two English language programs: an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) program and an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) program taught at two Japanese universities in the greater Tokyo area. My discussion will be framed around a larger backdrop of discourses, histories and epistemologies depicting: (1) Japan as a monolingual and monocultural nation where cultural diversity has been systemically and strategically resisted (Befu, 2001; Lee, 2006); (2) contestations over claims, meanings, renditions and suppressions of internationalization and cultural diversity in contemporary Japan; and (3) current practices surrounding English teaching in Japan, recent policy changes enabling content courses to be offered in English, and their implications for greater openness to cultural diversity given the plurality of cultures and canons identifiable with English (Kachru, 1995; Pennycook, 2007). Through critical observations of the two English programs, I will demonstrate how their different epistemological assumptions and ideological agendas hold implications for different understandings, treatments, renditions and enactments of cultural diversity. I will also argue that such differences and their accompanying inconsistencies and incongruities in turn create a wash back effect on policy decisions as well as mistakes on the part of policy makers.

Japanese attitudes toward difference and diversity

Majoritarian storytelling in Japan (Solorzano and Yosso, 2002) is characterized by discursive constructions of Japan as a monolingual and monocultural nation, and the Japanese people as a unique and homogeneous people living in a closed society (Befu, 2001; Murphy-Shigematsu, 2006). Such majoritarian storytelling has been popularized in a genre of literature known as nihonjinron that characteristically affirms and legitimizes the uniqueness of the Japanese people (Befu, 2001; van Wolferen, 1993). The popularity of nihonjinron writing extends to its functions as a civic religion (Befu, 2001; van Wolferen, 1993) while it has been observed that: ‘[v]ery little serious writing by Japanese on anything relating to their society is entirely free of nihonjinron influence’ (van Wolferen, 1993: 347). The influence of nihonjinron also means that its essentialisms and hegemonies have also influenced the writings of non-Japanese authors with van Wolferen (1993) observing that: ‘(i)t is also amazing how much nihonjinron has crept into assessments by foreign authors’ (van Wolferen, 1993: 347).

Given the power and pervasiveness of nihonjinron, academic thinkers writing about Japan have more often than not come across as being pessimistic or even cynical about Japan's prospects for cultural and linguistic diversity (Befu, 2001; Caprio, 2007; McVeigh, 2002; Murphy-Shigematsu, 2006; Tanaka, 2006) even in the face of strongly globalizing forces and outside pressures for greater openness to broader and more inclusive conceptualizations of race, language, culture and internationalization (Kubota and McKay, 2009; Stewart and Miyahara, 2011; Tabuchi, 2012).

In terms of post-World War II history and politics, a monocultural and inward looking Japan was seen to be in alignment with the agendas of both the allied occupiers (led by the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers or SCAP) as well as the conservative Liberal Democratic Party that SCAP helped put in place (Dower, 1999, 2012) as part of the US Cold War strategy of containment. A monocultural workforce that was malleable and compliant also served the mercantilist capitalist agendas of Japan Inc. (Dower, 1999; van Wolferen, 1993) that SCAP and later the US government were keen to facilitate and support. As for the presence of foreign residents (Koreans, Taiwanese and other minorities) in Japan at the time of the occupation, SCAP's attitude was that their: ‘inevitable return to their homelands would solve all potential minority problems’ and that the: ‘Japanese population would then revert to the homogeneous state it had enjoyed’ (Caprio, 2007: 185). The foundations for an inward looking society, while already in place before the start of the war (Das, 2013), were nevertheless reinforced during Japan's post-war occupation, paving the way for an: ‘oppressive ideology that only Japanese live[d] in Japan’ that in turn led to discrimination against minorities in the country (Murphy-Shigematsu, 2006: 80).

These political developments continue to remain relevant at the present time. Right-wing activism has lately been advocating: ‘discriminatory treatment of minority populations, and … rearming … with the aim of … engaging in warfare’ (Yamaguchi, 2007: 585). Conservative ‘pro-Japan’ rhetoric promoted by the Abe government (Dale, 2013) includes high-profile commitments toward economic reform and revival, which as noted by Das (2013), are motivated by strong undercurrents of nationalism and patriotism.

Given these undercurrents of nationalism and patriotism, a word concerning the significance of ‘open(closed)ness’ in the title would be appropriate. I owe the idea to Peters and Roberts (2012) and their summary of Hermann Hesse's description of Castalia – a fictional province in his novel The Glass Bead Game – which quickly enabled me to draw parallels with a Japan under the fosterage of nihonjinron worldviews:

Castalia is very much a hierarchical society, led by a small group of Masters … Castalia's residents are largely separated from the rest of the world … Expressions of excessive individuality are frowned upon; anonymity is valued … Castalians, as a rule, do not recognize or acknowledge their situatedness in history … Castalia is fundamentally a closed knowledge community … Openness and closure in Castalia … are related to questions about individuality and collectivism … Participation in the community and organizing knowledge in distinctive ways are seen as ends in themselves (Peters and Roberts, 2012: 121, 126 and 129).

Roberts (2009) similarly highlights how: ‘the smug certainty among Castalians that their ‘truth’ – their form of social organization, their way of understanding the world and their mode of life – should be seen as superior to all others’ is called into question by the chief protagonist of The Glass Bead Game (72).

With regard to Japan, ‘open(closed)ness’ signifies for me the inseparability between the two juxtaposing concepts of openness and closedness (see Peters and Roberts, 2012) given nihonjinron's strongly nationalistic rhetoric of closedness and homogeneity. Claims of openness to cultural diversity become facile (or fragile) when embedded within a larger (and more powerful) agenda of closedness linked to policy, politics and history. Later in this article I will relate how I found ‘open(closed)ness’ to be a helpful way of putting my experience of University A (see Case I) in clearer perspective. Needless to say, my concerns with openness to cultural diversity are in agreement with the belief that openness is ultimately an overriding virtue existing in tandem with its being a moral, ethical, progressive and humanizing value (Peters and Britez, 2008; Peters and Roberts, 2012).

The next section addresses the matter of the way the English language and English native speakers are essentialized, reminiscent of Robert's (2009) point about distinctive ways of organizing knowledge and smug certainties.

Japan, the English language and native speaker stereotypes as ‘open(closed)ness’

English has been written about as a language with a plurality of canons enacting a diversity of identities and epistemologies (Kachru, 1995; Pennycook, 2007). In Japan, English tends not to be associated with such a diversity of identities and canons, but viewed rather more as a language of its traditional native speakers particularly its white North American native speakers (Honna, 2008; Kubota, 2002). American-accented English is the aspired goal for English language learners followed by British-accented English. Australian-accented English and Black American varieties are not highly regarded (Kubota, 2002). In a similar vein, the Japanese image of teachers of English is dominated by essentialist notions of ‘whiteness’ (Honna, 2008; Kubota, 2011a; Kubota and McKay, 2009). While white native speaker teachers are often favored for employment and given better remuneration (Kubota, 2011a; Kubota and Fujimoto, 2013; Rivers, 2013), they may at the same time be stereotyped culturally and by physical appearance (Kubota and Fujimoto, 2013; Rivers, 2013), affirming: ‘symbolic links between physical appearance’ and what in the Japanese mind constitutes: ‘linguistic authenticity’ (Rivers, 2013: 81).

An allotrope of such stereotyping is the presence of foreign theme parks in Japan. Theme parks like the Shakespeare Country Park located just outside Tokyo epitomize Japanese efforts at capturing and confining aspects of foreignness presented on its shores (Seargeant, 2009). To be contrasted with Japaneseness, ‘Englishness’ is caricatured in an ‘authentic Elizabethan landscaped environment’ that includes a formal Elizabethan garden, a farm yard and orchard, a village green and a working windmill (Seargeant, 2009). A similar setup can be found in British Hills, which also functions as a language school teaching general English and British culture (Seargeant, 2009; British Hills, 2007). Visitors to British Hills see replicas of a castle, a countryside village in Britain, a royal bedchamber and a manor house constructed out of materials imported directly from the UK (Seargeant, 2009; British Hills, 2007). British Hills is owned by a business enterprise with vested interests in several private education institutions and English schools.

Essentialism and stereotyping of ‘English culture’ and native speakers of English, while legitimizing nihonjinron characterizations of the foreigner as an outsider and ‘other’ are also ways of reinforcing Japanese notions of racial purity (Befu, 2001) particularly as part of: ‘how Japaneseness is built vis-à-vis non-Japaneseness’ (McVeigh, 2002: 170). Variety, diaspora, diversity, cultural openness and hybridity (May, 2003) are all but sidelined in such an arrangement, while: ‘smiley faces and perpetual pleasantness decorating the veneer of “native speaker” English teaching’ are foregrounded as part of: ‘an education system which exploits them as a collective’ (Rivers, 2013: 75 and 77).

Rivers (2013) describes native speakers teaching in an English language center (called the ‘EC’ as pseudonym) at a Japanese university as being: ‘(i)mmobilized by static intergroup boundaries of existence’ (Rivers, 2013: 80), and notes the absence of: ‘teachers of different ethnolinguistic and cultural backgrounds’ (Rivers, 2013: 81). He argues that cultural variety:

will never become reality within the EC for one reason – exposing the “native speaker” English teachers to … other forms of diversity threatens to unravel the institutional burden of authenticity upon which the EC is founded making it an absolute imperative that the “native speaker” English teachers operate in a space of captive isolation (Rivers, 2013: 81).

Arrangements of English teaching within such a closed and narrow ethnocultural framework suggest the complicity of English language teaching (ELT) as an undertaking that is used in Japan to undermine the value and vibrancy of diversity, openness and transcultural hybridity.

Besides being exploited in a masquerade of image creation like how native speaker teachers are told to: ‘introduce more color into their shirts, ties, blouses and dresses … by replacing their regular caliginous work attire with brightly colored shirts, floral summer dresses and cartoon character ties’ (Rivers, 2013: 81–82) on days when promotional photographs are taken for university advertisements, the static image of native speaker teachers is also harnessed in other ways to forestall openness to change, diversity and variation.

Explaining the way one university well-known for its law faculty manages a strong resistance to transformation and internationalization among its Japanese staff members, Stewart and Miyahara (2011) describe how specific administrative arrangements resulted in a ‘surprisingly marked’ separation of the Japanese teachers who taught English reading using Japanese and the white native speaker teachers who taught academic literacy in English (Stewart and Miyahara, 2011: 67). The special administrative arrangements were put in place to accommodate pressures on the University to internationalize and: ‘to include foreigners in the new International and Business Law division’ (Stewart and Miyahara, 2011: 67). Stewart and Miyahara's (2011) interviews with Sam and Martin, two native speaker teachers on the Taught-in-English program, revealed: ‘no coordination and little if any communication between the two sides of the curriculum’ (Stewart and Miyahara, 2011: 67) as well as a: ‘lack of involvement and interest shown by the rest of the department’ (Stewart and Miyahara, 2011: 69) in what the Taught-in-English teachers were doing. Such behaviors in turn created a feeling of skepticism about the ‘somewhat duplicitous’ way in which the University opted for ‘a token gesture of change’ by ‘adding a new layer’ in the administrative structure of its English program rather than ‘instituting change throughout’ (Stewart and Miyahara, 2011: 69). This separation of the English reading program taught in Japanese and the Taught-in-English academic literacy classes was paralleled by an exaggeration of differences in the way foreign teachers ‘were seen as stereotypical representatives of their nationality’, whether it was the ‘classic outgoing American’ or the ‘typical English gent, tweed jacket and all’ (Stewart and Miyahara, 2011: 71). White native English teachers were relegated to a subdued and tokenized presence in a closely regulated atmosphere borne of carefully managed procedures preempting any possibility of a sudden break-out that could upset the longstanding status quo.

As is apparent in both the cases described by Rivers (2013) and Stewart and Miyahara (2011), the skewed or distorted treatment of internationalization, diversity and difference enacting a form of ‘open(closed)ness’ entailed particularized ways of conceptualizing and administering English language programs. Such particularizations in turn involved circumscribed conceptualizations of the English language, which would: ‘work against promoting the diverse identities and incarnations of the language’ (Seargeant, 2009: 100). English is treated not as a medium of plural cultures and canons but as a language closely linked to its white native speakers.

An inverted version of internationalization enacting ‘open(closed)ness’

Coming alongside these circumscribed conceptualizations of the English language are matters to do with internationalization or kokusaika and the challenges they bring to nihonjinron ideologies. In discussions of kokusaika which came into prominence during the period of Japan's trade wars with the United States, the English language is spoken of as a tool by which Japanese ideas and opinions can be communicated to its trading partners and the rest of the world (Kubota, 2011b). The threats that such cross border interactions were thought to bring to nihonjinron beliefs (Kubota, 2011b; Yamagami and Tollefson, 2011) were to be ameliorated through a heightened emphasis on patriotism in the education system (Kubota, 2011b). Such thinking signaled a deeper agenda, which was that the advent of kokusaika would paradoxically help foster sentiments of patriotism and an even greater consciousness of Japaneseness (Kubota, 2011b). This observation is corroborated by the fact that Japan's kokusaika reifies the English-speaking West as its antithetical point of reference, as a way of accentuating the uniqueness of Japaneseness through a simplistic juxtaposition of cultural differences (Kubota, 2011b). The irony to be noted here is that Japan has a growing hinterland of international residents whose native tongues are not English, but Filipino, Thai, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Korean and Chinese (Kubota and McKay, 2009; Lie, 2001), making a kokusaika that is skewed toward English and the English-speaking West a very particularized (and ideologized) form of internationalization indeed. This blindsiding of the growing presence of ethnic and cultural diversity within the country, while funneling attention monolithically to one single language like English (particularly American-accented English to wit) implicates English and ELT in the maze of issues regarding cultural diversity. In particular, questions of how or whether particularized conceptualizations of English and ELT imbricate Japanese understandings of cultural diversity, or whether they are complicit in skewed understandings of internationalization, come to mind.

Hence, despite the potential for heterogeneity and diversity offered by kokusaika, the expanding plurality of cultures and canons represented by the English language as global lingua franca, as well as the healthy presence of foreign residents in the country, Japanese apprehensions of these phenomena have remained closed, circumscribed and muted, all the more so in the way apparent instances of ‘openness’ to things international are (paradoxically) harnessed to reify notions of Japaneseness.

A tale of two programs

The previous sections have provided a socio-historical as well as political background to current issues relating to the handling of cultural diversity in Japan, particularly in how they relate to the treatment of people or things unfamiliar, as well as to the attendant matter of English language education. In the following sections, I will describe two English language programs I am familiar with by virtue of my having taught on them. These descriptions, and the subsequent commentaries, are part of my praxis as teacher and follow works that explore how teacher-generated narratives have formed the basis of consolidating professional knowledge and understanding (Morgan, 2004; Murphey, 2004; Rivers, 2013; Stewart and Miyahara, 2011).

Case (I)

Case (I) features a startup liberal arts faculty of a university (University A) located on a campus outside Tokyo offering courses in the English-medium.

Globalization-as-opportunity rhetoric

The manifesto of this University is reminiscent of globalization-as-opportunity rhetoric (Yamagami and Tollefson, 2011), where English is thought to provide open doors to a wider world of employment opportunities that globalization is thought to bring. University advertisements tapping on globalization-as-opportunity discourses typically highlight the bright prospects of positive engagement with people from a diversity of cultures, the inspiring presence of teaching staff of foreign nationalities and origins, as well as future employment in multinational companies with branches and offices in the world's major capitals.

University A's publicity efforts for its new liberal arts faculty includes colorful brochures, online advertisements and open campus days when parents and prospective students are invited to visit its newly refurbished campus complete with upbeat designs and contemporary furnishings. On open campus days visitors are told that students will engage in creative and challenging learning and social activities with fellow students, teaching faculty and administrative staff from a panorama of different countries and cultures. The entire campus is designated an English-speaking zone, where everyone will communicate in English in a free and fruitful exchange of ideas. Photographs of faculty members used in advertising brochures highlight their diverse cultural and linguistic affiliations through the display of an array of national flags spanning the different continents alongside each photograph. From its earnest efforts at publicity, it can be easily concluded that the success of this startup liberal arts campus remains extremely important to University A. With Japan's well-known low birth rate (Yamagami and Tollefson, 2011), universities have to devote substantial resources and administrative office personnel to student recruitment and University A is no different.

By way of history, the campus is located on the same grounds which previously housed a since defunct women's two-year college. The last year of the two-year college's operations coincided with the inaugural year of the new faculty. In official parlance the two-year college entered into a merger with University A, which also meant that about half a dozen members of the teaching staff from the two-year college (all of whom were Japanese) became employees of University A. To complement them, the University cast its nets wide for well-qualified English-speaking professors, literally across the continents. Economists, anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists were recruited from North America, Eastern and Western Europe, and the Far East, making good the claims of cultural diversity in the University's advertisements.

So in terms of overall vision and staff composition at least, there is great potential for the University to epitomize diversity, international outlook and global consciousness not to mention the creative energies that come with such heterogeneity extant on one campus.

The EFL program

With the above background description of the startup liberal arts faculty in mind, I turn now to a description of the EFL program at the faculty. My discussion is divided into two parts corresponding to the two components of the faculty EFL program. The first component concerns English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and will be discussed in relation to curricular matters and understandings of the nature of knowledge and meaning making. The second component concerns the teaching of English for Culture and will focus on matters to do with language, culture and the teaching of EFL. My purpose is to link the issues arising both to the literature discussed earlier and to the larger issues of openness, closedness and cultural diversity as they relate to Japanese culture and way of life.

Meaning, knowledge and the EAP curriculum

I was employed as an EAP teacher one year after University A launched its liberal arts campus. Prior to joining the University, I spent 20 years working on ELT, EAP and teacher training programs in Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Laos and my native Singapore.

On joining the EAP team of five full-time teachers from Britain and America, I learnt that the EAP program (as approved by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports) was conceptualized within a four-skills framework of reading, writing, listening and speaking. Holliday (2005) problematizes the four-skills curriculum for the way it circumscribes language teaching within a narrow commodified Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) curricular framework that often forecloses other more creative approaches to language teaching. The four-skills curriculum is to be contrasted with other curricular conceptualizations that engender student academic literacies, including broader understandings of the way language, culture, knowledge, meaning and human subjectivity are constructed, enacted and conveyed in diverse ways through language (Canagarajah, 2002; Lea and Street, 2000; Lillis, 2003; Lillis and Turner, 2001). An EAP program founded on promoting academic literacies engenders student appreciation for the constructed, dialogic and intertextual nature of content knowledge while promoting an appreciation for situatedness and diversity (Canagarajah, 2005; Lillis, 2003).

Soon after I joined the University, I was asked by a Psychology professor to his office and taken through the course website of his course in Introductory Psychology. I was told that I was timetabled to teach the EAP reading course and that my responsibility was to help the students achieve a level of English that would enable them to read academic papers and other recommended readings on the course website. From this initial conversation and from interaction with other content professors teaching anthropology and political science among other subject areas, I learnt that the University was experiencing difficulties admitting a viable number of students, resulting in students with even pre-intermediate levels of English being accepted for enrolment. Thus, it was explained to me that the main function of the EAP program was that of remediation. I discovered that discussions concerning the role of the program centered on matters such as running a writer's clinic, student-teacher consultation and counseling sessions to help overcome students’ weaknesses in English, and ways of improving ‘deficient grammar’. EAP teachers were also asked to ‘correct’ students’ essays before they were turned in to professors for grading. As I saw it, EAP teachers were not so much expected to foster critical, creative or dialogical mindsets or encourage understandings of the contextual and generative nature of knowledge, but were instead expected to: (1) remediate students’ language problems; while (2) shadowing their lessons around faculty course content – very much reminiscent of a deficit skills’ model of language pedagogy (Lea and Street, 2000; Rose, 1998; Valentia, 1997).

In conceptualizing EAP in deficit terms (Valentia, 1997) and adopting what the noted critical educator, Paulo Freire, calls: a banking approach to pedagogy promoting monolithic and static views of knowledge, humanity and society (Freire, 2000), University A forfeited the opportunity to harness the full potential of a language program that could have proffered more imaginative configurations of knowledge and the different ways it can be conveyed through language. For the EAP program at least, the expectations required of it did not bear out or corroborate the startup faculty's advertisements that spoke of fostering a flexible and creative mindset among its students.

Culture as captured in behaviors and habits

The English for Culture course was taught by teachers from the two-year women's college. It was conceived as a way of helping students to understand the ‘culture’ of English-speaking people, the assumption being that students will be able to function more effectively in English if they learnt the cultural habits and behaviors of its native speakers. Collegial discussions with the English for Culture teachers revealed their interest in researching topics such as English humor, or the positive go-getting attitudes of American people, and how these qualities could be taught to Japanese students of English to ‘enhance’ their language ability so that they would behave or interact ‘appropriately’ when using English. The English for Culture curriculum also included reading, listening and dictation passages contrasting Japanese culture with the foreign cultures of English native speakers, with the intention of helping students appreciate the worldview and thought patterns of English native speakers. Such a positivist correlation between language and culture is vividly described by critical language educator, Kumaravadivelu, as being about the:

learning and teaching of the cultural beliefs and practices associated with the members of the target language (TL) community, that is, the community of people speaking the second or foreign language (L2) that the learners are studying. The underlying assumptions here include: (a) languages and cultures are closely connected, (b) learning an L2 also means learning a C2 for interactive (e.g. travel), integrative (e.g. relationship), or instrumental (e.g. career) purposes (Kumaravadivelu, 2008: 173).

Seen in this way, the teaching and learning of the target culture is considered to be a way of understanding people of a different culture to facilitate smooth communication and felicitous relationships. May (2003), however, problematizes this as a: ‘naïve, static and undifferentiated conception’ of culture along with: ‘the allied notion of the incommensurability of cultures’ (May, 2003: 203), reminiscent of the way nihonjinron is steeped in: ‘distinct (ethnic) group identities, especially if such identities link cultural difference and identity ineluctably to a historical past of supposed cultural authenticity’ (May, 2003: 203). Seen in this way, English for Culture becomes a backhanded manifestation of nihonjinron ideology epitomizing ‘open(closed)ness’.

Kumaravadivelu (2008) also problematizes this approach but in a slightly different way when he expresses his reservations about whether it fosters broader and more encompassing mindsets among students:

It is my contention that in the context of cultural realism and its imperative to develop global cultural consciousness in our learners, the learning and teaching of culture cannot and should not be confined to the culture of the TL community alone. The exclusive focus on the culture of the TL community not only treats contemporary cultural challenges inadequately but it also neglects the L2 learners' need for developing global cultural consciousness. (Kumaravadivelu, 2008: 173, italics added)

One is reminded from reading Kumaravadivelu's (2008) observations that the English for Culture component was taught in the context of a newly launched faculty aiming to foster a broader outlook among its students to help them to reap the benefits of global modernity. In terms of engendering the global cultural consciousness that Kumaravadivelu (2008) speaks about, it appears that the English for Culture component remained caught in simplistic us-and-them: ‘cultural dichotomies such as individualism versus collectivism, innovation versus tradition, equality versus hierarchy’ (Kumaravadivelu, 2008: 193). Here again, opportunities for broader conceptualizations of knowledge and meaning were lost to reductionism and essentialism. Instead of the inclusive and nuanced understandings offered by a global cultural consciousness, students were caught in a local versus foreign binary, all but reinforced by the English for Culture component.

Case (II)

Case (II) takes place in a well-established private university (University B) in Tokyo. University B has seven colleges covering areas in agriculture, engineering, biological sciences and the liberal arts. Unlike the startup liberal arts campus in University A, teaching of content in University B is not undertaken in English but in Japanese, except for a tiny minority of post-graduate courses in English teaching. As a relatively well-known and established university, University B does not actively advertise for students.

English as a lingua franca institute

Traditionally, English teaching was managed by each individual college. However, this was not found to be an efficient way of planning and deploying English teachers, and it was decided that the University would streamline the teaching of English by establishing an English language institute to manage English teaching campus wide.

The institute was named the English as a Lingua Franca Institute (ELFI) and was launched after a year-long series of policy and conceptualization meetings discussing its vision and mission attended by university officials and ELFI's shadow administration. The name of the institute itself was aimed at signaling the University's (and inaugural Director's) conviction of how English as an international language (Matsuda, 2012) had become a common medium of communication among its many non-native speakers, hence recognizing the importance of capturing its heterogeneous nature rather than: ‘as a static language of native English speakers’ (Matsuda, 2012: 4). The name of the institute, the namesake of an area of study in applied linguistics and ELT (Jenkins, 2007; Seidlhofer, 2011), was not meant to signal the institute's strict adherence to the tenets of English as a lingua franca per se, but as a recognition of the institute's support for English in all its plural cultural and contextually situated identities.

The launching of the institute was marked by a one-day conference where three speakers, well-known for their studies and publications on the plural and multiple identities of English, delivered plenary sessions. The plenary sessions featured state-of-the-art perceptions on the contextualized, contingent, dynamic and heteroglossic nature of language in the real world, while also affirming that there was no one stable quintessential native ‘model’ of English or any other language. The sessions also addressed native speakerism, the belief that the native speaker was the final authority over ‘correctness’ and ‘right’ teaching methods (Holliday, 2005; Kubota and Fujimoto, 2013; Rivers, 2013), arguing how native speakerist views severely limited professional scope and imagination. Furthermore, the plenary speakers problematized the narrowness of the traditional native speaker and non-native speaker binary, linking it to the production of marginalized subjectivities in learners and non-native speaker teachers, while failing to recognize hybridized social practices often achieved through acts of exigent and creative negotiation of meanings among the many users of English as a lingua franca.

Meanwhile, the Director noted in his speech that, in Japan's foremost professional employment website, JRECin, and in other professional portals, University B's advertisements for English teachers deliberately sought to steer away from restricting applicants only to those who were native speakers, a stipulation commonly found in advertisements put up by other universities in the country. The ELFI, said the Director, wanted teachers from a diversity of creeds, cultures and English-speaking backgrounds, reminiscent of what May (2003) recognizes as the importance of promoting: ‘voice, agency … malleable and multiple aspects of identity formation … hybridity [and] syncretism’ (May, 2003: 203) among teachers and students.

English as a lingua franca program

Taking its cues from the institute's vision to teach English as a medium of plural cultures, canons and conceptualizations, as well as from the provocative discussions at the inaugural conference, the ELFI team, comprising teachers from Japan, the Philippines, Australia, the US, Britain, Hungary, India, Korea, Turkey and Yugoslavia, followed up with staff development and curriculum planning activities in that direction. Sustained discussions enabled the team to come up with two important guiding motifs emphasizing the importance of student and teacher agency and participation in the teaching and learning process, as well as that of recognizing a diversity of meanings and significations that could be explored through English. Departing from the strictures of stock and static conceptualizations of people, place and positioning as described in Kumaravadivelu (2008), the program would look upon English as a resource or springboard from which students and teachers could explore and negotiate meanings that were significant to their situations, aspirations and subjectivities.

As a teacher on the program, the way I took on this challenge was to encourage students to engage with issues of hybridity and transculturality, along with ample opportunities for students to respond imaginatively. I have often found both newspaper articles and television dramas to be useful in this regard. For example, there is the story of Michihisa Yamaguchi, a Japanese cheesemaker who made a name for himself working in the French Alps (Kohiyama, 2008). When Yamaguchi first arrived in France, the article relates how he could not even count to ten in French, which meant that he had to spend time learning the language. Students read about how Yamaguchi was a literature student in Japan before living through a bad experience working for an exploitative milk producer in Hokkaido. Eventually he became an expert in making blue cheese and integrated nicely into his adopted environment in France. Students are challenged in class to provide responses to Yamaguchi's experiences while reflecting on their own. They also engage with issues to do with learning a new language, meeting new people and adapting to unfamiliar environments when they read about Yamaguchi's encounters at university as well as in Hokkaido and France.

Another example can be found in the New York Times article (Tabuchi, 2012) about Ronan Sato, Ryutaro Sakamoto and Kenta Koga, young Japanese graduates from top universities in the United States fluent in English, who encountered barriers and prejudice when they decided to return home to apply for jobs in Japanese companies. Students are given the opportunity to consider issues concerning insular and hierarchical company cultures. They are asked to think about their own job-placement and job-hunting experiences, while considering different scenarios as to why recruiters in Japanese companies view Japanese returnees to their own country with suspicion. Students also discuss the reasons for stereotypes like ‘over spec’ Japanese overseas graduates who are deemed too outspoken, too ambitious, too likely to change jobs or be poached by competitors (Tabuchi, 2012), compared to people who have graduated locally.

Bilingual television dramas like ‘99 Years of Love’ with dialogs in both English and Japanese retelling the lives of Japanese migrants to the United States at the turn of the 20th century and their second and third generation descendants, invite students to reflect on their own roots and grapple with issues to do with emigration and hybridized identities that directly confront nihonjinron beliefs. Through television dramas like ‘99 Years of Love’, and ‘Haruka na Kizuna (Distant Bonds)’ about a four-year-old Japanese war orphan brought up in China by a doting Chinese foster mother, students are able to honestly examine matters to do with alienation, displacement or transculturality. A similar example can be found in the life of Rodrigo Igi, a Brazilian-Japanese immigrant to Japan who came as a child, surviving the traumas of bullying in a Japanese primary school because he did not speak Japanese. His breakthrough came when he gained recognition for his knowledge of Japanese kunji after years of practice. Igi eventually became a middle-school English teacher, even though a Brazilian immigrant of Japanese descent employed as a teacher in the public school system was something extremely rare.

Through engagement with issues that require openness to a continuum of varied responses couched in nuanced language, students are steered away from cut-and-dry representations of discrete cultural and linguistic meanings. Instead, they are exposed to a cline of multiple meanings and significations, in keeping with the multiplicity of representations made possible through viewing English not as a static language of its native speakers but its many users who regard it as a lingua franca.

The significance of the differences in beliefs and practices between the EFL program in University A and the ELF program in University B are discussed in the next section in relation to cultural diversity and reflexive praxis.

Reflections

There are important lessons to be drawn from comparisons between the programs in University A and University B.

The openness to a wider spectrum of cultural practices and conceptualizations facilitated by University B's ELF program enabled teaching to be less narrowly defined than was the case with University A's EAP and English for Culture programs. Presenting students with a cline of cultural scenarios, while helping them recognize their own situated socio-histories and understandings (Lin, 2010; Lin and Luk, 2005), exposed students to human subjectivities and cultural viewpoints they would not otherwise have come across. In this connection, some Japanese scholars have (very helpfully) supported the belief that English has the potential to convey a plurality of cultural practices and representations (Hino, 2009; Honna, 2008; Matsuda, 2002, 2012).

As for University A, bearing in mind the presence of professors representing different languages and cultures, the English for Culture component could have opted for a more embracing view of cultural consciousness in place of the rather limiting local versus foreign binary that in reality reified Japaneseness versus non-Japaneseness dichotomies. One cannot help but see the hidden hand of nihonjinron in the way English for Culture drew attention to Japanese uniqueness through the contrasts that could be drawn with non-Japaneseness. Coupled with the static views of knowledge reified in the EAP component, University A's English program, and its vision of enabling students to reap the benefits of global cultural capital through higher education in English, seem incompatible. This incompatibility in turn suggests that University A's ‘global’ vision works well as advertising rhetoric, but fails to deliver in substantial or material terms because of the powerful influences of reductionist ideologies, possibly including those implicating nihonjinron and its opposition to openness, expansiveness and variation. Moreover, this would mean that the presence of a diversity of foreign professors was in part to be a cosmetic rendition of cultural ‘diversity’ in form, but not in substance. For University A what began plausibly as a policy initiative to deliver its academic courses in English, ultimately became a policy mistake given a general lack of openness to more encompassing conceptualizations of knowledge and culture on the part of its policy makers and implementers.

The ELFI program in University B, on the other hand, opted to convey to learners plural representations of people, places and cultures, paving the way for more sophisticated configurations of cultural and political meanings. The opportunities created for greater openness to a cline and continuum of meanings and significations meant that students were not kept on a restricted diet of us-and-them or Japanese and non-Japanese parochialisms – definitely more commensurate with the nature of exploration and inquiry expected of a university education. Unlike the situation in University A, where diversity tended to be exoticized and cosmeticized, the teaching in University B's ELFI endorsed a negotiated version of culture which in turn permitted students to imagine a greater range of transcultural and intercultural possibilities. Indeed, University A's decision to deliver curricular content in an international language like English (Matsuda, 2012), while very appealing on paper to openness and diversity, was hamstrung by the way the EAP and English for Culture programs were conceptualized and executed.

Conclusion

In a larger sense, the moral of the story is that no institution, country or entity can hope to exercise ideological controls to hamstring diversity and variation while at the same time wanting to create illusions of the same. To purport to manufacture openness to diversity in an ideological climate that supports monolingualism, monoculturality and other forms of closedness as default modes of cultural-political existence, is manifestly difficult if not hypocritical.

For the record, University A did in the end experience a spate of resignations from its foreign professors in its startup faculty. The spate of resignations happened principally because of doubts over the tenability of teaching tertiary level courses in English, given the dubious state of affairs stemming from the mass admission of students with low proficiency levels and the viability of the remedial ‘support’ that was supposed to come from the EAP and English for Culture programs. Courses taught in English had to be drastically scaled back. With these resignations, University A literally lost the face-validity of its purported mission to engender more internationalized worldviews among its students, not least in the way the campus suddenly became less ‘diverse’ in terms of staff composition. Not that this was a huge loss to diversity. For all its attempts to attract the attention of parents and potential students through its (facile) appellations to diversity in its colorful advertisements and glossy photographs, challenges of a more fundamental nature ultimately preempted the genuine openness necessary for the authentication of a truly international campus. Attempts at reinventing the institution were, at the end of the day, hamstrung by the fixedness of the: ‘manuals, pedals and stops’ to use a metaphor from The Glass Bead Game (Peters and Roberts, 2012).

The thought to bear in mind is that true openness to diversity must be borne of a genuine readiness for knowledge, semiosis and meaning to be sincerely negotiated in real life and real time by a realistic people who are prepared to embrace change, difference and diversity in an attitude of humility and openness. Until this happens, true diversity will remain subordinate to a regime of monolithic controls, policy mistakes and open(closed) mindsets.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Glenn Toh graduated with a BA (Honors) from the Victoria University of Wellington before completing a MEd Studies and PhD in Charles Darwin University and Curtin University, respectively. He has taught on EFL and language teacher training programs in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Laos, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore. He keeps a watchful eye over developments in language, ideology, power relations and education.

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