One way of taking the educational pulse of Japan is to visit the School of International Liberal Studies here at Waseda University. Higher education seems cosmopolitan and vibrant at the school, with a faculty that is 30 percent foreign — drawn from a dozen nationalities — offering a diverse curriculum taught in English to students who must spend a year abroad to graduate. And the dean is British.
As a fluent speaker of Japanese who was the most senior academic on the staff, Paul Snowden was the natural choice for the job. But his appointment as dean last year, the highest position reached by a non-Japanese at Waseda, the country's top private university, was considered so unusual that he compared it to the first moonwalk.
"For Waseda the smashing of this glass ceiling might be seen as a pretty huge step," he told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
Indeed, Waseda's embrace of foreigners is still much more the exception than the rule in Japan.
Few Japanese universities have been as ready to take the hammer to tradition. While some parts of society are slowly opening up — the number of permanent foreign residents recently passed two million, or 1.57 percent of the total population — universities in this Asian superpower remain strikingly homogenous and isolated from the globalizing trend in higher education.
According to the Ministry of Education, just 5,652 of the 158,770 professors employed in Japanese higher education are foreigners on full-time contracts, mostly at private universities.
Most of those foreigners work as low-level English-language teachers on short-term contracts.
And although Japan has finally reached its target, set in 1984, of enrolling 100,000 foreign students every year, the bulk of them are from China and South Korea. That means the rest of the world sends fewer than 20,000 students to Japanese campuses each year. In contrast, Japan sends nearly 40,000 students a year to the United States alone.
Many academics and administrators here agree that Japan's insular higher-education system would benefit enormously by opening up to the rest of the world. They cite such problems as the sluggish adoption of new course-management technologies like Blackboard's, the lack of creative thinking in departments and classrooms, and a shortage of programs for older students. Critics add that most Japanese universities are not competitive internationally: Just three Japanese institutions made the top-100 list in the 2006 rankings of the Times Higher Education Supplement, in London.
"Japanese universities are not doing well, and one reason is because the education students are getting is homogenous," says Bruce Stronach, an American who, as president of Yokohama City University, is probably the highest-placed foreigner in Japanese academe. "They're not getting a diversity of views — the ability to argue and discuss and that sort of Socratic give-and-take with their colleagues."
Bern Mulvey, an American who is dean of Miyazaki International College, which runs one of the handful of continuing-education programs on the large southern island of Kyushu, says that when he raised the idea of starting such programs among his colleagues, he was greeted with astonishment.
"They'd never heard of it until I explained it to them," he says. "Finding solutions in universities often involves listening to the faculty members from Romania or Nicaragua or other places who have new ideas. In Japan those voices would not be heard."
The education ministry appears to agree with such criticism, increasingly sprinkling the buzzword "internationalization" in documents on university reform, and proclaiming, at least officially, that more foreign academic talent is welcome here.
Japan's top campus administrators are reading from the same page.
"Universities have to internationalize for the sake of diversity," says Hiroshi Komiyama, president of the elite University of Tokyo — which employs just 250 foreign nationals among its 5,000 faculty members. "People who are part of the same culture and language can no longer really develop intellectually."
His own university's poor record of hiring foreigners is largely the result of external forces, he explains. "A lot of this is not our fault," he says. "National public universities were banned from employing foreigners full time until the 1990s because employees were classed as civil servants." Those rules were only recently relaxed.
Underlying Tensions
Pull back the curtain, however, and major obstacles to reform emerge. Except at a handful of prestigious academic citadels, say professors, university administrators keep foreigners on a very short leash, hiring them only on contracts lasting three years or less, and dictating what they can teach. Faculty positions in Japan are still rarely advertised outside the country, unless universities are looking for foreign-language instructors. And the few job advertisements that are posted internationally often demand that highly qualified applicants agree to spend much of their time correcting the English-language papers of Japanese colleagues, say foreign professors.
Many foreign academics here say they have been discriminated against: snubbed in corridors, passed over for promotion in favor of Japanese colleagues, and worse.
"I was at a university where female faculty members would get off the elevator and take the stairs," says Mr. Mulvey, of Miyazaki. "They said they didn't want to be alone with a foreigner because you didn't know what was going to happen."
Negative feelings among foreigners can run deep. At a recent conference on education issues here, foreign professors compared themselves to lab animals. "When they have been sufficiently abused or have mastered the maze, it is time to bring in a 'fresh specimen,'" one said. Some have sued their employers for discrimination. Several institutions, including the prestigious private Ritsumeikan University, are dealing with disputes involving foreign instructors.
Nonetheless, a growing number of foreign professors are climbing the slippery academic pole in Japan. Foreigners now run research projects, departments, and even universities, evidence for Mr. Snowden, of Waseda, that the system is changing.
Still, he says, his own promotion to dean has put him under special scrutiny. "I've really got to perform well," he says. "Otherwise there will be this excessive interpretation of a foreigner having done badly, and never electing another one."
Mr. Snowden, who is knowledgeable about teaching English as a second language and has written about comparative linguistics and culture, joined Waseda as a part-time instructor in 1980. Like many successful foreign academics in Japan, he questions whether non-Japanese have always made the commitment needed to build university careers here.
Linda Grove, a former dean of liberal arts at Tokyo's Jesuit-run Sophia University, which has the highest percentage of non-Japanese staff of any university in the country — over 50 percent — argues that language has been a huge problem.
"It was very difficult for Japanese universities to take on people who couldn't attend meetings or read documents," she says. "I don't think it was because they didn't want foreigners. It was worrying that they could cope."
Sophia's school of liberal arts is one of the few in Japan that offer an entire curriculum in English and have a campus that boasts a fair number of non-Asian faces. In the corridors here, English is heard as commonly as Japanese, and doors have nameplates for professors from all over the world.
In contrast, most university campuses in Japan are still strikingly monocultural. The faculty at the University of Tokyo for example, looks much as it did two decades ago.
"Many Japanese students have never even talked to somebody from outside the country," says Igo Takahiro, a first-year student. "It would obviously be better for our education if we had more opportunities to learn what foreigners think and exchange ideas with them. I think most of my friends would agree."
Some academics believe that Sophia could serve as a model of the "internationalized" university, with its mix of teaching styles and polyglot community of Chinese, Koreans, Americans, and Europeans. Few Japanese students, however, speak and read English well enough to be able to function in such an environment. Tom Gill, an associate professor in the department of international studies at Meiji Gakuin University, says his department would like to hire more foreign academics but cannot: "Finding a guy who has a specialty other than Japanese is not easy." Many universities argue that hiring more non-Japanese simply increases the workload for current staff members.
Such claims infuriate equality campaigners. "Yes, poor Japanese-language skills are an issue," says Mr. Mulvey, who is a fluent Japanese speaker and reader. "However, this really is beside the point. The real problem is that Sophia University and the few places like it are exceptions.
The vast majority of universities in this country will not hire or even consider foreigners for tenured positions, regardless of language level, publication record, and teaching ability."
The "embarrassingly" low number of tenured foreign professors in Japan bears that out, says Mr. Mulvey. The education ministry cannot even say how many foreigners are tenured, arguing that tenure is a matter for each institution to take up. "We don't know how many Japanese are tenured, either," says a ministry spokesman.
While the government does run a few programs intended to recruit foreign academics, the spokesman notes that "we cannot order universities to hire more foreigners."
For some, this response proves that the government is not serious about internationalizing higher education or discouraging discrimination. "This is an intensely political issue," says Debito Arudou, a naturalized Japanese citizen and lecturer who says universities are "systemically denying" tenure to non-Japanese academics through the use of employment term limits.
'System of Apartheid'
Ivan P. Hall, one of Japanese academe's fiercest critics and author of Cartels of the Mind: Japan's Intellectual Closed Shop, a 1997 book that argues that Japan has put up institutional barriers to outsiders in the media, academic, and legal sectors, says the lowly position of most foreign academics in Japan is by design. "The ministry knows universities discriminate against foreigners and so it lies about these statistics," he says. "Every time you try to nail this thing down it is like jelly."
Japanese universities, he says, have a long record of banishing gaijin, foreigners, to the academic sidelines. The record, he says, can be read only as a determination — "conscious and politically motivated" — not to open up to foreign scholars. It is a system of apartheid that keeps most gaijin "disenfranchised and disposable."
University administrators say it is difficult to find qualified foreigners, but that they are trying. "If they can work the same as a Japanese person, and if they are comfortable with the language, we hire the foreigner," says Takuya Honda, a professor in the School of Knowledge Science at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
Administrators also reject the idea that the government forces them away from such hires, and that there are any systematic efforts to keep out foreign academics. "I have no idea what the Ministry of Education thinks," says Mr. Komiyama, president of the University of Tokyo. "We don't consult with them when we want to hire more people from abroad."
Mr. Snowden, dean of international studies at Waseda, acknowledges that some of the hiring criteria can be tough to meet. "Japanese universities are wary of committing themselves to people who claim they might stay but who take off after a few years," he says. "I was told when I became full time that I must stay 10 years or 'we're not interested.' Foreigners sometimes don't stay around for very long."
Rhetoric vs. Reality
Government rhetoric often seems least convincing in universities outside the big cities, where a multicultural dawn looks far off indeed. The school of humanities at Hokkai Gakuen University, in Sapporo, for example, employs just one tenured professor among its 36 foreign academics despite its efforts to build a Sophia-style humanities program. Now the university is in a dispute with a foreign instructor who says he was passed over in favor of a Japanese colleague.
"It's a bit uncomfortable, but management said all foreign teachers should be on one-year contracts," says Toshikazu Kuwabara, dean of the school. The university introduced the measure, he says, because it has had "problems" with foreigners, including sexual harassment of students and difficulty in getting along with one another in campus housing.
"We've had to put them into separate apartments, and that kind of thing is difficult to arrange," the dean says. Four of the instructors speak very little Japanese, he adds, "even after 10 years."
The issue of the treatment of foreign faculty members recently became quite public, and acrimonious, at Akita International University, in northern Japan. Promoted as one of the new "internationalized" campuses, the university had agreed to retain about a dozen foreign lecturers after the local prefecture took over the campus from the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system in 2003.
The instructors, some of whom have been living in the area for a decade and a half, say they were led to believe that their contracts would be extended, but were stunned when told at a meeting last July that they would not have jobs as of this March.
Instead, the university told them, their positions would be advertised internationally, in an attempt to recruit the strongest candidates. Some of the instructors were replaced by other foreign academics, but those who were let go find it ironic that, after years of hearing complaints that foreign instructors don't understand Japan and are too transient, a university would dismiss academics with deep roots in the community. They also note that the new president of the university, Mineo Nakajima, is on the prime minister's education-reform council.
"The idea universities are internationalizing is ridiculous," says one of the instructors, Mark Cunningham, who taught English. "They want the distinguished-visitor model rather than someone who disrupts the status quo. It is not a two-way exchange."
Akita administrators deny that nationality was a factor in the dismissals. "We employ more foreigners than anywhere else in Japan, in exactly the same position as Japanese," says a vice president, Gregory Clark, who is Australian. "The teachers knew their contracts were likely to be terminated. We rescued these people from unemployment for three years." He adds, correctly, that limited contracts for all university professors — Japanese included — are a growing fact of life in most countries.
Recent government-led changes in Japan's higher-education system — the most sweeping in more than 100 years — have many academics here wondering whether the result will be the long-promised wave of foreign professors or simply worse working conditions for everyone.
Three years ago, in an effort to force national universities to become more independent and more creative, the government made them independent agencies. As a result, university employees lost their civil-service status, which had effectively given them tenure for life.
The overhaul, which followed changes in university employment rules in the late 1990s, has also strengthened the power of university heads. The Education Ministry apparently hopes that will energize the faculty, by allowing administrators to bring in the best talent rather than leaving hiring decisions in the hands of department heads, who have traditionally preferred hiring their own graduate students.
But the abolition of job security could also pull up the drawbridge behind the smaller number of tenured foreigners, while politicizing hiring and discouraging faculty dissension among newer, younger arrivals.
After 100 years of controversy over the status of foreign academics, say some observers, the ministry might at last produce a level playing field — by dragging everyone down to the same tenuous status.
http://chronicle.comSection: InternationalVolume 53, Issue 24, Page A47
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i24/24a04701.htm
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