The Complex Construction of Professional Identities: Female EFL Educators in Japan Speak Out
Andrea Simon-Maeda
Nagoya Keizai University
This article reports on the life history narratives of nine female EFL teachers working in higher education in Japan. An interpretive qualitative analysis of the stories suggests that gender cannot be viewed as a free-floating attribute of individual subjectivities but rather as one of many components in an ever-evolving network of personal, social, and cultural circumstances. Consequently, this study does not provide a unitary description of the intersection of gender and language teaching and learning. The intention here is to offer a more complicated version of female teachers’ lives and in so doing challenge and expand prevalent TESOL education theories which do not fully address the confusions and transitions in teachers’ career trajectories. The in-depth, open-ended life history interviews allowed optimal opportunities for a dialogical authoring and understanding of work identities. Significant to this examination is how the participants engage with sociocultural circumstances in the face of ideological constraints, construct their educator identities accordingly, and mobilize available resources to contest oppressive forces in their professional lives. Bringing to the fore through narratives the interrelationship of local social actors’ interpretations of work contexts and hegemonic ideologies can inform the field by reminding us how far we have yet to go in reconceptualizing the goals of TESOL and by providing access points for approaching this task.
INTRODUCTION
I teach English at a conservative Japanese university in Osaka. I’m full-time and have tenure and I’ve also gotten, over about 12 years, promoted to full professor. I’m already known as a feminist, union-member, etc. “trouble maker,” and am liked by some faculty for that reason and disliked by some, so in some ways I have nothing to lose now, right? Over the last couple years of working there I gradually came out to selected professors and small classes of students. So far it hasn’t caused any problems and it’s made me feel much closer to those I’ve come out to. They seem to find it interesting and admire my courage in telling them, but I haven’t come out to those who I think of as jerks or those who I’ve been in conflict with. I’ll probably continue slowly coming out to students and teachers when I’m in the mood and the right occasion arises. My goal is that eventually everyone at the school knows, though I’m still afraid of the bigshots at the school hearing that I’ve actually said “I’m a lesbian” in the classroom. (participant quote, 2002)
The stories in this study provide a rich site for the examination of the striking range of possibilities and constraints in the careers of female EFL educators in Japan. Although employed in the highest rungs of the educational hierarchy in what is considered by most observers to be an advanced country, Western and non-Western participants speak out in the sections below of serious encounters with professional discrimination. Gendered discrepancies are most visible in the Japanese political and educational sphere where men constitute an overwhelming majority in the top posts of national and local government, school administrations, and academic departments, and women remain underrepresented as political leaders, ministry officials, and university students and professors (Japan Almanac, 2001). Local contextual factors (classroom culture, curriculum, job conditions) as well as more macrolevel phenomena (sociocultural ideologies, institutional and national policies) impact the situations of female educators who encounter a variety of work circumstances which differ from and at times overlap with the experiences of their male counterparts. The unsettled relationship between women’s professional and personal lives, gendered and racial inequalities, sexual orientation, ageism, cross-cultural norms, and socioeconomic background are intricately involved in the participants’ narrativized constructions of their individual, multifaceted identities.
The narratives are told from myriad standpoints, but taken together there are commonalities which have not been sufficiently addressed in TESOL education programs. Teacher training has traditionally laid more importance on instructional methods and proficiency measurements while ignoring the realities of teachers’ lives in and outside of the classroom (see Freeman & Johnson, 1998; Johnson & Golombek, 2002). A socially-situated perspective of teaching then speaks to the necessity of including in teacher preparation programs a more holistic consideration of actual work contexts located within broader socio-political circumstances. Beyond the practical implications for teacher education, female EFL educators’ stories can help us further explore and re-work our understandings of how hegemonic ideologies operate in the lives of marginalized individuals attempting to challenge and change the educational status quo through local teaching practices.
NARRATIVE INQUIRY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITIES
Since the “interpretive turn” [1] in the social sciences, analyses of storytelling have been used to observe how speakers display a particular version of Self and come to understand their everyday worlds. The value of life history interviews as an investigative procedure in feminist research projects has been well documented (e.g., Gluck & Patai, 1991; Olesen, 2000; Reinharz, 1992). The education field especially has benefited from the insights gained from personal narratives of schooling processes as told by teachers (e.g., Clandinin & Connelly, 1987, 1995). Postmodern feminist educationists (e.g., Britzman, 2000; Davies, 1993; Lather, 1991; Weiler, 1988) have used narrative methodology to “deliver voices that have been previously shut out of normative educational research” (Britzman, 2000, p. 35) and to highlight the ways that female teachers negotiate subjectivities with/in the dominant discourses of gender and education.
Narrative inquiry is gaining increasing recognition in the TESOL field as a means of depicting language learning experiences (e.g., Bell, 2002; Harklau, 2000; Kanno, 2000; Pavlenko, 1998) and how teachers construct their professional identities (e.g., Casanave & Schecter, 1997; Freeman, 1996; Johnson & Golombek, 2002; Johnston, 1997). Representing a bottom-up approach to exploring the knowledge-base of teachers, narratives are particularly attractive to critical researchers concerned with ways of including the voices of women and other marginalized groups in academic discussions of teacher practice (e.g., Canagarajah, 1996; Pennycook, 1989, 1999). Although still relatively few in number, some notable examples of the use of narratives are Duff and Uchida’s (1997) ethnographic study of teachers’ sociocultural identity formations, Johnston’s (1997) study of teacher careers in Poland, and the following edited collections: L2 academics’ literacy experiences (Belcher & Connor, 2001) non-native educators in ELT (Braine, 1999), teachers’ reflections on their language classroom practices (Johnson & Golombek, 2002), and language educators’ professional development (Casanave & Schecter, 1997). Drawing on work in this vein, the current study adds to our understanding of how educators’ identities are shaped at the nexus of local practices and larger ideological influences, and thus contributes to recent trends in teacher-directed professional development and research.
THE STUDY
Methodology
Modeling my study’s methodological approach on the above sources, I felt that life-history interviews of female EFL educators would provide some interesting insights on the special circumstances of women working in higher education contexts in Japan. I anticipated that my interviewees’ experiences would not only share some similarities and differences with male EFL educators in Japanese colleges (see, e.g., Haig, 1999, McVeigh, 2002) but also with women working in different high-status educational positions elsewhere (see, e.g., Smulyan, 2000; Skrla, 2000; Chase, 1995 for life history approaches to examining the complex role of gender in male-dominated school leadership positions in the U.S.).
Not adhering to a strict interview protocol with standardized questions, I instead used a more open-ended style (cf. Atkinson, 1998; Holstein & Gubrium, 1995) to maximize opportunities for a “dialogical authoring” (Bakhtin, 1981) and co-constructed understanding of work identities. Initial interviews conducted separately with each participant at coffee shops, school offices and private homes lasted approximately 2 1/2 hours and generally covered topics concerned with family and academic background, entry into the EFL teaching profession, work environments, and pedagogical practices. Preliminary insights were clarified and expanded through follow-up interviews which provided a fuller view of the participants’ multiplex identities. I coded the transcripts of the oral data and other textual material (researcher memos, email messages) with a qualitative data analysis software program (NVivo © ) and noted recurring patterns. Key links were then established between conceptual categories which became the thematic strands in the interpretive commentary.
Participants
To enhance the transferability of the findings, I interviewed women of various ethnic, racial, religious, national, socioeconomic, cultural, family backgrounds, with diverse levels of EFL teaching expertise in different geographical areas and tertiary-level institutions in Japan, and each at different degrees of intimacy with me. One of the participants was a close friend who introduced me to two other participants I had never met before, and the rest of the participants I knew casually through various academic and teacher networks. The interviewees represented a diverse range of personal attributes (see Appendix A for participant profiles), and of the nine participants one was Japanese and one a second-generation Korean born in Japan. The other female educators were not from Japan -- another important aspect of their “outsider” identities which I will elaborate on in later sections. As a long-term resident of Japan and American expatriate with a Japanese husband, while interviewing the participants, I could not help but reflect on my own life and EFL teaching experiences, which thus became part of the negotiated reality of the research.
In this study, the conceptualization of identity as “emerging from an individual’s different sorts of relationships with others” (Litosseliti & Sunderland, 2002, p. 15) is in line with current language and gender theories which emphasize the dialectical relationship between identity formations and social interactions. Consequently, the feminist stance this study adheres to must now briefly address those hegemonic contexts in Japan which define the parameters of women’s accounts of their work experiences.
Sociocultural Context of EFL Women Educators in Japan
There is extensive research literature on the general situation of working women in Japan [2], but to my knowledge there have been no feminist qualitative studies published in widely distributed international journals which focus specifically on the lives of professional female EFL educators in Japan or, for that matter, in other countries as well. The paucity of information in this area speaks to the field’s continued preoccupation with mainstream (male-centered) approaches to investigating educational contexts through the lens of “phallocentric knowledge systems which militate against women in the academy” (Luke & Gore, 1992, p. 193).
Teachers’ professional identities develop within a network of ongoing microlevel, private and public interactions in and outside of the classroom and macrolevel sociocultural circumstances. The ramifications of this last point are crucial for female educators who, like their male counterparts, contend with conflicts between their own idiosyncratic backgrounds and local conditions, but additionally must grapple with prevailing institutional ideologies and practices which limit women’s full participation in higher education teaching contexts. This situation was brought to the fore in 1995 with the establishment of a professional support network in Japan, WELL (Women Educators and Language Learners), to help Japanese and non-Japanese female language educators “cope with the isolation and sexism they personally experience or are personally sensitive to as women” (McMahill, 1998, p. 41). At the university and junior college level in Japan, women still make up only 13.5% of full-time faculty positions (Monbusho, 2000), and the following comments from an opinion survey (McMahill, 1998, p. 42) administered to WELL’s membership depict what many women experience in a male-dominated work situation:
I don’t have a voice.
I feel like a symbol or decoration.
I was sexually harassed at my former university and realized that I had few people to turn
to for support. The colleagues whom I approached about the sexual harassment generally
treated it as a joke or refused to talk about it.
I feel I have to work three times more than male teachers to be recognized that I am working.
At my university, women have no positions of power . . . a feminist proposed a women’s
studies course the year before I arrived. It was refused as irrelevant to language learning.
At my former university, I was only one of two full-time women and the only non-Japanese
instructor out of some 35 faculty members.
The above quotes illustrate a key concept of this article, namely, women educators remain in disadvantaged positions within Japanese higher education contexts not simply because we all share the biological attribute, female . Our everyday interactions as women operate within an elaborate network of power relations (Foucault, 1980) of which gender is only one component. Although the elimination of sex discrimination in the workplace continues to be an important goal of feminist activism, we cannot assume a homogeneous reaction to hegemonic forces. In other words, the specific circumstances of each woman’s experiences of oppression intersecting with her class, ethnicity, nationality, and innumerable other variables preclude a wholesale application of essentialist notions of “woman” or “women’s oppression.” As Donna Haraway states, “There is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual discourses and other social practices” (1990, p. 197). The stories of the participants in this study demonstrate that identity categories of race, ableism, class, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so forth may at different times over the course of one’s life become as important as the category of female due to the transitory, unpredictable nature of our ways of being in the world. Therefore, we must examine the microdynamics of the myriad meaning-making and coping strategies that women of various backgrounds resort to when confronted with professional disempowerment. For this purpose, life-history narratives served as a window into the multidimensional lives of women who use the linguistic, sociocultural, and personal tools at hand to construct their teacher identities within and against prevailing hegemonic ideologies in Japanese society.
INSIGHTS FROM THE LIFE HISTORY NARRATIVES
Based on an analysis of the life history narratives, several themes emerged to indicate the participants’ understandings of what it means to be an EFL educator in higher education in Japan; however, due to space limitations, I will focus below only on three major aspects which seemed to be particularly salient factors in the construction of teacher identities. I should make clear from the outset that, as mentioned above, gender was only one of several dynamics, albeit a powerful one, which played a part in the discursive fashioning of professional lives. More specifically, it was the interface of gender and the following themes which contributed in significant ways to narrativized perceptions of becoming and being a female teacher in a sometimes hostile traditional environment:
personal biographies (sociocultural/family background, previous
teaching/learning experiences)
ways of dealing with (cross-cultural) conflicts in work environments
attitudes towards students and professional practices
Personal Biographies
At the beginning of each interview [3], I asked each interviewee to talk about her family background, past and present, and the influences, if any, on her career trajectory. Across the interviews, there was a clear pattern of participants quickly pinpointing a specific juncture or state of affairs in their early years which they felt has affected their evolving self-definitions in relation to the EFL teaching profession.
I always pushed myself forward.
Consider the following account from Celine, a 30-year old White American with a serious visual impairment who was in the process of upgrading her educational qualifications in order to obtain a full-time, college level teaching position:
Andrea: So, you told me before that you wanted to continue on to the doctoral program.
Celine: Right now it’s a completely greedy situation. I want the most money possible, so
give me my Ph.D., yeah, I would like to be called doctor, but I mostly want to go
back to Montana and show all those people that said I would not graduate from
university. People flat out told my folks, “Your daughter will not graduate from
university, she won’t be able to get a Bachelor’s,” because I couldn’t read.
Because in elementary school they told me I would fail, even teachers, halfway
through elementary school they said, “Your daughter’s not going to finish,
or the percentage of students that went to that elementary school didn’t graduate,
and I was going to be one of them,” kind of thing. So I kind of want my Ph.D.
to go back and say, “Excuse me, [chuckle] I did it [said in a sarcastic voice].”
Yeah, I just want to show off and punch them in the nose, but even my mother’s
aunt and uncle said I would never graduate, our own family said I wouldn’t.
Being a recent doctoral graduate myself, I admired Celine’s determination to pursue a long, arduous academic journey which, in light of Japan’s current sluggish economy, will not necessarily lead to a lucrative employment outcome but is nevertheless a necessary requirement to moving up the ranks of the teaching hierarchy. The idea of wanting to show off or proving one’s worth through academic or professional achievement appeared throughout other participants’ stories as well but with a kaleidoscopic array of different motivating forces due to the particularities of unique biographical backgrounds. Julia, an American expatriate fluent in Japanese, spoke about trying to overcome her feelings of academic inadequacy:
Julia: So, as I got into this then about writing and politics, and then my own experience, how marginal or how I feel in Japan as an academic, I always feel that I’m not, I don’t measure up to the standards, the Western standards. I had a Scottish professor at [name of university in Japan] who said because I was an American, I didn’t know how to write. I didn’t have my last year of high school English in the States because I came to Japan, and I haven’t gone to, you know, a Western academic university, so right along the way I feel like I neve r measure up to what the Western academic standard is. So when I started writing my Master’s thesis for a British university, I kept coming up against this. I felt that I had to prove myself academically, I want to prove that I can do what an academic is expected to do and do it well and to really prove myself.
A second-generation Korean born in Japan, Se-ri told her story of racial discrimination and then added how she specifically chose English education and a career as an English teacher as a means to “fight back”:
Se-ri: You know, my father, he wanted to send me to a private women’s junior high and
high school, pretty famous one, and he went to one of the teachers at the school he had consulted about his daughter’s future and told the teacher the plan that, “I’m gonna have my daughter challenge taking the entrance examination to the school.” And that teacher said, “No she can’t because she’s Korean and that school will not accept Korean students’ applications.” And my father got really pissed and he just told her that, “No matter what you say, I’m gonna have her take the entrance examination.” So I couldn’t get a recommendation from her and I passed it, and when I got news from the school many of my classmates came to me and said, “We heard that your father paid money to the school.” And I said, “What the hell, who is spreading that kind of stupid rumor?” and they said, “The teacher.” My father said that in order to survive in society and also in order to fight back against Japanese discrimination, education is the key. If I were an ordinary Korean, just living like an ordinary Korean housewife they [Japanese] don’t respect me. But if I say, “I speak English fluently and I was in the States for 6 years,” then their way of looking at me is completely different. My motivation was exclusively instrumental, if I master the language of the people [Westerners] who Japanese admire, then I can be equal to their [Japanese] rank, and they eventually have to respect me because I will be speaking their [Westerners’] language, that was the only reason I became an English teacher.
Mariko, a Japanese EFL teacher-educator, also expressed the idea of attaining the prestige which she felt she was deprived of as a child because of her family background:
Mariko: So, I was a kind of good student since maybe 5 th or 6 th grade. I had a consciousness
I want to be good especially after that bullying incident [Mariko had previously re-
lated how she had been bullied in elementary school by students who wouldn’t talk
to her because her father “works at night”]. I decided, I told myself, “Well, I’ll nev-
er be beaten by those regular girls,” you know, normally brought up girls, so that
was a kind of competition I wanted to win over. If I could speak good English I
thought I could get some jobs. So, then I decided to get a degree, so I have to be the
same with other women, to be prepared for the real job which will give me lifetime assuredness. I started kind of organizing my life a lot and then that was the first time I thought about being an English teacher because I thought about my background and then being a Japanese woman in Japan, what job can give me good enough money with some social respect, that’s a teacher. I always pushed myself forward and forward just because I don’t want to be defeated.
Likewise, Diana, a Black South African, juxtaposed an account of an early ostracizing experience at an English boarding school with her current educational philosophy:
Diana: And there were lots of girls who had never seen a Black person. So for them it was a
different sort of racism, it wasn’t racism, but it was, I was really something that they
had never seen, they had seen on TV, but never had they been up close. So it was ig-
norance rather, so that, “When you would have a shower does your skin rub off?” and when they looked at the palms of my hand, they couldn’t believe that they were white. I was 16 years old and I go there, they had their own little cliques, so here I came in the middle of the term and it was very difficult to make friends and I was trying to please. So suddenly in this group I was really the outsider and I was Black and I mean just all these things, and the nuns had this thing that I was from Africa and so I was dumb, and they would say to me, “But you’re from Africa and you know how you are so you won’t pass the exam.” They would say things like that to me, can you imagine?” So it was very hurtful and I cried a lot. People try to pull you down, I found that in life, but I never listen to them and that’s always my message to my students, whatever you want to be you can be if you believe in yourselves. Why do we always assume like teachers at Japanese high schools or universities that these kids are incapable, you know, because they aren’t, you’ve got to push them to do it.
Janet, a White, 50-year old British woman brought up in various ex-colonies, linked her awareness of the ethnocentric tendencies of EFL education to her antagonistic opinion of her father’s racism:
Janet: I later discovered that my father was very racially prejudiced, and that continued
until he popped off. So that’s certainly probably a part of the consciousness that
has made me a little doubtful about what ESL does. I mean how much of EFL out-
side of English-speaking metropolitan centers and ESL inside, how much of it is
colonial intent, not intent necessarily not conscious intent very often, but in effect.
I have to say I don’t think I consciously theorized about it at all until, oh, probably my
30s. I was already in Japan by then, I was aware of it of course, I was irritated by it, I
mean every time my father said something racist it irritated me. So it wasn’t really un-
til I got into Afro-American studies, cultural studies, post-colonial studies that I could
reflect on this part of my background.
In diverse ways, participants recounted how family or previous schooling experiences were intertwined in a complex set of relationships to their views on education, teaching, and self-identity. These women drew on multiple subject positions as daughters, expatriates, racial minorities, or socioeconomically disadvantaged in the act of working out an understanding of what differences their personal backgrounds made to their own learning contexts and how they experienced the EFL teaching profession.
I’m the man in the family.
Six of the nine participants were married, and there were various perceptions of the role played by spouses in career paths. Conventional gender ideologies in Japan are such that married women with professional employment aspirations may be, as Liddle and Nakajima (2000) contend, “required to bring with them higher levels of economic, social and cultural capital than comparable men if they are to convert these capitals into symbolic power in the form of recognition and respect as legitimate players in the field” (p. 222). Thus, sociocultural priority is given to male professionals who are expected to be the main breadwinners with supportive wives who adhere to a ryousaikenbo (good wife, wise mother) norm at the expense of either giving up their careers or attempting to juggle career and domestic duties. For Julia, whose Japanese husband was unemployed, her professional EFL teaching identity evolved from a different set of circumstances which did not follow the cultural mandate for working women in Japan but yet were in conflict with Julia’s personal ideals concerning married life:
Andrea: And after you got married, I know this is a sensitive issue.
Julia: I have been the breadwinner from day one. So, when I was working part-time I
became pregnant and I had 6 classes so that was a really solid, stable income. But
it wasn’t solid, stable as far as long term, and especially having a child and a hus-
band who didn’t look like he was going to be working. And there’s a problem with
me because, my hope, my ideal I think was to be a support to a man who had a ca-
reer. Not that I wouldn’t have my own but I see myself, my makeup, as I have a very strong desire, it almost feels innate to be supportive, to be helpful, I like doing it, I mean, being supportive. Like doing housework, if my husband were out working all day, then it would be a delight to be the head of the house so that he comes home and feels he can relax, but maybe now because I understand what it’s like to be outside, working and coming home to a house that’s dirty and dinner isn’t ready, just makes life unpleasant. So I understand the value of housewife duties.
Andrea: So you understand both, being professional and coming home, but also being at
at home and being supportive for someone who’s out working.
Julia: Right, but I like to stay home and bake cakes and clean and do the stuff, the kind
of traditional women’s stuff.
Julia’s concern with having a “solid stable income” was quite understandable, due to Japan’s economic recession and high unemployment rate (“5.4% jobless rate,” 2003). Despite her own ideal of being a supportive wife at home, Julia was actively pursuing a professional EFL career by upgrading her teaching credentials in order to maintain her college teaching position and support her family, but not without a considerable amount of ambivalent feelings:
Andrea: So you made the decision to do the Master’s and you did it.// Julia: Desired results
but // Andrea: Can we talk about that?// Julia: Ah, gee, depress me. It’s just that
I’m not good at doing two things at once and I like to do what I do well so it was
a very frustrating experience for me. And I still feel a kind of bitter taste in my
mouth because I don’t feel that I did, I mean, it was a good experience and I’m so
glad I did it and I learned a tremendous amount, the difficulty was that I expect myself to do well, and I want to do well and I couldn’t do well because I had priorities and it wasn’t my first priority. I couldn’t make it my first priority, my family was my first priority, my job was my second priority, and the Master’s was my third, and I couldn’t change that and it was tremendously frustrating. My whole Master’s thesis was trying to come to grips with my own identity in Japan, and my whole identity in Japan, trying to be a professional is that I feel like a fake because I don’t have the, here you’re getting the self-confidence stuff, boy you’ve got one big lack of it right here.
In contrast to Julia’s ambivalent attitude, Celine elaborated rather straightforwardly in an email correspondence on her views concerning the domestic/career expectations of husbands and wives vis à vis the opinions of her female Japanese friends:
I remember writing that I was the "man" in the family. Hee hee. Many of my Japanese friends say so because [husband’s name] does all the shopping and holds the money, "purse strings" takes out the garbage and hangs the laundry, so they say I'm the man in the family. This has made some of my friends uncomfortable and as I mentioned they have criticized me. When we went into our relationship I made sure I was clear about who I was. Of course I didn’t know I was going to further my education but my goals and dreams, no one could stop. In fact, I’m probably the “man” in my marriage because we live by my standard.
For unmarried female teachers as well, traditional societal ideologies served to constrain professional discourses:
Andrea: Tell me what it’s been like for you as a single woman.
Janet: Well, in fact our present dean still says, “Janet, kawaikattan da yo ne .” [You used to be cute]. So there’s that. There’s a very fatherly older teacher who’s now retired who used to make a great effort to find a husband for me. We’ve done that. I think we’ve probably all passed it now because I mean obviously, at this point, as one of my Japanese male friends tends to say, “ mou uren yo omae .” [You can’t be sold anymore.] [laughter]. So in that sense, I’m sort of over that hill. Most of my female colleagues in my department are indeed married, uhm, there’s one exception.
Before getting married, Celine was also subjected to sexist remarks when her contract at her previous job ended:
Celine: They don’t care where you go or what you do, in fact everyone thought I was going
back to the States to get married, it was so funny, ughh. This Japanese guy, he was
young, he had perfect, beautiful English, native-speaker level of English, right down to the idioms and everything, even cultural understanding, really good grasp of everything. And when I left, and it was at my sayonara party that my school had given me, he said, “So Celine, you’re going back to get married, right?” I was like, “The contract’s making me go back. I was like “Whoa guy, we’ve been teaching together for 2 years now and I can’t believe you’re asking me this question.” I just wanted to smack him, “What the hell’s wrong with you, of course not.” And I told him that flat out, and he’s like, “But you’re 24 now.” And I’m like, “Yeah so, what’s your point.”
Participants’ presentations of themselves were thus inscribed by normative Japanese expectations regarding a woman’s personal circumstances. Similarly, in her report on woman teachers in the UK, Tamboukou (2000) comments on the frustrating dilemmas that professional women face:
[T]he ambivalent persona of the female educator is invested by the accumulation of a series of layers that emerge from the gaps, rupture, and interstices women have slipped into, as they have tried to avoid being positioned in the social structuring of a world that recognises them only as belonging subjects, usually wives, mothers, daughters or sisters of enclosed spaces, like those of their families. (p. 470)
In sum, the EFL teachers in this study have struggled to resolve conflicts inherent in the (re)negotiation of their subject positions, forged from personal backgrounds, within work environments which were not always conducive to enhancing their professional identities.
Dealing with conflicts in work environments
In addition to a host of ongoing career obstacles confronted by all the study’s participants, some of which have already been alluded to above, there were additional cross-cultural complications which the non-Japanese educators encountered in their host country. What was striking across the interviews was the oftentimes uneasy coexistence of descriptions of disempowering experiences as women or a sense of alienation because of our gaikokujin (foreigner) status and stories of individual solutions to these problems. As Susan Chase (1995) puts it:
[S]tories about power and accomplishment through professional work have been the
prerogative of middle-class, or upwardly mobile, White men . . . women, particularly
women of color and women raised in working-class families – have not had access to
well-paid, prestigious, professional jobs and so have not had access to discourse that
is culturally intelligible within that realm. (p. 48)
In other words, as women in a male-dominated work environment in Japan, our accounts of successful careers are inevitably interwoven with stories of inequity -- a disjunctive narrativization process in which interlocutors must work especially hard at constructing viable professional identities.
I’ve felt like a second-class citizen
In Sandra McKay’s book, Teaching English Overseas: An Introduction (1992), expatriate teachers are advised that their role in their host country “is not to effect change in its social and educational structure but rather to attempt to increase their students’ proficiency in English as best they can within the existing structure” (p. ix-x). The reader is then presented with alternatives to undesirable EFL teaching situations which include leaving the country, changing institutions, or negotiating with the administration and students over matters such as language policies and curriculum. In light of the increasing cases of intermarriage with Japanese (Japan Almanac, 2001), many educators are contemplating long-term employment and/or permanent residency in Japan, and so the first two alternatives above do not seem practical. Additionally, in the case of non-Japanese couples, if career-oriented wives do not take a proactive stance in maintaining their jobs, they not only risk being further excluded from the dwindling pool of EFL teaching positions but also may find it more difficult to enter Japanese society. Celine elaborated on how establishing a professional identity as a college EFL instructor was intimately related to her becoming a “respected” member of Japanese society:
Celine: So within XYZ [private language school where Celine was previously employed]
I did see that there were limitations, that in a sense no matter what I make of myself
I was still being labelled as just an eikaiwa [English conversation] person and that it
wasn’t taken too seriously in the community. And when people would ask me,
“ oshigoto wa ?” [What do you do?] if I wanted to tell them I would, but they always
assumed that I was an eigo no sensei [English teacher]. That didn’t bother me, I hap-
pily admitted I was an eikaiwa teacher. But when I went to immigration, and would
go, “Well, I would like permanent residence, and you need permanent residence to
get the bank loan to buy a house, that we would like to live here forever like the
house that Jack built,” he [immigration officer] basically told me to go out the door.
There was nothing sound or substantial or serious that he was going to take from me
when I said I was an XYZ teacher, like, “We know the eikaiwa turnover rate, we’re
not going to accept your application for permanent residence, come back when
you’ve got something more secure.” If I can show them I have a salaried contract,
tenure preferably, I have the greater chance of getting it. So in that respect, yeah I get
a lot of respect.
To make her point concerning her determination to become a professional higher-education teacher and achieve the attendant symbolic capital, Celine embedded within the central narrative a complementary story concerning an interaction with an immigration officer. A foreign instructor’s work status is highly contingent on larger socioeconomic factors as well as different educational institutions’ employment policies, some of which are not always favorable to foreign instructors, as Janet explained:
Andrea: You’ve been here for how many years?
Janet: Twenty-three, this will be my twenty-third year as a full-timer plus two years
part-time.
Andrea: And always on this kind of renewable contract.
Janet: Absolutely.
Andrea: What are you on now?
Janet: One year.
Andrea: Gee, I just assumed because you’ve been here so long that you had a very secure
job.
Janet: Well no, like I said, there was this big broohaha about “Oh, you’re gonna stay for
ever.” And I even got, “ rokujugousai made kanou ” [It’s possible for you to stay
until you’re 65]. The idea was that, “You’re tenured and we will keep you until
you’re 65,” and also the pension thing is tied up in this. And then suddenly at the
end of 1995 it was, “All foreigners will now have the same length of contract, it will
be 6 years and, we can’t make an exception of you so understand the economic
situation is such that we don’t want to hire any foreigners over the age of 35 because they’re too expensive, and therefore you and your aged colleagues will go at the end of 6 years like everybody else.”
Andrea: This is just for the gaijin [foreigners]?
Janet: Yeah. And I don’t want to end up so bitter about this, I mean Japan has been a
home for, really, I’ve lived here longer than I’ve lived in any country, and to end up
feeling bitter is not what I want.
In addition to unfair work-related conditions which are a concern for many teachers worldwide, there is a different yet related set of issues which restrain non-Japanese college educators from developing a sense of professionalism on a par with their Japanese colleagues. EFL teachers from Western countries are commonly perceived as being a privileged group entrusted with teaching a subject matter of considerable sociopolitical value. Notwithstanding the high-prestige status of the English language as seen from macro-social perspectives (see, e.g., Crystal, 1997; Kachru, 1989; Phillipson, 1992), the microlevel experiences of teachers at work reveal a complex transformation of global factors. Julia explained the difference between the sense of “community” she felt with the Japanese staff at her former college as opposed to the atmosphere at her present job:
Julia: At ABC [name of former school] they had really accepted me as part, I mean, I didn’t feel any sabetsu [discrimination] in the sense of, uhm, I really felt a part of the community, a part of the staff, we were treated equally. But when I came to XYZ [name of present college] I have felt like a second-class citizen.
Andrea: Why? Even after getting the degree [Master’s]?
Julia: Yeah, probably it’s more of the academia, probably if I had come in with a Ph.D. or something, you know, “Wow!” there’s that kind of attitude at XYZ. And also English teachers, I think they have a low evaluation, you know, anybody can teach English. The Japanese faculty in the English department think that anybody, foreigners, native speakers, that, you know, teaching English, is, you know, you’ve got to have an MA, but basically when it comes right down to it, anybody can teach as long as they’ve got an MA. We all feel that the Japanese feel that way.
Janet also expressed a similar interpretation of Japanese administrator/faculty views of the role of the foreign EFL teacher:
Janet: When I was first hired I taught the seminar in education in English for the juniors and seniors who were going to be teachers. Now there is no gaijin [foreigner] teaching any seminar class because that’s not what we’re here for, we’re supposed to be teaching English and, you know, we’re not up to that academic shit.
The seminar class in most Japanese colleges and universities is usually taught by Japanese professors and is accorded more academic prestige than courses like English Communication which are reserved for the foreign instructors. In light of this situation, Janet later expressed the sentiments of many non-Japanese EFL teachers who feel that “we are only there to be parrots, walking tape recorders.” This one-dimensional view of the role of the foreign teacher also surfaced in Julia’s account of her college teaching job interview:
Julia: “Well, we expect you to be 100% American when you come here” [laughter]. And I just remember I didn’t say anything, I just said “ wakarimashita ” [I understand] or something, because to me it was such an affront to my whole experience. And what does it mean to be a 100% American? In fact, what they did, something they liked [Julia’s Japanese fluency], but they didn’t want to face that up front, that, yes they knew that my Japanese would be a real advantage, but they didn’t want that up front at all, like, “On the surface we want you to be 100% American.”
From Se-ri’s unique insider/outsider position as a second-generation Korean born in Japan, she talked about the discriminatory situation she saw as existing in her college English department:
Se-ri: They [college administrators] want to have fresh faces because they only look at you as an object, like a kazari [ornament], akusesarii mitai ne [like an accessory, right], native speakers, White Caucasian, with blonde hair, blue eyes is the symbol of internationalization. So once they become older [laughs] they want to switch. That kind of attitude should be really changed. That’s like, you know, I keep calling these Japanese, many of the Japanese English teachers are racist .
Just as Janet alluded previously to job discrimination on the basis of age, Se-ri also mentioned above how the work status of foreign instructors depends on criteria which do not apply to our Japanese colleagues. Se-ri then insisted later on during the interview that one’s English teaching capabilities should not be judged according to ethnic/racial background and that “one day we really should erase the categorical names like native or non-native.” In the same vein, Mariah recounted an experience with racial discrimination in Japan where Filipino women must contend with the negative stereotypes ascribed to japayuki (female Filipino entertainers/sex workers):
Andrea: Tell me about when you were hired, I guess you went for an interview, or how
did you find out about the job? What was that like?
Mariah: Maybe I could start by not directly answering that one. I have another experience
when I first came to Japan. Because I’m very active in the Philippines and I want
to work right away, I tried calling a school. But that man, I never met him, I think
he’s biased.