Abstract
This chapter focuses on the ‘Top Global Universities Project’, a recent government-sponsored initiative to globalize Japanese universities, and investigates to what extent the ideologies of native-speakerism and/or nihonjinron (discourses of Japaneseness) are reflected in this policy and the hiring practices associated with it. Drawing on critical discourse analysis (CDA), publicly available documents relating to the programme as well as job advertisements published by the participating universities are analysed and compared with information available online concerning the actual people hired. Although the term ‘native-speaker’ is never explicitly mentioned in official documents relating to the programme, terms implicitly referring to ‘native speakers’ are, and an analysis of 36 job advertisements reveals that many participating universities seemed to interpret the wording of the documents in this way, as their frequent use of the terms ‘native-speaker’ and ‘native-level English’ illustrates. An examination of the types of people hired reveals that some clear cases of native-speakerism can still be seen; nevertheless, both ‘native speakers’ and ‘non-native speakers’ were hired for both permanent and non-permanent positions, although there seemed to be a preference for hiring ‘non-native speakers’ who were either northeast Asian or white in appearance. On the other hand, when the term ‘native speaker’ was not used or when Japanese proficiency was mentioned in the advertisements, there was a clear preference for hiring Japanese nationals, suggesting the presence of ‘Japanese native-speakerism’, which may place non-Japanese applicants at a disadvantage.
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Notes
- 1.
In this paper I use the terms ‘white’, ‘Asian’, etc. as descriptors of racialized people, reflecting the common usage of these terms in the public domain, whilst also recognizing the inadequacy of these terms to describe the concept of ‘race’, which is in fact a social construction rather than a biological reality (see Kubota & Lin, 2009).
- 2.
A list of the private and public universities participating in the project can be found on MEXT’s website: https://tgu.mext.go.jp/en/downloads/pdf/sgu_flier.pdf
- 3.
Rose and McKinley (2017) use the term ‘Englishization’ to refer to the increase in English-as-a-medium-of-instruction courses at universities in contexts where English is not a first or official language, for the purpose of internationalization.
- 4.
Its regulations ‘are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of Japan’, which implies that they follow the Employment Security Act (http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/%2D%2D-ed_protect/%2D%2D-protrav/%2D%2D-ilo_aids/documents/legaldocument/wcms_117326.pdf) which prohibits employment discrimination based on race and nationality.
- 5.
The term ‘North East Asian’ is used in this paper to refer to people of Asian appearance, originating from the geographical region of China, Korea and Japan. Typically, people from this region use a Chinese character-based writing system to some extent.
- 6.
Although it goes beyond the current analysis, there is also the possibility that different nuances may be triggered by the use of the terms ‘teach’ and ‘lecture’ in job advertisements. It is possible that ‘lecture’ may imply a higher status within the university teaching hierarchy and thus impact on the type of people hired to fill such positions.
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Fairbrother, L. (2020). Native-Speakerism and Nihonjinron in Japanese Higher Education Policy and Related Hiring Practices: A Focus on the Japanese ‘Top Global Universities’ Project. In: Houghton, S.A., Bouchard, J. (eds) Native-Speakerism. Intercultural Communication and Language Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5671-5_3
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