Masahide Shibusawa
Executive Director, MRA Foundation
Co-Founder, Language Institute of Japan
On behalf of the board and the staff of the MRA Foundation, I would like to extend my congratulations and gratitude on the publication of this CD of the amazing stories, past and present, of the Language Institute of Japan (LIOJ).
In the late 1960s, a small group of us that included Roland and Terttu Harker came together to consider launching an experimental program designed to provide language training, as well as skills for living in the English-speaking world, for the increasing number of Japanese aspiring to study or work abroad. Hardly did we expect that the experiment would grow so rapidly and in such a way as to make a substantive contribution to the process of Japan's internationalization, let alone provide a valuable financial underpinning to the management of the Asia Center building in Odawara.
While we decided to name the program an "institute," LIOJ was never a "school" equipped with a long-term educational strategy or solid fund-raising arrangements. Rather, the program turned out to be a phenomenon that evolved spontaneously around the interaction between the North American teachers and the Japanese students. Under successive directors, LIOJ maintained an outstanding flexibility of management, enabling swift and timely responses to the changing needs of Japan's people and society.
One of the factors that helped generate a pattern of operation for LIOJ was the legacy of Moral Rearmament (MRA), which was engaged in a wide range of activities around the world in the 1950s and 1960s. Of course, LIOJ had no intention whatsoever in proselytizing MRA's credo. Instead, LIOJ was genuinely committed to educating Japanese people in the ways of communicating in English and thereby facilitating the process of internationalization, one of the top priorities of post-war Japan. Nevertheless, there is a distinct aspect of MRA life that has long remained in the daily life and operation of LIOJ.
In the words of MRA founder, Dr. Frank N. D. Buchman, MRA was conceived as a "force," rather than as an "organization." It insulated itself from such organizational trappings as articles of incorporation, lists of membership, and by-laws to regulate its daily management. Instead, participants were expected to act freely, based on the conviction they felt deep in their hearts. There was no labor agreement to stipulate the amount of work and the compensation thereof, or to define the difference between one's work and one's personal life. LIOJ's founding director, Rowland Harker, and his wife, Terttu, were believers of such principles and their lives were dedicated--literally 24 hours a day, seven days a week--to promoting the institute's objectives.
Contrary to concerns that such an attitude toward work might alienate the incoming teachers who grew up in the United States amid the post-Vietnam counter culture, it was a pleasant surprise that LIOJ's structure of work appeared to be compatible with the aspirations of successive directors and teachers. Admittedly, none of them was converted to MRA. However, they were quite willing to accept the reality of intensive language education in a residential setting that demanded extraordinary commitment, dedication, and hard work on the part of the teachers and students. Thus developed LIOJ's unique work/life combination, which would not have been viable in a traditional educational setting dominated by strict work rules and finely defined rights and duties on the part of the teachers.
Altogether, 340 men and women have held teaching positions at LIOJ in the past 35 years. They were fully aware of the intensity of the work that would be expected of them. What drew them to LIOJ, nevertheless, was perhaps an opportunity to experiment with an ideal way of teaching English. Likewise, few students complained about the workload that was imposed upon them. Besides being Japan's elite business executives, the students were highly motivated to learn English as quickly as possible, since most of them were soon to be transferred to a new post abroad. There was little doubt that the mix of students and teachers with such backgrounds helped enhance the effectiveness of the program by creating a highly productive environment for language education, which was quite unusual in Japan.
Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, LIOJ offered annually ten four-week courses for businessmen and drew participants from major companies around the country. As a result, the teachers were required to cope with a highly intensive teaching load month after month, with scant opportunity to rest and recuperate. Doubtlessly, the presence of highly intelligent and strongly motivated students was a help in generating an exciting environment, which in turn provided the teachers with a strong incentive to live with the kind of work/life arrangement somewhat reminiscent of the old MRA operation.
The successful development of LIOJ's business program coincided with the period of Japan's extraordinarily high growth. The way in which 4,000 or more elite businessmen went through the four-week residential course and, through their daily work and life, experienced intense interaction with young native-speaker teachers, is evidence of the valuable contribution that LIOJ--and, by implication, the MRA Foundation--made to Japan's urgent need for internationalization.
In addition to the businessmen's course, LIOJ for the past 35 years has offered a one-week residential summer workshop for teachers of English. This program, known as the teachers' workshop, is where the LIOJ's work/life structure proved to be especially effective. The growing aspiration of teachers throughout Japan to improve their teaching skills, as well as to reinforce their own English proficiency, met with the willingness of our LIOJ teachers to offer everything to assist the endeavors of their counterparts in Japan. The effectiveness of such encounters was seen in the increasing number of teachers who took their time in the heat of the Japanese summer to participate in the program year after year. The presence of world-renowned lecturers, whom LIOJ invited for these occasions, added highly academic quality to these workshops. Since the latter half of the 1970s, the teachers' workshop has invited participants from various Asian countries such as Thailand, China, Vietnam, India, Malaysia, and even Russia, and many experienced native English-speaking teachers who had worked for many years in these countries. The participation of these international teachers brought a new dimension to LIOJ's own internationalization.
During the 1970s and the 1980s, Japan's relationship with the outside world was embroiled with persistent conflict due to the perpetual and enormous trade surplus. LIOJ tried to facilitate in-depth discussion among the workshop participants with the hope of inciting a clear and balanced understanding of the issues, and thereby enabling them to engage in frank and intelligent dialogues with people whom they would encounter inside and outside of Japan.
Since the beginning of the 1990s, however, Japan has suffered from serious economic dislocation due to the burst of the so-called bubble economy. Through such turmoil, Japan's interaction with the world began to change somewhat in its nature and character. The predominantly go-it-alone mentality that had dominated the nation for many decades, if not centuries, gradually abated, and the country and its people appear to have become more comfortable in interacting with the world of the 21st century. However, the country has yet to discover its rightful role in the world, or to overcome a variety of hang-ups in its relations with such neighboring countries as China, the two Koreas, and Russia.
Analyses of Japan's latest problem tend to put too much emphasis on its economic difficulties. Although there is no doubt that the economy needs to rebound as soon as possible, the real problems facing the country seem to lie in the difficulty in redefining and re-innovating its social and political systems. Behind the astounding economic growth of the 1970s and the 1980s, the nation's decision-making system was rendered excessively bureaucratic and out-of-date, while the intricate network of vested interests was entrenched at the heart of its political system. Although there is a genuine wish for a change among the majority of people, there is still a stiff resistance to it because of the fear that such change might disrupt a precious stability of its society which the nation has come to expect as a given. Conflict between these two forces is likely to dominate Japan's political and social scene for some years to come.
The post-bubble recession brought great difficulty to LIOJ by way of taking away the once lucrative market for its businessmen's program, a long-term mainstay of its operation. The prolonged recession discouraged companies to invest in personnel training, which was aggravated further by the extraordinary hike in the value of the yen. The rate of 360 yen to a dollar in the 1960s quadruplicated to a staggering 79 yen to the dollar at the beginning of the 1990s. Naturally, this pushed the cost of the intensive course for businessmen quite out of the market, forcing LIOJ to curtail such program and move toward a variety of courses such as high school intensives, and a team teaching program at local schools, or even in Thailand.
The kind of multi-national, multi-cultural, and multi-lingual operational culture that LIOJ has nurtured in the past may well have a key role to play in shaping Japan's future, as the nation gropes for a better balanced and mutually beneficial relation with the outside world. Jim Kahny, who assumed the directorship in 1996, has shown a superb leadership in continuing to manage the institute in an increasingly difficult environment, for which I am grateful indeed. With the support of his wife, Doray, and other staff, I hope LIOJ will conceive yet another program that will meet the real needs of Japan in the coming years and decades.
In closing, I would like to pay homage and heartfelt gratitude to every director, teacher, lecturer, participant, student, manager, and staff member--well over 18,000 people in all--who, through their passion and commitment, contributed in developing a truly memorable "phenomenon" by the name of the "Language Institute of Japan."
September 2003
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