Debating Culture Shock

I've gotten involved in coaching the Japan World Schoolies, the Japanese team going to the World Schools Debating Competition (WSDC) 2011 in Scotland. It came about very randomly...


A month or so after arriving in Japan, it occurred to me that as I was teaching my students debating anyway, why not enter them in some competitions? Finding the relevant info in English was a struggle. Even the Prefectural Board of Education had to scramble for it when I requested their assistance. Eventually I found a Japanese website and using Google translate (official sponsor of my low motivation to study Japanese), I could sort of read it. It turned out to be too late to enter my kids in the 2010 Prefectural competition...boo...

A few months later it occurred to me to email the Japanese debating powers that be, to see if I couldn't become involved in some other way. I contacted all kinds of random people. I would comb past WUDC tabs, deciphering abbreviations to find the Japanese universities who had sent teams. Then I'd comb their institutional websites for information on the English department. Finally, all the English staff with readily accessible email addresses were bombarded with emails, albeit apologetic and pleading ones. If you're not the person responsible, could you PLEASE direct me to the person who is?...0 response.

The hook that took was a message I sent to a man involved in the All-Japan high schools debating competition. I'd volunteered to help coach the team that had (already) been chosen for WSDC 2011. My orignial message was fairly presumptuous. Suffice to say I exaggerated my university debating success...impling that I was a complete hotshot without actually naming anything I had (not) won. He replied a few months later and in fact apologised for the delay, to which my response was, 'Well it's awfully decent of you to get back to me at all, complete sham face that I am for having cold-written you in the first place'.

From him, I got the email address of the amazing Japan WSDC team coach, and she allowed me to visit them in the (not too inconveniently located) city of Urawa, Saitama Prefecture. Yes, I spend much of that Saturday on the Shinkansen but it literally could not have been more worth it! The team is a really smart group of 1 2-nensei and 3 3-nensei girls. I've visited them twice more since and am consistently blown away by their English ability and general smarts. In truth, I'm also pretty chuffed that they're all girls...I mean how unlikely was that? Not that it matters, and it didn't occur to me until a while after I first me them, but it is statistically not what you'd expect. Yay!

In all in anyways, a few prep sessions later I finally got to meet the coach who'd allowed me access to these lingual prodigies. She told me about the Japan Parliamentary Debating Union's Pre-Australs 2011 tournament, which was held last Sunday, June 26th. (I can only hope my preference for the American date format will fade when I leave Japan!) In an incredible display of good faith, she put in a good word for me with the organisers and I judged at it. The incredulity of the faith was due to my never having seen, let along adjudicated an AustralAsian style debate. Nevertheless, I gathered up my complicated directions to the Yagami Campus of Keio University, Kanagawa Prefecture and was on my way...

...to debating culture shock!

The first divergence from the familiar inter-varsity format of previous competitions I've attended was the schedule, which rather than being a black and white page filled with boring, practical info, was a choice of 3 adorably coloured and illustrated booklets. Totemo kawaii deshita ne! Needless to say I choose the most pink one before proceeding inside to the base lecture hall.

The lounging around with between 50 and 100 people waiting for the competition to commence was pretty much exactly like being at an Irish competition. Of course, I recognised less people and more of them were Japanese. Shock number two was when I looked at the list of teams including names printed in the booklet...how convenient (Note to Irish debate conveners: HOW CONVENIENT). It avoids those unnecessary 'how do you spell that?' questions that chair judges have to ask speakers. Also, 'what is your name?' if they're happy to guesstimate who is who on the team and risk mixing up speaker points (which barely matter anyway).

Anyway, during my perusal of the delightfully formatted participants list, I found the names of two veteran British debaters. Eeeeeeeeeeee? But yes indeed, they were speaking in the competition! Having arrived in Tokyo the previous day and being booked to teach an AustralAsians boot camp for Japanese debaters, they'd been encouraged to speak at Pre-Australs. It was incredibly weird to randomly meet people I recognised from home in Japan. That just doesn't happen in a country this big with so few British and Irish people. Then again, I suppose the international debate circuit's a bit odd. It's a pretty big internationalising force..like I suppose any major international community with a common pastime and an international competition.

It was a twisted kind of culture shock I felt then. Something like...you're not supposed to be here, you're Caucasian and not American/Canadian. You're not speaking slowly all the time as if explaining something to a non-native speaker. You don't pepper your speech with Japanese terms that you don't think of as actual Japanese, but are in fact Japanese and as such can't be understood by English speakers who don't live in Japan ( like genki, enkai, combini, chou-hai, onigiri, kawaii, otsukaresma, so desu ne, hontou ni, atsui and so on)...but wait, wasn't I like that once? Cue defamiliarisation.

Fourthly (I think that was three), the motionS were released. Yeah with an S. In Australs style there's one fairly general theme (like cross border activities, social media, outside vs. inside), and 3 motions which the two teams in each room vote to decide between. These are mad times we live in, mad! I'm used to that whole: get THE motion, mull over THE motion preempting the debate, listen to a debate on THE motion, dissect the debate on THE motion. With 3 I usually wasn't sure what would be debated until the first speaker took the floor. This led to a mixture of emotions such as relief..it's not that god-awful 1st one, and annoyance...it's not that super-interesting 3rd one, as well as a healthy unpreparedness for each debate I heard. Having said that the judging went OK.

Food-wise, there was no food. Strangely, for Japan there was not a combini in striking range. It was exactly like the whole 'college SPAR's closed on Sundays, sorry lads you'll have to starve' Irish IV conundrum. Also, we couldn't eat or drink inside, AND people heeded this advice. I had to hide the large ice-mocha I'd brought from Doutor under the bench when they mentioned that at the adjudication briefing.

Finally...and this was definitely the greatest debating shock, I got to judge the final. Again, I got to judge the final of a national tournament, the style of which I had only first encountered that very day! I could think of nada to be announced about me. Somehow 'She once won an internal Phil competition' or 'She reached the Irish Times Semis twice' didn't seem to cut it. In the end, it was announced that I was coaching the WSDC kids (true) and that I would be competing in WSDC for Japan myself (false and impossible)...people seemed surprised that me, a gaijin teacher was competing on the Japanese national high schools debating team, and so they should have been. I would have been a heavy burden for the girls!

In the final analysis, it was a fun day. With many shocking aspects, but many more that were familiar. It seems that debating cultures, like national cultures, are more alike than unalike after all.

(Wait I forgot, there were no POIs?!?!?...I take it all back. Australs is bizarre.)

Gender Roles in Japan

Before coming to Japan, I was warned of a possibly stringent view of gender roles here. While preparing for the JET interview I came across strange questions online, apparently often asked of American applicants. For example, if you were in the staffroom and all the female teachers began preparing tea for all the male teachers, and they asked you to join them, how would you react? This question proportedly weeds out the feminist applicants, those who will be rejected because it's suspected they'll shove their culturally insensitive ideas of gender equality down the poor Japanese people's throats. According to the online advice about JET interviews, it's best to suppress your inner feminist for their duration, if you really want to go to Japan.

You can probably extrapolate from my position on JET, that I was never asked this question.

In my staffroom, thankfully everyone makes tea for themselves. The cultural conflict with regard to gender roles has only arisen on several occasions. Questions about my parents were along the lines of: What does your father do? Does your mother work outside the home? While discussing teachers' extra curricular responsibilities at school, I learnt that males generally shoulder more of the burden of club activities because females have more household chores to attend to. One teacher asked me what the balance of genders in my university math course was, and seemed suprised to learn that it was roughly 50/50.

Then there's grammar. The already tough essay marking scheme is made more complicated when I mark students' use of 'he' as the ungendered third person singular pronoun as wrong. I'm aware that they were probably taught this by the JTEs. I'm even aware that there is no genuine ungendered third person singular pronoun to use instead, so I cross out 'he' and write 'they'. I'm patiently awaiting the moment when a JTE notices this and questions me about it. But even this is only the tip of the iceberg of my aggressive cultural insensitivity!

I've immensely enjoy raising gender issues during lessons. I'm convinced that it's crucial to broadening the students' minds. To my utter dismay, I find that unless I assign their seats, the classroom is divided down the middle, boys on one side, girls on the other. I appreciate that secondary school is a difficult time for kids, and they're pretty awkward. This could reasonably result in their staying within their group of friends, not in boys and girls consistently avoiding one another. Maybe I'm biased, because in my old co-ed school we formed mostly mixed-gender groups of friends naturally.

Of course, the fact that I'm teaching debating facilitates it all. I assigned some students speeches on feminism and was pretty impressed with the results. Women should be paid the same as men. Parents shouldn't dissuade boys from crying because it's girly. On the other hand, (and I had to assist the student to think of single bad point) feminism runs the risk of ignoring the real differences between the sexes.

The agree or disagree game was even more productive. Boys and girls should wear the same school uniform. Do you agree or disagree? I can't help but paint the uniforms as a villian in the tale of the separation of male and female at my school. It's a marker of difference. The girls wear a navy skirt, blazer and bow tie, while the boys wear a black military style jacket and trousers. (The military jackets still kind of freak me out. It's like they're little educational soldiers.) Ok so many schools around the world have different uniforms for boys and girls, but for me the final nail in the coffin of the school's uniform policy is that they're even different colours. I mean it's just adding needless further difference. Why not have everyone wear the trouser suit and make them different colours? At least that way we could avoid the classic skirt/trousers, passive/active role implications.

What did the students have to say? They all disagreed. Boys and girls shouldn't have the same school uniform. The whys were difficult for them to articulate. It's always doubly difficult for the students when we engage in interesting analysis of an issue. First, they need to account for their opinions, justify themselves to themselves in Japanese. Second, they need to express their chain of reasoning in English. The popular why was, 'because boys and girls are differnt, so different clothes suit them'.

At this point I asked for a show of hands by the girls who usually wore skirts outside school. A single student raised her hand. So why do you wear trousers when they don't suit you? Our class schedule didn't permit further probing just then, but I was satisfied that they'd actually thought about the issue for the first time.

I'm pretty excited about our next class, in which we're holding half a BP debate on the motion, 'TTHB boys and girls should wear the same school uniform'!

Teaching Debating

As JET Programme participants, we're employed to teach oral English. For many JETs this seems to involve conducting lessons on a number of key topics: food, hobbies, careers etc. They teach vocabulary and get the students to practice using it in a real situation, like ordering food at a restaurant. As it happens though, I don't do that at all. I mostly teach debating.

This is only possible because of the really high level of my students..they are absolute ledges all of them! Thus it would be pretty pointless conducting lessons on key topics because they already know all the vocab and probably more about English grammar than I do! My JTEs never asked me to use a book for teaching or to follow any set curriculum. I was left with the opportunity to teach whatever I wanted..so I decided it was best to play to my strengths. Some super-insightful JTEs even said that they wanted to try debating, talk about being in the right school at the right time!

There are several reasons why teaching debating works..it involves speaking English of course, English which can be as complicated or as simple as the students want. Often they surprise me by coming out with vocabulary that I had no idea they knew. For example, there's a debating warm-up game that we play with first (15-16) and second (16-17) years. We clear away the desks and designate sides of the room as agree and disagree. Then I read out sentences and they move to express their opinion. Finally, we ask some students why they agree or disagree. One sentence I use is 'Students should not wear school uniforms'. Typically, Japanese students disagree with this. First years say things like: It is convenient or It costs less money. Second years use more complicated English: It teaches us group identity. The advantage is that the students we call on can use whatever English they have to answer.

The second reason why debating works, is that it gently encourages students to act as individuals. During the above game, the same class who had collectively chosen to disagree with the sentence about uniforms, were suddenly split down the middle when I read 'The U.S. military should leave Okinawa'. Friends had heated discussions before parting ways in the middle of the room...a deprival of group identity and participation in the culture of the English-speaking world, individuality! The first kind of debating we taught was Impromptu. We graded the speeches on a number of criteria, one of which was 'expression of opinion'. For every point they made in a speech they had to give a reason, no blindly agreeing with popular opinion because it's popular..what do YOU think?


The final advantage of debating as I see it, is that it guides students toward critical thinking. Ok, so maybe it's time I took off my college hat..but I honestly think that it's a pretty crucial life-skill and people should be introduced to it as early as possible. After Impromptu, the students graduate to British Parliamentary Debating. This is the point at which I struggle to explain terms like principle analysis and model definition to the JTE...and that's before the lesson even begins! In the end, the students incredible English has saved the day thus-far. They knew the word 'abstract', which helped me cut some dark, translation-filled corners. Then came the gasps of 'Eeeehhhhhh' when I revealed that we'd need to ask WHY? at least 3 times for each point in BP. Lights, camera, critical thinking.

Maybe it should worry me that only one out of three 'debating rocks' points mention English, but it doesn't! The students get their English practice in. Seeing as I'm under-qualified to improve their language skills, I might as well improve their communication. After all, what's the point of speaking English if you can't use it to engage in real discussion?