In the evening, riding the train home, I feel a kind of weird kinship with Akemi. It could easily be that the children of some her clients attend K.A., or at least go to the same schools—class position and affluence share the talking spaces Akemi and I make manifest. We each trade in a specific form of enunciated, affective labor—gendered and Anglophonic, respectively. In the hostess club the women work to repair and enliven male corporate relations, bolstering it so that it can go put in long hours at the office, prepared with a future sociality. It is not just talking, but the fine transactions doing the work between, through, beneath, intensifying and amplifying and stimulating. At K.A., something similar transpires. Nearly all of the teachers are part-time and teaching pays bills, in some cases it provides a visa, it gives someone just enough of a routine to hold together an aimless expatriated life. It is a provisional site where teaching is performed as part-time work and students come once or twice a week, more often during their exam preparation year, and again more often in their last years of high school if they hope to take the SAT or TOEFL exams for admission to universities in the English-speaking West, most often the U.S.

Apart from the full-time Japanese staff (at the main location where I worked, there was usually two—Kanna and an assistant) and the three co-owners, Charlie, Josh, and Thomas, none of the teachers spent a great deal of time at the school or with their students. Class sessions were two hours long and Saturday was the busy day with all four classrooms in constant use. Saturday was exhausting, but also extremely social as nearly all teachers would be working at least part of the day’s many shifts. With the last evening classes ending, the remaining staff would go out for dinner and drinks, frequently meeting up with other teachers who had already gathered at a nearby izakaya. There were so few of us working in small classrooms. We shared the same bored frustration with vocabulary tests and commiserated with the stubborn unwillingness of some kids who floundered in a language they were losing. The intimacy constituted us more like family than co-workers.

The school was founded with the intention of preparing elementary school students to take the entrance exams to prestigious schools, but even this purpose was modified from the goal, shifting to meet need. Charlie, one of the co-founders, had been a teacher at a very, exclusive, renowned school before leaving and beginning the K.A. venture with Josh, both from Seattle. Charlie parlayed the name recognition of his former position much the way a former political staffer might. “Charlie's original idea for K.A. was to provide a school for all the students that didn't make it into [Charlie’s original school/employer]. When he opened the school, Charlie thought he was going to get high school and junior high school students. What actually happened was that we got mostly elementary. Juken spawned organically as well. First juken season: one student. Second: seven” (Thomas, correspondence). K.A. went from being imagined as a consolation school to becoming the site where possible, intensively desired academic futures could be prepared.

Charlie promised parents the school’s focus on juken, the notorious entrance exams, would ensure their children passed the difficult barriers to special programs at elite schools reserved for kikokushijo. Crossing the threshold from elementary school into an exclusive junior high school would secure the student’s future through high school and frequently all the way into college as a chain of educational institutions, known as escalator schools, would ferry a student straight to graduation from a prestigious university. The school was predicated on a lack, or more precisely, a failure—of a native Japanese ability sufficient to allow kikokushijo to compete with their peers on the notoriously difficult entrance exams, from junior high school all the way through college. “Since their Japanese often suffers from being overseas, this [K.A.’s successful prep] is kinda the only real option to get into the more prestigious JHS/HS/Universities.” Thomas succinctly summarizes the predicament perceived by many parents of kikokushijo and the narrow path to “success” once their child becomes bilingual. Being bi-cultural also impacted the modes of sociality the children were comfortable with. The effectiveness and proven results of the juken prep underwrote the affective aspects of the schools, where the social identity of the kikokushijo were given sanctuary and nurtured. Kanna and the other Japanese staff all spoke fluent English and recent high school graduates (who were also kikokushijo) were often hired to hang out in the lounge area on the second floor with kids who were on break, engaging them in conversation and games. “Groups lessons were a pretty good sell, as was the lounge. Ks have trouble adjusting; get bullied; trouble making friends. In KA classes they could make friends with others ks just like them” (Thomas 2014). The school performed a twofold task: preserving and strengthening English skills to the degree that students could cross over into the safe haven of a prestigious school where an academic future was often assured. The school’s website advertises the numbers of its students who secured places at which schools, and how many received scholarships. The quantification of a potential future is blatant and a powerful, reassuring attractant. At the same time, K.A. offered a space where the sociality of other kikokushijo could normalize and exceptional, perhaps deviant Japanese identity while deepening affective bonds with an incongruous foreign teaching staff, the immaterial capacity to inhabit a globalized future. Quoted in a Japan Times article, Charlie said, “I think they need to stay in contact with their previous culture…I think they need to be able to express that side of themselves, and that’s why we have this school. It’s a safe haven for a lot of these kids” (Grigg-Saito 2008). The interior space of the school, with its familiar relations, crafted an educational space pervaded by a sociality always intended to supersede the immediate confines of Tokyo and Japanese society—pointing outwards to a global imaginary which reifies a tense negative binary between native Japanness and assimilated foreignness.

The hiring policy was disinclined towards trained teachers based on the belief they would be more resistant to the K.A.’s curriculum and less organic in their approach. Generating a natural, relaxed atmosphere where the students had fun was central to the success of the school—if the kids were happy, the parents were happy. Students could be enrolled as young as three or four years old and each age group had teachers who primarily worked them. Teachers, if they had never worked with children before, would be given a range of classes to teach to naturally discover which ages they related to most easily. As I had taught junior high school students in Iwate-ken for two years and had subsequently worked with the same age in the U.S., it was obvious I should be assigned to the upper elementary grades. This was a critical strata for after completing their time with at this level, they would graduate into juken or exam preparation, taught almost exclusively by Charlie and Joe-Joe, an Oxford graduate specifically hired to take on the growing numbers of juken prep students. The juken prep provided legitimized K.A. and elevated it above the conventional English conversation schools. When I asked Thomas, a co-owner, how the school presented itself to parents he responded: “The societal value of Ks [kikokushijo] is already recognized by the fact that they [major schools and universities] have K programs and juken. We heavily emphasized that Charlie basically wrote the juken for one of the most prestigious schools and basically told parents we could get their kids into the best program we could” (Thomas, correspondence 2014). Built around the mutability of English as a commodity, K.A. presented itself where the ineffable risks incorporated into the social identity of kikokushijo children could be ameliorated while English language proficiency could be preserved and test-taking and interview techniques would be instilled. All three aspects—social belonging, fluent cosmopolitanism, and entrance exam skills—wove together into a powerful, braided series of affective, pedagogical, and familial energies all oriented towards potential future consolidation of the unstable kikokushijo identity. This identity pivoted around communication and possibility. Katrina, a part-time teacher and freelance journalist, wrote a piece for The Japan Times about kikokushijo in which students describe the openness of the school and the close relations they develop with the teachers. “One junior high school student said, ‘It’s easier to express myself at K.A.,’ and the rest of the class seemed to agree, with students adding that here they feel like they are friends with their teachers and can relate to them. Most students don’t speak to their parents in English, and having English-speaking and culturally global role models opens up a greater range of possibilities” (Grigg-Saito 2008).

A delicate alchemy depended so much on the weekly interaction between teachers and students and the relations between the staff. Thomas describes his own attachment to the school in terms of emotion and, significantly, of family: “I loved the students. I was always so grateful that my job enabled me to be around children. I definitely felt a kinship with them. I miss them…I guess I felt like KA was a family: staff, students and teachers.” But the social cohesion of K.A. was always at risk from its own changes, as it effectively mobilized the affect of the staff “for sure as KA grew, the family feeling faded.” Much like for the corporate salarymen in Akemi’s hostess club, the family feeling was something in need of care.

K.A. conjured a particular moment among the millions shaping Tokyo and its global relations. It organized young people’s lives and drew on their abilities, personalities, and trajectories not just in its curriculum or structure, but in the affective power flowing through the whole social matrix. It was a power stimulated and intensified at different time by key staff members, especially Thomas and Kanna. The family atmosphere was constructed, partly by scale, but also by the intense emotional, psychic, and structural investment from the Japanese staff, especially Kanna and the owners, who in turn were shaped by the flows in a kind of intense feedback. The sense of family echoes the rhetorical structuring of relations in Japanese corporations as I’ve discussed elsewhere, but those relations were palpably real if irregular, hybridized and atypical.

Strife certainly occurred. People showed up late, or hungover, or both. The three co-owners fought over the direction of the company, over hiring decisions, over finances. More than once the exasperated exclamation “dysfunctional!” was flung by various staff into the air, as expressive as hands flung up helplessly.

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