Japan’s “Full-Time Part-Time” Instructors

by Alice Grodenker

Hinako Matsumura teaches constitutional law in Japan. Or at least she tries. Her employment conditions as a part-time university lecturer are so poor that it’s virtually impossible to do a proper job of it. Unable to secure a full-time position, Matsumura has cobbled together a career teaching part-time at six different universities scattered throughout the vast Tokyo metropolitan area. This means spending up to six hours a day commuting between jobs and home.

“I waste 21 hours a week on trains, which is time I would much rather spend with my students,” Matsumura lamented in a recent interview in Tokyo. But even if she could spend less time on trains and more time on campus, getting to know her students would be an uphill battle: she has up to 400 students in a class and nearly 1,000 students in total. With so many students, Matsumura has to cut corners to keep grading at a manageable level. That means exams have to be multiple-choice, and she can’t assign papers.

She doesn’t earn enough to live on and receives no benefits. Job security? Academic freedom? Hardly. Matsumura believes she lost one job because she wouldn’t use a textbook she deemed too difficult. A full-time colleague, who engaged in the unusual practice of selling the book in class, got miffed at Matsumura’s refusal to mandate it for her students, and the next thing she knew, her contract wasn’t renewed.

“This isn’t quality education,” Matsumura asserted. “And this certainly isn’t the way I want to be teaching.” Concerned and frustrated, Matsumura has become an activist for part-time lecturers in and around Tokyo, the area of Japan with the highest concentration of universities. As current president of the Tokyo-Area University Part-Time Teachers Union (Shutoken Daigaku Hijokin Koshi Kumiai) Matsumura now rushes not only from class to class, but also from classes to collective bargaining sessions and testimony before the national assembly.

Historically low pay

Japanese higher education relies heavily on adjuncts. At most universities, roughly half of all courses are taught by part-time instructors, and the percentage of part-timers is generally somewhat higher at private universities than at national and prefectural universities.

Part-time instructors are paid 20,000 to 30,000 yen per month ($169-$253) for teaching one koma, a unit that describes a 90-minute class that meets once a week. This pay scale for part-timers is a fraction of what full-time professors earn per class, and is part of a compensation system that dates back to before WWII, when adjuncts were generally full-time professors at the prestigious national universities. As public employees, these professors were not permitted to receive outside income. But private universities were anxious to lure famous professors to their campuses and came up with the idea of offering payment in terms of “reimbursement for transportation expenses.” Payments remained modest to support that pretense, and because no one expected a university teacher to live exclusively on part-time work.

These days, however, more and more do. Many adjuncts today are sengyo hijokin koshi, which translates rather awkwardly as “full-time part-time instructors.” Furthermore, the number of university lecturers who do not have a full-time position to provide a base salary, benefits and job security is believed to be rising as universities struggle to cut costs.

Higher education in Japan is undergoing drastic restructuring in part because of a precipitous drop in the birth rate. Within the next year or two, the number of student applying for college in Japan will equal the number of positions available. While competition at the most prestigious universities will remain tough, many smaller and less prominent schools are teetering on the verge of collapse.

The education ministry, as compensation for reduced financial support, has relaxed restrictions so universities can enter into profit-earning activities and cut costs through more flexible staffing. At the same time, it has encouraged universities to eliminate the tenure system and put full-time professors on fixed-term contracts. All these changes mean more classes are being taught by adjuncts even as employment conditions for part-timers worsen.

Exactly how many Japanese university lecturers have only part-time jobs? No one knows for certain, because the education ministry, which collects prodigious amounts of data about universities, has never included this question on any of its surveys.

“We have been pushing the ministry for years to collect data about part-time instructors, and make it public, but to date it hasn’t happened,” Matsumura complained. “The best information we have been able to get out of the ministry–and this is not officially published data–is that in 2003 there were 66,813 ‘positions’ for part-time university lecturers.

“What we don’t know is how many of those ‘positions’ are filled by people with full-time jobs elsewhere, and how many are taught by instructors who work solely at part-time jobs,” Matsumura explained. “Our members report working an average of 2.7 jobs, and by dividing this figure into the ministry’s number for part-time positions, we estimate that there are about 25,000 people teaching part-time at universities in Japan.”

Power to part-timers

It was four instructors working at Hitotsubashi University on the western outskirts of Tokyo who in January 1996 launched the Tokyo-area union, putting out a call to colleagues at other universities to join them. Only 12 people attended the first general meeting, but even so, the fledging group attracted a fair amount of press attention, largely because the whole idea of part-time teachers organizing was so novel at the time.

In Japan, unions are generally company-based and part-time employees have traditionally received little or no union representation. This pattern holds true for higher education as well, where each university has its own faculty union. University-based unions generally do not even permit part-timers to join, and usually have not addressed issues that relate only to part-timers.
However, in recent years, more attention has been paid in Japan to the rights of part-time workers in general. The first union specifically for part-time workers, the General Union of Tokyo Part-Timers, was formed in 1990. Two years later, the government passed a law to address the growing problem of companies keeping workers on part-time status indefinitely as a means to reduce labor costs. The new law stipulated that, after a certain period of continued employment, part-time workers must be converted to regular employee status, and that part-time employees should receive the same kinds of benefits as full-time workers, including bonuses, retirement payments, education training, health examinations and maternity leave.

For part-time university instructors, the impetus to organize was a change in education policy that lifted a requirement that universities provide a two-year course in general studies for all students. Once universities were free to set their own curriculums, many dropped foreign-language requirements and cut language and other courses that tended to be taught by part-timers.
The first negotiation the union handled was in 1996, on behalf of a part-time instructor of women’s history at a junior college who was being paid far below the average wage at other schools. In that case, union officials were negotiating with the local board of education. When presented with data on current pay rates, the education official in charge realized that the school hadn’t adjusted its pay scale in 16 years. The history instructor received a raise, as did all other part-timers at the school.

In another case, the union represented a Chinese-language instructor who was fired abruptly for unapproved absences. The instructor, a Chinese national, had arranged for a colleague to cover her classes while she was away, but did not seek administrative approval for her leave because she didn’t realize it was necessary. The union argued that the university had not made adequate effort to explain its leave of absence policies, and that it did not act in good faith by terminating her without discussion. The instructor was reinstated.

Obstacles to recruitment

Despite these and other successes, recruitment of new members was slow and remains difficult to this day. Through its initial outreach efforts, the Tokyo-area union learned that a similar group had been formed six months earlier in another part of Japan. That union, the University Part-Time Lecturers Union Kansai, focuses on universities in the Kansai region, which includes the cities of Kyoto and Osaka. Currently, there are six unions representing part-time university teachers in Japan (others are the University Teacher Union, NUGW Tokyo Nambu, General Union, and Fukuoka General Union).

In the early days of unionization, many universities refused to allow union officials on campus to distribute materials, and others removed union flyers from faculty mailboxes. The union now has a website that helps with recruitment, but there are fundamental issues in Japanese society that make it difficult for people to join organizations like the Tokyo-area union.

One is the general reluctance Japanese have to stand out from the crowd, often expressed through the common saying that in Japan, “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” It’s one thing to join a company-sponsored union that everyone else joins; it’s quite another to join a group that lacks official sanction. Part-time instructors, who generally work on one-year contracts, live in constant fear that their contract won’t be renewed if they rock the boat in any way. Some thus consider union membership to be a risky proposition.
Another fear many Japanese adjuncts have is that joining a union will jeopardize their relationship with their Ph.D. advisor, a person of critical importance throughout their careers for landing jobs. In Japan, teaching positions are normally filled through personal connections and are rarely advertised. You get a job when your Ph.D. advisor recommends you for a position, and it can be seen as disrespectful and ungrateful to question where you go or the terms of the job. And if you should then “cause trouble” at that university, it is seen as reflecting badly on the professor who recommended you for the position.

Foreigners teaching in Japan are under even more pressure to toe the line, according to Hermann Troll, a German national who has lived in Japan for more than twenty years and supports his family entirely on part-time jobs teaching German and English.

“It is very, very difficult for a foreigner to get a full-time position, so even those who have been in Japan for a long time work almost exclusively on one-year contracts. Furthermore, most foreigners are handicapped by inadequate knowledge of the Japanese language and social customs, which makes it very easy to intimidate them.”

Troll and other union members are making special efforts to reach foreign instructors, including translating union materials into English; as a result, foreign membership in the Tokyo-area union has been rising steadily.

Now ten years old, the goals of the Tokyo-area union remain focused on the same basic issues that spurred the original members to form the group in the first place. Members are still fighting for salaries comparable to those paid to full-time teachers; access to benefits including health insurance, retirement pensions and medical examinations; increased job security through renewable contracts and other means; a fixed place to work, including access to telephones, copiers, libraries and space to meet with students, and support for academic research including grants and the right to submit articles to university publications.

“Foreigners come to the union because they want to join with their Japanese colleagues to improve the situation for everybody,” Troll said, “but in fact, the situation for part-time lecturers in Japan is deteriorating rather than improving as universities are being pushed by the government to be run more like businesses.”