An autoethnography of internationalisation: ethical dilemmas in Japanese academe

Abstract

Via an autoethnography of internationalisation, the article highlights the ethical dilemmas transnational scholars face when universities fail to denationalise their organisational culture. Section one explains the pertinence and pitfalls of autoethnography — writing oneself into existence over against a context experienced as domination — for gras** the ethical quandaries of transnational scholars in a Japanese national university (JNU). As section two shows, the persistence of ethno-national working practices in JNUs precludes both the equal treatment of transnational scholars and the recognition of their difference. Specifically, the discussion documents two mechanisms of marginalisation at the JNU in question, Tōdai (University of Tokyo): section three links the rejection of ethno-national diversity to absolutisation, viz. the generalisation of prejudice by gatekeepers in order to stigmatise transnational scholars as unfit for organisational life; and section four contends gatekeepers defend their territorialised academic culture through normalisation, which is underpinned by academic inbreeding that produces a hermitic community of sameness blind to its ethno-national prejudices. The article concludes with the ethical gymnastics of transnational scholars situated in universities that solicit their multiplicity without renovating their ethno-national culture. It also reflects upon the limited leverage of autoethnography beyond the Anglosphere, notably in a JNU organisational environment that does not recognise the strop of agency with structure. Finally, the article suggests Japan would be better off promoting a cultural form of internationalisation rather than following a commercial iteration with neo-colonial costs.

Introduction

If a life lived in academic interstices qualifies one to reflect on the internationalisation of higher education (IHE), I would like to chronicle moments spent in the teaching and learning spaces between nations to highlight the ethical dilemmas faculty face. By drawing on the “experiencing body” (Conquergood, 1991), which in my case has passed through fifteen universities, I undertake an autoethnography of a Japanese national university (JNU).¹ As “titular” institutions that serve as the cultural attaché of the nation-state, JNUs are increasingly “engaged across national borders” (Cantwell & Lee, 2020). Historically “passive”, with internationalisation institutionally bottom–up by departments (Takagi, 2016), JNUs are enrolled in a “proactive” nationally top–down process by MEXT, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Ninomiya et al., 2009). Starting in the 1990s with eight JNUs and three private universities, MEXT now promotes a global tier of “flagship” research universities (Yonezawa, 2007) and a local tier of tugboat teaching institutions subordinate to national needs (Seaton, 2020).² As a faculty member “compelled yet incomplete” within these processes (Brunila, 2016, p. 387), the life of the trans-scholar appears to confirm the capacity of faculty to flit across borders.³ Yet we should be wary of romanticising academic mobility as a “pleasurable formation” grounded in a primordial freedom of movement, which is “unburdened by embodiment” (Morley et al., 2020, p. 766). For an ivory tower journeyperson, academic life is less an unimpeded exercise of liberty than an agonistic joust of becoming vis-à-vis insuperable horizons (Foucault, 1994). At the same time as the circumstances of IHE undermine unfettered choice as the bedrock of an academic life, they also underwrite — here, in the guise of the ethno-national orientation of JNUs — the ethical impasse that confronts the trans-scholar.⁴

Documenting the lot of international faculty under CIHE — the “commercial” internationalisation of higher education (de Wit, 2020) that transforms academe into a “global commodity” (Brandenburg and de Wit, 2011) — is a budding field in Higher Education (Kim, 2017; Morley et al., 2018; Chen, 2024).⁵ To contribute a particular experience of the ethical dilemmas of academic life in Japan, section one introduces autoethnography. As a method to voice the experience of marginalisation, I address the epistemological pitfall of whether it is possible to present the intricacies of life without a bias represention of them at the same time. Section one further outlines the conceptual armoury that allows autoethnography to grasp the ethical quandaries in JNUs as they internationalise. It paves the way for section two, which taps into “personal experience” — in my case, at Tōdai — to undertake a critical study (Holman Jones et al., 2013).⁶ After defining JNUs and situating them in IHE, I show how ethical tensions arise when ethno-national norms of prejudice meet the exception of difference borne by trans-scholars.⁷ Section three contends that because gatekeepers control the territorially oriented organisational culture of Tōdai, the ethical accommodation of trans-scholars often culminates in exclusion due to absolutisation, or their stigmatisation as misfits who threaten working life.⁸ The fourth section posits a further explanation of normalisation due this time to academic inbreeding. By fostering a self-enclosed community of dogmatic ethno-national practices that are exclusionary, academically inbred Tōdai faculty remain oblivious to the prejudices in their midst. I conclude with the ethical gymnastics required of trans-scholars situated in JNUs, which solicit them to instil diversity as they clamber their way up the greasy pole of global academe but denationalise their territorialised ways of working at a snail’s pace. I also reflect upon the limited leverage of autoethnography beyond the Anglosphere,⁹ notably in an organisational environment like Tōdai that does not recognise the strop of agency with structure. Finally, I suggest Japan would be better off promoting a cultural form of internationalisation rather than following a commercial iteration with neo-colonial costs.

Towards an autoethnography of internationalisation

Discarding the interrogative who that presumes being is prior to its context and that we live life forwards in full comprehension of it, I propose an autoethnographic methodology to articulate how I have embraced becoming by negotiating asymmetrical ethical relations at Tōdai. Autoethnography, though, is a niche methodology in the field of IHE, and it behoves me to explain why I enlist it.¹⁰

Firstly, numerous critiques undermine theoretically driven and empirically verifiable positivist epistemologies as the monopoly method to study social life. Their patriarchal gaze and colonial trajectories taint them, while the quantitative aggregates they collate miss the minutiae of meanings in social practices. To overcome the “alienating effects [of] … abstract claims of truth” (Ellingson & Ellis, 2008, p. 450), many on the margins turn to autoethnography as a qualitative methodology to voice subjugated knowledge and disclose exclusion. In this respect, I espouse a critical autoethnography.¹¹ The limitation is the inherent perspective of any reflection upon the world already experienced. Yet given the damage caused by epistemology when we deny our standpoint, speaking from one is arguably the strength of autoethnography. Rejecting writing as a post hoc “mop**-up” activity, autoethnographers use the writing process to drive inquiry (Poulos, 2021). With the experiences of the self (autos) impregnated by the norms of culture (ethnos), reflexivity tempers subjectivism to conclude in their textualisation (graphein). By weaving experience into words, we get an insight into the workings of power, usually from the individual autoethnographer and occasionally through “collaborative” endeavours (Sakurai et al., 2022). Ultimately, in acquiring self-understanding we also comprehend the struggles that circumscribe our becoming (Bochner & Ellis, 2016).

Demarcating autoethnography from its siblings, we should note firstly it is not an autobiography. There is no abdicating leap from putative objectivity to self-conscious subjectivity. Rather, the focus of autoethnography on personal experience is a step**stone to understanding the conditions of the life in question. Autoethnography is attentive to the intersections between agency and structure, or “how our individual biographies intertwine with the history we share” (Bauman, 1990, p. 10). In contrast, autobiography invites the reader into the experiences narrated by the subject to show what it was like being them in certain times and places. Secondly, autoethnography is not a twin of its other sibling, ethnography. They both analyse the ethnos, but their respective agendas are normative and descriptive. The autoethnographer writes themself into existence by critiquing the ethical dilemmas of culture from the inside, whereas the ethnographer observes culture from the outside and projects a sense of what it is like to be there. Notwithstanding, I deploy autoethnography because it is “ethnographic in its methodological orientation, cultural in its interpretive orientation, and autobiographical in its content orientation” (Chang, 2008, p. 48).

In principle, the purchase of the methodology is clear. It presumes those who deploy autoethnography — trans-scholars, for instance, with their outsider’s cosmopolitan “loose” perspective on the insider’s parochial “tight” practices (Merton, 1968) — are the harbingers of change with the “liberating ability to view dogmatic practices from a fresh perspective” (Lanford, 2019, p. 501).¹² Through the process of writing to understand oneself in relation to the culture where one lives, the autoethnographer “critiques the situatedness of self with others in social contexts” (Spry, 2001, p. 710). Such onto-localisation is particularly pertinent for trans-scholars utilising personal experiences to expose ethical indigestion in JNUs. Enjoying a degree of distance from organisational culture that insiders cannot attain, outsiders proffer a “creative destruction and reconstruction of the paradigms” of academe (Kim, 2010, p. 579), yet “respect the complexity” of the societies they inhabit (Braidotti, 1994, p. 15).

Despite the guarantor of reflexivity, does autoethnography have any weak points? Firstly, we should note the epistemological charge of narcissistic introspection by those wedded to quantitative approaches. However, blind to the privilege afforded by their positionality, positivist methodologists are incapable of seeing that autoethnography is an epistemological terrorism of the silenced to rock the foundations of the ivory towers. Nevertheless, the politics of the methodology is naïve. Change is neither the prerogative of the trans-scholar, nor is autoethnography necessary for it. Thirdly, we might doubt the capacity of the trans-scholar to make a difference at all. There are quixotic elements that hark back to the days of the universal intellectual, who represents the shenanigans of power on the inside from their position in the world of knowledge outside.

So, what can we achieve with autoethnography? Perhaps, it is fruitful to give a synopsis of its main tenets in relation to internationalisation (Adams et al., 2017). Autoethnography is an act of resistance against the ethical denigration of trans-scholars, which I write as an experience of marginality — a “regime of socio-spatial relegation and exclusionary closure” (Wacquant, 2008, p. 2) — that results from organisational practices that reify institutional ethno-national norms. Secondly, autoethnography is a consciousness raising endeavour. Via a first-hand account of the “dehumanising” underbelly of universities (Cuadraz & Flores, 2017), Tōdai insiders get to see the exclusionary nature of their organisational practices. Thirdly, by articulating a hands-on experience of internationalisation in a JNU, the ethical paradoxes it throws at outsiders are brought to the attention of policy makers. And fourth, autoethnography builds textual bridges for non-academic audiences to align with pressing issues, though in my case this principle is moot. Let me say why.

Highlighting the ethical shortcomings of IHE is the prerogative of those who enjoy the privilege of mobility in the manner of the tourist. It contrasts sharply with the shackles of immobility and marginalisation experienced by their alter ego, the vagabond (Bauman, 1998). Their manifestation as migrant labourers or refugees are proper examples of pressing issues. Otherwise, in the context of American academe where autoethnography originates, vagabonds are “women, scholars of colour, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) academics, people with disabilities, and those from working-class backgrounds” (Duncan et al., 2021, p. 2). Last in line is an experience of vagabondage read as the exclusion of the foreign white male, though not — and I reiterate, not — as a claim of moral equivalence with the migrant labourer or refugee, or to culturally relativise the plight of academic vagabonds, but as an ethical accounting of internationalisation in a JNU.¹³ Also, the margins I ruminate on concern recognition and dignity that engender ethical quandaries. In these relative margins, the symbolic violence that excludes — often “substantially under-estimated”, too (Morley et al., 2020, p. 767) — can be sidestepped by the choice of trans-scholars to up sticks and leave; vagabonds can only dream of such a luxury to escape the physical violence they often face.

In summary, autoethnography is a device to discern the ethical price of prejudice for outsiders of ethno-national practices in JNUs.¹⁴ To elaborate further, I turn to how I find myself enmeshed in the process of internationalisation and the ethical paradoxes it produces for the trans-scholar.

Tōdai and ethno-national organisational culture

The initial prompt was as a conscientious objector in apartheid South Africa. Exile from there brought an insular experience of a sole country to an end, together with the attendant spoils of its skin-of-kin community. Perhaps, out of poetic justice for white privilege, I have since experienced life on the road as a stranger.¹⁵ The incongruity of JNUs recruiting outsiders without any concomitant renovation of their organisational culture typifies such an experience. To understand marginalisation in academe, I focus on two mechanisms of ethno-national prejudice: absolutisation (in section three), where prejudice weaponises characteristics of behaviour to stigmatise all outsiders as culturally unsuited to organisational life; and normalisation (in section four), with academic inbreeding routinising the prejudice of insiders, which prevents them intuitiing chauvinism in their organisational culture (Burns, 2008).

How did I get myself into such a fix? Upon completion of my doctoral studies in Scotland in 2002, I worked on internationalisation projects for nine years in French academe before procuring a full-time position at a JNU to help establish an English-medium undergraduate degree (E-MUD). Despite a history of treating trans-scholars as transient teaching tools barred from academic life, I was encouraged by the ambitions of G30 and the Go Global Japan Project (2012–2016). They aim to increase the number of foreign and Japanese academics with experience abroad (Rose and McKinley, 2018).¹⁶ The goal is to make the JNU “campus a … multinational community” (CAGI, 2007). As a sign of “true internationalisation”, TGUP (2020) backs it up with a transparent tenure system and multilingual administrative staff. As intimated, the JNU in question is Tōdai. Established in 1877 to produce an elite, it still “crowns … [the] academic hierarchy” (Ishikawa, 2009, p. 168).¹⁷ Its students are considered the best and get the most desirable jobs, and its faculty are seen as the most accomplished with research activities to match (Yonezawa, 2007). E-MUD, which embodies a “serious commitment to globalising”, is a step into the unknown world of deterritorialised academe for Tōdai (UTGB, 2014). The university imagines faculty and students “work[ing] together regardless of culture, … while mutually understanding each other” (TGUPUT, 2014). To the extent it is the prototype of what a JNU ought to be (Nakayama, 1989), and with its peers today universities in the global arena (Yonezawa, 2007), is Tōdai also the most conducive workplace for trans-scholars or are their “subject positions … disqualified [in favour of] elevat[ing]” those of homegrown academics (Morley et al., 2020, p. 767)?

As I testify, an environment that ethically disentitles the trans-scholar persists at Tōdai. The heady policy pronouncements above uphold rather than undermine the historic “simulation” of Japanese internationalisation and camouflage exclusionary business as usual (Itoh, 2000). Bearing in mind the “multivocality” of concepts (Goodman, 2007), kokusaika — altering (化) the form of the national (国) via encounters with its borderlands (際) — is indicative of the third wave of internationalisation in Japan. In this post-1980s period, kokusaika oscillates between altering as a nationalistic “closing in” to affirm Japanese culture and a cosmopolitan “opening up” to diversify it (Burgess et al., 2010). Kokusaika is often an introverted and extroverted process at the same time (Hashimoto, 2009). Since 2004, when JNUs were transformed into national university corporations and repositioned as drivers of economic growth (Hatakenaka, 2005), Japan has followed the global IHE trend and switched from a cultural rationale to a commercial leitmotif (Iwabuchi, 2021). CIHE, however, does nothing to spring clean the legacy of ethno-national navel gazing kokusaika (Ishii, 2003). Hence, my critical autoethnography of prejudices harboured by the “closing in” organisational culture of Tōdai, despite its recent “opening up” to flirt with the fringes of nationhood. The paradox should not surprise us, either. Outmoded norms from practices past their sell by date often endure in the present as duress (Stoler, 2016), catalogued here as the ethical dilemmas of trans-scholars.

To be fair, Tōdai sought to design E-MUD from scratch. It would have incorporated the trans-scholar as a peer proper and enforced organisational renovation.¹⁸ However, out of an unwavering faith in its ethno-national standards that consistently come out tops territorially, Tōdai reneged on MEXT pledges to wipe the slate clean. With its curriculum mirroring that for domestic students, E-MUD is a typical assimilationist programme that treats foreign students as “empty vessels” to be filled with indigenous science and culture (Singh, 2005). Notwithstanding, there are several organisational novelties, such as an admissions process that prioritises thinking over memory and the pedagogical styles of its trans-scholars, as well as successes like the participation of E-MUD students in domestic internationalisation initiatives and an alumni network to seed students into employment in Japan.

Whereas Tōdai pulls out all the stops to accommodate E-MUD students, its treatment of trans-scholars is more haphazard and compounded by precarity in universities worldwide. In this respect, my initial non-permanent position could have led to another three year non-renewable contract, or a permanent faculty position. I had some cause for optimism as the number of trans-scholars in Japanese higher education increased from 940 in 1979 to 8,262 in 2017, or from 0.9 to 4.5% (Huang, 2018); however, more than half of trans-scholars are on contracts without prospect of tenure (Green, 2019).¹⁹ The ambiguity of my status was aggravated by the fact that there are no signals on the Tōdai track to tenure. JNUs are often indifferent to the ethno-national make up of scholars, too, with young foreign faculty on fixed term contracts equally bereft of “belonging” (Sakurai & Mason, 2023). Such insecurity is a neoliberal technique of control, with universities the unashamed pioneers of the precarious gig economy.²⁰ In fact, it manifested itself towards the end of my first contract when many E-MUD trans-scholars were denied a permanent position due to a reluctance to hire anyone without inhouse qualifications. Yet organisational opaqueness means even commissars at Tōdai can be all at sea, and a permanent position suddenly materialised out of the blue in 2015.

Gatekeepers, absolutisation and exclusion

My conditions of employment are symptomatic of the first mechanism of prejudice, absolutisation, that vilifies trans-scholars as unfit for JNU academic life. To simplify the divergence in these conditions, let me touch on teaching and service. I have a 30% heavier teaching load than insider E-MUD faculty, which to boot is restricted to the undergraduate level. In terms of service, I am excluded from participation in professional practices of reciprocal recognition. It is mostly a relic of history, which famously weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living — in this instance, of the trans-scholar — as Tōdai has an array of service opportunities administered in English.²¹ In contrast, insiders take part in the service components of academic life that is central to the constitution of collegiality and its associated material and symbolic benefits, such as sabbatical leave and promotion.

With one exception, the rule for dealing with my request for parity in teaching and service is for insiders to close ranks. It is a classic reaction of gatekeepers in defence of their organisation. In higher education, their traditional territory is epistemological, whether university presses whose editors gatekeep what is published (Coser, 1975), or tenure committees where senior faculty lord over disciplinary specialisation (Mihesuah, 2004). To extend the epistemic orientation to the ethical plane of JNUs, Kurt Lewin shows that the values of gatekeepers are epiphenomena of organisational culture. It guarantees the status quo “as long as forces are not changed which determine the decisions of the gatekeepers” (Lewin, 2014, p. 20). When these forces are clothed in ethno-national norms, the gatekeeper becomes the executor — often unwittingly — of organisational prejudice.

The blanket rejection of dialogue by E-MUD concerning teaching and service parity is a tell-tale sign of “moral harassment,” or the fact that when an organisation connives its gatekeepers turn a blind eye (Valentim, 2018). Marginalising trans-scholars conveniently avoids Tōdai reflecting on the validity of its ethno-national norms, too. It is why van Dijk (2002, p. 151) highlights “semantic moves with a positive part about Us, and a negative part about Them”. Predominant among gatekeepers, they block “negative inferences of the recipients about the attitudes of the speaker” and keep face for the insiders in respect of their prejudices (van Dijk, 1993, p. 180). Such an ethno-national dispensation props up the power to silence by the mechanism of absolutisation. Stigmatising outsiders as alterity beyond the Tōdai pale derives from ethnic nationalism.²² In contrast to a “lateral” shallow affiliation to a constructed ethnicity that characterises civic nationalism — which might explain why Australia or Canada are leaders in IHE — ethnic nationalism entails a “vertical” deep affiliation to a primordial ethnicity (Smith, 2009). Hence, my autoethnography, which discloses the prejudices in the Japanese ethnos that originate with the professors of national culture at many a JNU. These biases culminated in the now discredited 1970s discourse of Japaneseness, Nihon**ron, which still informs the public imagination (Lie, 2001). It is why some scholars speak of a “veneer” of internationalisation from local faculty, which glosses the parsimony of actual “qualitative reform” of JNUs (Ota, 2018). Similarly, at the level of university administrations, there is push back of “de-internationalisation” as ethno-national norms prove too unwieldy to accommodate trans-scholars (Poole, 2016).

CIHE is another reason for the contradiction between JNUs upholding ethno-national prejudice, which precludes the recognition of trans-scholars, and pursuing internationalisation on the back of their difference. With its commodification of higher education — and its chassis of capitalism notoriously indifferent to the moral consequences of markets — CIHE tacitly condones the ethical abandonment of outsiders coming into a JNU neo-Confucian organisation without a champion to shepherd them.²³ Starting from their days as a student, insiders are reared with a patron who has their back. As a client parachuted in from the outside as a token of internationalisation, the absence of a patron to induct the trans-scholar leaves them fumbling in the dark. It makes organisational life a wager on goodwill, with inevitable mistakes soon becoming the alibi for the absolutisation mechanism of prejudice: if left to their own devices, trans-scholars pose an organisational threat; in turn, it justifies the need for supervision by a gatekeeper, which makes organisational life an act of faith in the malevolent individualised control of the insider that masquerades as benevolent general management.

Betting on faith, however, has never been a tenable position in houses of reason, as other absolutisation episodes demonstrate: my piloting of a training programme for a foreign university, which included government stakeholders, was cancelled without explanation by E-MUD despite a significant investment of resources; secondly, my offer to a Tōdai research institute to co-host an international workshop, as well as a request to my departmental head for obligatory administrative support, were refused until an assistant organiser followed up, who is both an ethno-national and Tōdai insider — as are the heads of the research institute and department — with financial and administrative support suddenly forthcoming; thirdly, the lum** together of trans-scholars in an organisational entity lacking departmental status and disciplinary coherence, which effectively resembles a detention centre for gai** control and security, or a CGCS; finally, whether a first E-MUD gatekeeper dismissing my claim for parity in teaching and service as insolence, a second imposing a stopgap measure by falsely claiming I have mental health issues, or Tōdai head gatekeepers prevaricating in the hope the problem disappears, a pattern emerged of listening attentively, expressing concern, promising to investigate but ultimately doing nothing — as the Japanese maxim says, mizaru (見ざる), kikazaru (聞かざる), iwazaru (言わざる), or the turning of a blind eye by those gone deaf because they refuse to hear as well as adhere to the golden rule of silence.²⁴

Academic inbreeding, normalisation and marginalisation

The stigmatising prejudice in the episodes of absolutisation above is unremarkable insofar as gatekeepers reify entrenched ethno-national norms. For this to happen, the blatant biases of these norms must be “dereferentialised”; the outsider is not subject to overt derogatory remarks but to the absolutisation of differences into pejorative categories that tarnish their every action (Delanty et al., 2008). As Burns (2008, p. 156) notes, ethno-national prejudice entails the “sustained denial of respect…, opportunities, [and] privileges” available to insiders, and results from a “dominant group applying [organisational norms] … unthinkingly”. It presumes a misfit of the trans-scholar with the established ways of doing things. As local lore is second nature for the insider, it explains their inability to empathise with the ethical dissonance the same working ways produce for the outsider, who they work with daily.

To have a mindset so in tune with university culture is an effect of academic inbreeding. Indeed, such is the desire to maintain organisational order through a fundamental faith in its ethno-national principles that exclusion is presented as self-marginalisation — the outsider commits social suicide rather than suffers social execution. From the perspective of Tōdai, the occlusion of outsiders is righteous to protect them from themselves, as well as necessary to uphold its traditions (Bauman, 2000). Crucially, exclusion is beyond the control of any single individual. It springs from structures of domination and could be due to who we are (black under a pigmentocracy), how we perform (women in a patriarchy) or what we think (trans-scholars in an ethno-national oligarchy). At the risk of exposure that they have no clothes, E-MUD silences dissent to ensure outsiders remain “incommunicado”; apart from the fact that they are “still eating and defecating” — and in the case of trans-scholars, teaching, too — their world “could be mistaken for coffins” (Bauman, 2000, p. 209).

One way to understand the figurative brutality of exclusion that Tōdai enforces on its trans-scholars in defence of its traditions is the lack of ethno-national diversity in faculty ranks. To be sure, very few countries practise a strategic policy of international recruitment.²⁵ Those which do are limited by size (Singapore or Switzerland), available qualified faculty (Saudi Arabia or Egypt) or engage in the brain trade for competitive advantage (the USA or Australia) (Altbach & Yudkevich, 2017). Otherwise, the territorial orientation of the ethno-national norms of the university that engender the outsider’s exclusion is related to the number of faculty who study at the doctoral level before taking up an academic position at the same university (Padilla, 2008). Academic inbreeding ranges from pure inbreds, where faculty only ever study and work at one university, to non-inbreds, or faculty like trans-scholars who work at several universities but studied at none of them (Horta, 2013). Inbreeding is also more likely in older established universities, such as JNUs (Tavares et al., 2015). There are exceptions, too, notably Russia where a faculty position in the university one obtained a bachelor’s degree from defines academic inbreeding, or Japan where it is a “four-stage” process of obtaining one’s bachelor, master and doctoral degrees at the same university before emerging into faculty ranks (Horta, 2022). Although there is a case to be made for an “ethic of loyalty,” where personalised relationships ensure quality and efficiency gains in recruitment, the “perverse nepotism [of] endogamy” is rightly frowned upon (Godechot & Louvet, 2010). It negatively impacts research performance (Soler, 2001) and stifles teaching quality (Shibayama & Kobayashi, 2017), which might account for the recent rankings “meltdown” of JNUs (Seaton, 2020).

Japan is by no means an outlier when it comes to academic inbreeding. At under 5%, the number of trans-scholars in full-time positions remains low and is also misleading.²⁶ Figures are difficult to come by for an international comparison and vary widely within countries, too.²⁷ Academic inbreeding across faculties within the same university also diverges, as well as between fields with chemistry and engineering most likely to favour intramural recruitment, whereas the disciplines of economics and philosophy are least likely (Tavares et al., 2015). At Tōdai, the figures for pure inbreds from 2014 are the second highest in Japan after Kyoto University. In the law, humanities and engineering faculties, the number of faculty who acquired their final degree from Tōdai is 83%, 69% and 70%, respectively, with the average across all disciplines 42% at JNUs, 28% at public and 30% at private universities (NISTEP, 2016).²⁸

Such entrenched academic inbreeding, which emphasises “organisational identity” and past “ways of doing things … in the present” (Horta, 2022, p. 608), explains why E-MUD trans-scholars constantly hit a brick wall and experience the denigration of their difference. Indeed, when three quarters of the faculty at Tōdai are pure inbreds, insiders assume an exclusive right of entitlement. It clarifies why gatekeepers zealously control access and demand sameness and subordination for entry into the E-MUD stable. Even Natsume Sōseki, a famous academically inbred son, initially had trouble imbibing the codes of Tōdai when he first walked through its blood stained gate.²⁹ His protagonist, Sanshirō, felt quite out of place. As the sole student to turn up on the opening day of class at the right time — only to learn the professor randomly decides when (Natsume, 2009) — the guidance of insiders is crucial for ethno-national norms to become Sanshirō’s habitus; namely, a capacity to make and manage organisational culture such that it can be objectively adapted to any given end without consciously presupposing it (Bourdieu, 1990). In short, recognition of outsiders, whether simply as colleagues or sources of difference, is well-nigh impossible in these sealed off settings of insouciant whispers between Tōdai faculty that share the same ethno-national organisational codes. By clinging to practices historically defined by territorial parameters, universities vying for pole position in global academe squander the opportunity to embed the difference of outsiders and reinvent their organisation beyond a cosmetic name change to UTokyo.

Conclusion: ethics, autoethnography and internationalisation

It is difficult to complete an autoethnography on the travails of trans-scholars without closure. At the same time, opening has not been in the name of a solution. Insofar as it is indicative of the ethical teething troubles of JNUs as they internationalise, my predicament is incidental. It is why I have tried to make the marginal experience underpinning my narrative chime beyond the echo chamber of the mind that ponders it. To the extent my autoethnography of internationalisation in Japan offers a critical insight into how ethno-national organisational culture produces ethical dilemmas for trans-scholars, my work is done. It simply remains for me to conclude with critical observations on my core concepts.

Regarding ethics, the trans-scholar is neither a threat to organisational health and in need of control, nor a danger to its existence that must be kept at arm’s length. In each instance, the price is the trans-scholar’s difference, which is courted precisely because it augurs organisational change for JNUs keen to compete on the global stage. Unfortunately, my autoethnography of Tōdai shows how attempts to construct international spaces for teaching and learning get quashed by E-MUD gatekeepers. Their existential alignment with ethno-national norms due to organisational consanguinity makes an orientation to the extra-national world difficult. Additionally, ethical homogeneity im**es upon the cultural: without curtailing absolutisation by gatekeepers and taming normalisation due to academic inbreeding, JNUs that refuse renovation risk “ossification” (Horta, 2022).

Concerning autoethnography, the organisational culture in respect of which I author myself offers the trans-scholar three alternatives: accept thoroughly inbred E-MUD gatekeepers are unwilling to renounce their ethno-national norms; struggle to have a voice in the hope the Tōdai assemblage develops lines of flight that make it receptive to difference; or resign to navigate becoming another day in an organisational culture that recognises the value of trans-scholars. For the university, acceptance would sound the death knell of internationalisation other than as a “closing in” kokusaika. Struggle — perhaps to the death, and certainly not of Tōdai — would be to drive head on into organisational domination in the hope of an “opening up” kokusaika. And resignation would be to walk away from the asymmetry of power between the individual and the organisation, which at least allows me to yank myself free from under the E-MUD knee and breathe again.

What makes acceptance unpalatable, struggle attractive and resignation defeatist derives from a design flaw in my way of becoming. It is the idea of a subject for whom confrontation with their horizons, however insuperable, is the conduit of autonomy. Autoethnography is implicated here because it turns on self-realisation via a writing of oneself into existence over against the culture that conditions experience. Whereas I confront, therefore I am, E-MUD gatekeepers conform, therefore they are. As a hierarchical normative system that curtails extremes via collective decision-making to guarantee corporate accord, Tōdai does not restrict freedom so much as give purpose to faculty that abide by it (Lebra, 1992). So long as one belongs, ethical subjectivity becomes a matter of selflessness within the E-MUD collective that treasures self-improvement, not selfishness where self-interest is esteemed (Nisbett, 2003). Although the respective stances of confrontation and conformity of the outsider and insider reflect their relative positionality, it is equally obvious that where there is no self to be written in demarcation from culture, autoethnography is obsolete. Indeed, in deploying autoethnography to undertake an ethical ledger of JNUs, am I foisting the Western cult of individuation upon Tōdai? If so, the only saving grace is that practising the reflexivity that autoethnography preaches makes me aware of its colonising disposition of methodological individualism.

Which brings me to internationalisation, and the neo-colonial price of playing the “hegemonic” game of CIHE (Scott, 2015). Based on a “template” developed by “Anglo–Saxon countries” (Takagi, 2016), Japan perpetuates their domination when it uses English as a lingue franca, borrows curricula from Australia and the UK, sends the best students to graduate school in the USA (Mok, 2007) or builds flagship world-class universities — and, in the case of Tōdai, even constructs its “Uchida Gothic” style buildings themselves — in imitation of Cornell or Glasgow. However, it is a lost cause for JNUs to go head-to-head with Uncle Sam and John Bull. Japan is already outgunned in establishing transnational campuses in its target markets of India and China (Maringe et al., 2013). Similarly, it is outmanoeuvred by the entrepreneurialism of Anglosphere universities on the back of Western epistemological privilege (Welch, 2012). In this light, would it not be better to challenge the commercialisation of global academe by changing the game itself and resituating internationalisation under its original cultural banner? Ironically, it might be the only option if CIHE fails to pierce the Confucian tradition of top–down state control of higher education (Marginson, 2011). It also requires demarcating a neo-colonial policy copying of the Anglosphere, which imposes ill-suited practices on the cultural environments of Asia, from self-confident policy learning adapted to them (Mok, 2007). Arguably, JNUs have no choice but to “develop their own ways to internationalise” (Takagi, 2016, p. 270). Given a tradition of “the opening up of [the Japanese] … to the world [by] changing [them]selves”, the foundations are there, too (Tsuruta, 2013, p. 143). Shorn of its “closing in” alter ego —  and my autoethnography attests to its durability — it could also be an apt ethics for the cultural infusion of international spaces of teaching and learning, where we go astray from our ethno-national selves to experiment with coexistence.