Whereas my first analysis started with a
charged social problem as presented in a small text, for this next exercise I’d
like to look at a longer text without any explicit social problems and tease
out both its discursive structures as well as any social issues implicated by
them.
I have chosen the ‘Satisfaction’
advertising campaign by ECC, a large English conversation teaching company or ‘eikaiwa’ here in Japan. Web and
television versions of its current campaign star Takeshi Kitano, world-famous
actor, director, comedian and artist.
It is first necessary to explain the
context of English conversation teaching or ‘eikaiwa’ here in Japan.
Eikaiwas in Japan are generally non-accredited teaching
classrooms where Japanese people come and take lessons in mostly English
conversation from mostly unlicensed foreign teachers, usually young people
living and working in Japan
for a short time. The instruction at eikaiwas
is thus largely ‘casual’, with a lack of testing or evaluation, syllabuses,
curriculum, or any other trappings of an institutional setting. Tiny local eikaiwas often run by a foreign husband-Japanese
wife pair dot the land, while large corporate eikaiwas such as Nova, Geos, and Aeon dominated the casual English
teaching scene in the 1980s and 1990s with prominently displayed ‘ekimae’
classrooms close to most rail stations, so as to be convenient for workers and
students. The embezzlement scandal that rocked Nova in the early 2000s began a
period of lower profile for these three heavyweight eikaiwas, which are still popular but not as ubiquitous as before.
Conversely, ECC has recently taken a larger profile, with advertisements on TV
and in trains. ECC previously specialized in children’s English classes as
taught in local spaces such as houses or community centers taught by housewives
looking for extra income or to use English skills acquired in their youth, but
has now branched out to business and adult lessons while relegating child
classes to the ECC junior brand.
Since this ad campaign depends largely on
visuals, I start my analysis with them. Color is a major element in marketing
considerations, and the Satisfaction campaign is marked by the use of a neon
pink textbox on white background colorscheme. This is a change from the
previous ECC Beat Taheshi campaign that used a scarlet background with gold
piping, which held an aura of respectability. The neon pink of the ‘Satisfaction’
campaign, by contrast, is redolent of spontaneity and creativity, allowing the
customer to feel their choice of ECC marks them as such.
The screenshot above is taken from ECC's
main webpage, and presents the dominant themes of the campaign, as well as
their inherent contradictions. On the left are four foreigners, smiling
and besuited, tokens of both the 'fun' often associated with English ‘eikaiwa’ classes as well as the
professionalism denoted by their attire. Although ECC classes may be as fun as
any other eikaiwa, their professionalism is just as suspect. A link on the ECC website to its '6
Deciding Factors' (ＥＣＣの６つのこだわり） begins with its claim of stringent background
checks, which is belied by the detail that foreign teachers must have a 4 year
university degree, but not any teaching experience or credentials.
In terms of genre, the campaign is not just
a simple advertisement, but features the informative or didactive theme of
survey results. This touch of ‘scientificity’ adds legitimacy to the ad’s
claims, although the objectivity and validity are questionable considering that
the agency performing the survey is a for-pay market research company and not
an academic organization. The survey is notable for its supposed anonymity,
although the use of pseudonyms for rival schools (School A, School B etc) also
calls its results into question in terms of transparency.
There are number of claims made through
keywords in the main statement for the Satisfaction ad campaign, supposedly,
which is found on the ECC main homepage at www.ecc.jp.
It is as follows:
英会話学校を選ぶなら、満足度で選ぼう。
プロの教師のもと、楽しく学べるレッスンの雰囲気。
通いやすくて、続きやすい充実のサポート体制。
すべての人に、英語の満足を。
はじめなら、ＥＣＣです。
http://www.ecc.jp/
If you’re choosing an English conversation
school, choose for satisfaction.
Learn from a professional teacher, in an
atmosphere of fun learning.
Easy to come to, easy to continue, with a
complete support system.
The satisfaction of English for all people.
If you’re starting out, it is ECC. (my translation)
The keywords of ‘conversation’, ‘satisfaction’,
‘professional’, ‘atmosphere’, ‘fun’, ‘easy’, ‘support’, and ‘all people’ stand
out and define the discourse, as do their ambiguities. First, ECC is a ‘conversation
school’, thus ‘satisfaction’ is a natural aim of its discourse instead of the
results and accreditation marking the discourse of schools in the education
system. For precisely this reason there is no mention of results, credentials,
etc, and thus it is marked as a discourse of ‘edutainment’ characteristic of eikaiwas.
Second, the mention of ‘professional’ is a
claim of legitimation, despite the lack of any mention of credentials for
either students or teachers. As mentioned above, ECC teachers are not required
to have any pedagogic credentials or experience. The concomitant claim of ‘support’
is similarly a claim of an organizational status ECC does not have
Next, the claim of ‘atmosphere’ is ironic
considering that ECC was outperformed by School E in two categories of the survey
concerning this keyword, namely Quality of Instructor Atmosphere (講師の雰囲気の良さ) and Quality of School Atmosphere (学校の雰囲気の良さ). Ironically, the use of the term ‘instructor’
(講師), which is usually
reserved in Japanese education discourse for university instructors, mark yet another
implicit claim to educational institutional status that ECC and other
conversation schools do not deserve. Similarly, the very use of the term ‘school’
（学校）to describe ECC is a
calculated misnomer, as businesses of its kind are usually referred to by the
term ‘English conversation classrooms’ (英会話教室), and thus another claim of institutional status it does not hold.
Moving on to the terms ‘fun’ and ‘easy’, they
hearken back to the ads of the big three ekimae
eikaiwa of the past, as mentioned above, and thus are an attempt to
capitalize on their popular appeal. This contrasts with the claim of being ‘for
all people’, which is simultaneously an appeal for new students, as well as a
statement that ECC lessons no longer for kids, as implied by the aforementioned
usage of the brand name ‘ECC junior’ to differentiate between children and
adult lessons.
Although on the surface this ad campaign
may have little to do with social issues, the Japanese public discourse of
English as opportunity and English as threat noted by Seargeant (2011) is well
in evidence, and has a lot to say about the conception and valuation of foreign
labour in Japan. Besides Mr. Takeshi, all actors are smiling be-suited Caucasian
males and females, who both iterate the native fallacy and the definition of
welcoming white foreigner. The ‘native fallacy’ is the belief that only a
native English speaker can impart speakable English to Japanese, a form of
fetishization that stems from the school system where foreigners are found
teaching English and most kids sleep through classes, preferring to get their
English from Japanese teachers at juku,
or cram schools that aim to help them pass the entrance exam of the high school
or university of their choice. In both these cases, fluency is far from the aim
or result. The addition of the prominent ‘white gaijin’ or foreigner underlines
the conception of English as a ‘first world’ language, at once both accessible
to the Japanese yet denied to Filipino, Indians and other ‘brown gaijin’ who
have a harder time of working as English teachers despite their fluency with
the language.
References
Seargeant, Phillip. (2011). English in Japan in the
Era of Globalization. Palgrave.
NOTE: This analysis took longer than
expected, so I will simply mark the paper reference here and add internet links
at a later date when I am free.
