Dear Minister of Education Yoshiaki Takaki:
Over the past decade, some school boards have been reprimanded for only hiring "blond-haired, blue-eyed teachers." A top-ranking executive of a now-defunct English conversation school chain also admitted in an interview that the company would routinely turn away qualified applicants who were non-Caucasian.
Why do the majority of the Japanese people seem to prefer white-skinned people as English teachers? It would appear that somewhere along the way, the thinking that Caucasians are better English teachers than nonwhites has become a permanent feature of the Japanese mindset. In my experience, linguistic imperialism (i.e., the mistaken conception that only white-skinned individuals speak proper English and only they are able to properly teach it) still reigns supreme in Japan.