What is your major (mal)function?

Not too long ago I had a chat with one of the Japanese teachers at the one of the schools I work at. And she told me something that genuinely surprised me.
She's what would be considered a senior teacher. She's around 45-50, and has been a teacher or a substitute for most of her career. And she started talking about her own experiences as a junior high student trying to study English. At that time there was no policy of importing foreigners for English classes, and as a result her classes were taught solely by a Japanese teacher. She, and most of the kids she went to school with, never saw a non-Japanese person until they were out of high school, at the earliest. The functional differences between a werewolf, a robot and a foreigner were all equally academic to her and all her classmates. She seemed to genuinely regret missing the chances her students have to get familiar with the existence of alien peoples.
One of the things that is expected of me, but which I never really grasped, is this role of, well, test-gaijin. I, and other people who have taken similar work, have been checked for terrifying deformity, sufficient patience and appropriate attitude. Command of the language is almost entirely irrelevant. I've been aware of how tangential my teaching skills were to my job for a while, but I never really grasped why.
Most of the people who are now of policy-making age in Japan's various bureaucracies were in school at about the same time, or earlier, as this teacher. These curriculum choices are being made by people for whom English ability is an unnecessary abstract. The curriculum choices are being made by people whose primary understanding of English language use is not one of nuance, fluency or even function, but one of fear of contact with the unknown, as represented by a non-Japanese person.
Regardless of what the board of education told my employers, regardless of what they told me, my main job really isn't to teach; In the minds of Education Ministry policymakers I'm like a safe strain of foreigner-serum introduced to the children so they'll develop the defenses to handle encounters with foreigners in the wild.

Is that role in any way unimportant for a nation struggling to come to grips with globalization? No, of course not.

Is that role one I can take any great amount of pride in doing well?


How would you answer that?