This chapter is grounded in the storied realities of an EMI programme in a Japanese university where one entire campus was transformed into an English-speaking operation. The accompanying rhetoric reified campus ‘internationalization’ as part of the quest for institutional ‘renewal’. Given the ambitiousness and contentiousness of this undertaking, the EMI programme would eventually become implicated in controversies over the workings of underlying ideologies linked to campus Englishization. In so forcibly compounding Englishization, internationalization, and institutional renewal with EMI, the administration introduced a set of ancillary activities and practices involving advertising and faculty recruitment that bore only peripheral relevance to EMI. While principally irrelevant to EMI, these undertakings were not arbitrary but a part of using EMI to fulfil agendas that went beyond concerns over medium of instruction per se, or for that matter education. In this critique the authors consider these peripheral undertakings to be para-EMI activities and argue that these activities were influenced by prevailing cultural political and socio-economic relations within Japanese society.