yoshiwara nikki: school life

How different would one expect a Japanese high school to be from an American one? I think that many of us would focus the difference on the style of teaching, perhaps, and the amount of study the students engage in. American students, after all, do not generally sit silently in class being told facts for rote memorization, and they don't go to cram school after they are done in their normal classes. They don't wear uniforms and many take a school bus rather than public transportation.

These differences that came to my mind when I thought about what my school in Japan might be like, then, were by and large superficial. They involved how the students looked and acted, their language, their imposed learning style. Perhaps I expected them to have more homework, or be more serious about their schoolwork, but I did not expect them to have a different basic mentality about school. I did not anticipate the striking difference in how society viewed the role of public school, and its place in the lives of both students (central) and parents (non-existent). Of course, it was ridiculous for me to expect the students to have American assumptions despite being Japanese. It turned out to also be ridiculous to expect a year in a Japanese high school not to teach me some very fundamental things about my own views and that of my own society toward education as well.

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The most noticeable difference between my own public school education and that of my Japanese students was the place of school in their lives, and indeed the very focus of their lives. Their experience seemed so alien to me, as someone who had suffered through the required time of being in school and stayed away as much as possible otherwise. These students lived for school - not that they were any more motivated to study and learn than any other 16-year-olds, but they literally engaged in their entire social life on school grounds. Their homeroom groups became their social worlds - even more so because they remain in the same group for all three years of high school - and their extracurricular activities became like families, using up any remaining time after classes were done. The students came to school seven days a week; they were no longer required to, but they were expected to, by their teachers, their parents, and their friends. For what would they do if they weren't at school? It contained their entire lives.

I had the distinct feeling, in fact, that the students - just like their hard-working parents and teachers - would not have the slightest idea of what to do with unstructured time off. Every moment of their lives, it seemed, was planned out and had a specific purpose, full of activities to keep them busy if not productive. Extra classes in the morning, classes all day, grade year meetings and activities, cleaning time, more extra classes, study time, extra help time, extracurricular activities, school events - these things swallowed my students' time from 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning until late at night. The school system may have officially stopped having mandatory Saturday classes years ago, but the official requirements of Japanese schools and the reality differed widely in my experience. The "optional" classes and activities on weekends were de facto requirements, and students were expected to be at school on weekends and even their official breaks and holidays. Unlike the true break from school that summer vacation was for me as a student - with the school grounds thoroughly unwelcoming, if not closed and locked to visitors - the students' "vacation" consisted of four or more ostensibly optional classes that everyone was expected to attend, plus school events and hours of extracurricular group meetings. The junior high school behind my apartment building never sent a single day without 7:00 am PA system announcements, much to my chagrin on weekends and my own rare breaks from work.

This constant presence at school seemed intertwined with another factor, in contrast to my American schooling. More than the students' own parents, families, and communities, the school itself - teachers, administrators, and older students - were left with the responsibility of raising the students. Of course, any society with public schooling expects the school to instruct the students in social norms and expected behavior in addition to reading and math, but in Japan this went on at a level I never expected. Not only were the students taught by dress code and uniforms to conform and look the same as their classmates, and to work together as a group in their homerooms rather than function on individual desires, but they came to treat their classmates as even closer than their real family members. They spent their waking hours with this group, working out their friendships and personality conflicts, sticking together out of necessity. They studied together, played sports in homeroom-based teams at school events, ate lunch together, endured being scolded by teachers together. Regardless of whether the members of the homerooms got along at the outset, they had to learn a common ground; those fellow students would be where they would find their best friends and connections that they would cherish and look back on nostalgically for the rest of their lives.

Meanwhile, the teachers would become their substitute parents for three years. Often, the first-year homeroom teacher would accompany their group for all three years; even if they did not, the school - not the parents - remained responsible for helping students through problems ranging from academic to emotional to disciplinary. Not only were the teachers obligated to address and resolve the problems, but the parents were often not even notified of a problem at all. With parents spending most of their waking hours at the workplace and children spending theirs at school, it doesn't seem quite so unnatural that the ones responsible for the children's upbringing and development should be the people who spent the most significant amount of time with them.

One event which made this relationship more clear to me was the announcement at one morning teachers' meeting that several students had caused a problem at the train station the evening before. Or, at least, they <i>thought</i> the kids were our students, because the train station personnel thought their bags and uniforms resembled ours. In any case, the station personnel had called up the school to report that the students threw their garbage near the train tracks and then laughed about it. Now, from what the administrator told us, it seemed that the staff at the station didn't so much as say a word about it to the students at the time, but instead just called the school. The school, in turn, asked us teachers to "discipline our students." There was no attempt made to even identify the ones responsible, let alone contact their parents or discipline them individually at school. Rather, it was more important to discipline the group - here, the entire student body - for the actions of two or three individuals who may not even have been from our school. The teachers were reinforcing two ideas here - first, that sense of group identity and belonging. The group was held responsible, not the individual. Secondly, they made it clear that the school, not the parents (who may not have even known about the event), was responsible for dealing with the students' discipline, even regarding incidents that took place off school grounds and outside of school hours. They, not the parents, were the ones responsible for the students' behavior at all times and in all places.

I had heard stories about students who got in enough trouble to have a run-in with the police. In these situations, I was told, students usually called a teacher with whom they were close to come to the station and help them in their discussions with police officers. They did this so that the parents would never have to be notified of the students' troublemaking. While I never witnessed such an extreme situation, I often saw students come to their homeroom teachers with personal problems, relying on them for their confidence and advice. Likewise, in a situation where the parent would surely be called to discipline their child and take him or her home in the United States, the student would be brought to the teachers' room for punishment. There, a group of teachers who knew the student well would gang up on him or her, scolding and shouting and threatening, and generally making the student feel ashamed and guilty for doing something bad. I never once saw a parent called in my entire year at my high school. And yet, why call in the parent when the student is already at "home" among real "family"?

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The other major difference I encountered was not in social structure, but rather in educational philosophy. I had learned about Japan's system of rote memorization and high-stakes testing before, but I usually thought of it in the context of science and math, where we Americans also adopt memorization of facts as our educational strategy more often than not.

The system of high-stakes standardized testing went hand-in-hand with the goal of memorizing predetermined information. Students spent their primary school years gearing up to take the high school entrance exam, and once in high school, focused their educational career on the nationwide Center Test for university admissions. While this description oversimplifies to a certain extent, this is the basic idea and the fundamental system that dictates how material is taught to students and why.

In short, everything in Japan is geared toward test-taking, and every teacher teaches to the test. Given that the tests are multiple-choice with only one "right" answer per question, this makes memorization the only viable strategy for preparation. Likewise, multiple-choice testing is probably seen as suited for determining whether students have internalized a certain set of facts. Moreover, the students are given an unbelievable amount of material to cover and retain before taking the Center Test in their last year of high school - enough to keep them in extra classes, weekend study sessions, cram school in the evening, and in their rooms with their books until late at night. I heard a saying while in Japan - if you get more than 4 hours of sleep a night, you're not studying hard enough for the test. Unless you kill yourself with work, you have no chance at getting a high enough score to enter a good university. It's no wonder, with this system in place, that it's all the students can do to memorize the information, let alone question it or consider it critically.

It is not simply a problem of time and material, however. What I did not fully realize before is that Japanese society does not value, and indeed actively discourages, critical thinking. It is more valuable and important to know each step of a process perfectly, than to spend time questioning its use or attempting to make it more efficient. My good friend and I, who shared much the same educational philosophy, often wondered how it was that questioning norms and critical thinking were so strongly looked down upon in Japan, both in terms of the educational system and in everyday life.

One day, my friend had a conversation with a literature teacher at his high school about her classes. He was curious about how she taught; like me, he had grown up reading books, discussing them in class, and writing critical essays analyzing them and their place in the larger world of literature. He wondered if this would be the one place where he could find a critical approach to material in a Japanese classroom, with contrasting views and written expression of arguments. Her answer taught us both something about how different the priorities of Japanese education were from our own: the students read books or sometimes just excerpts from important works, which were agreed upon as canon. They read material on who the authors were, why they were great figures, and why the books were masterpieces. Then, they moved on to the next topic. On the test, just like every other subject, students were expected to regurgitate that information in multiple-choice questions.

No critical thinking even entered into the picture. When my friend asked, the teacher conceded that she'd like to have more written expression in the curriculum, not least because students' skills in that area were so poor and undeveloped. But, she explained, that would make it far too difficult for teachers to assess the work. After all, there would be no readily-identifiable "right" answer, so the whole process would be simply unmanageable. Furthermore, it would not be relevant to the test, and getting through the material for the test was infinitely more important than nice extras like developing writing skills and critical analysis.

After my friend told me this story, we simply looked at each other in silent understanding, and it was then that we truly began to appreciate how different the goals of our students' education were from our own. When I spoke to people at my own school, they were in turn surprised that grades and personal recommendations were more important in our system than one test score. Certainly, we all took the SAT and the score had some bearing on our admission to schools, but it was not a uniform set of facts that we all had to remember; it also was not the sole factor in deciding whether we would attend university. Just like me, they were surprised at how different the goals were in my education from the ones they considered important above all others.

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My students' graduation ceremony was another eye-opening event for me; that important event in their lives was addressed so differently in a culture different from my own. In the United States, I was used to graduation ceremonies being held after the school year was over, usually in a theatre, and diplomas being given out individually to students on stage. My own graduation contained both this diploma-giving ceremony and other miscellaneous events, such as speeches and performances by soloists and small orchestra groups from my school.

In Japan, the first noticeable difference was that the graduation took place in the school gymnasium - a glorified hangar, with no heat. It was freezing; we had all dressed up in suits for this formal event and of course many of the women - including unfortunate me - had on skirt suits. An hour into the ceremony, I could barely feel my legs. The parents that had come were all wearing fuzzy indoor slippers and their coats. Why was it so cold? The school year does not end until the end of March here, and yet our graduation was held in the beginning of March. This is about a month after the graduating students had stopped coming to school, because they had already taken the university entrance exam, and thereby accomplished their ultimate educational goal. It no longer mattered whether they came to school for classes, because they had already finished. The graduation was simply a formality: there was no way these students could be prevented from graduating. While I was accustomed to grades and test scores mattering up until the last minute, possibly affecting a student's ability to graduate, at my school the true goal of the educational system was already taken care of.

As I watched the older students stand and their graduation was made official, I reflected on the fact that their grades hadn't been handed out and school would not end for another month. Yet, they wouldn't bother coming back until the semester-closing ceremony, because they had already finished their work that twelve years had prepared them to do. And I watched my own students, the first-year freshmen; I noted how easily they performed tasks that a year ago had been impossible for them: they stood and sat as a group, they bowed on cue, they all shouted formal greetings as a class. They knew exactly what to say, and when and how to say it. Watching each class stand to exit the gymnasium on cue, I thought that perhaps the school had been entirely successful in achieving its goals after all.