Japanese Lessons
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Japanese Lessons

A Year in a Japanese School Through the Eyes of An American Anthropologist and Her Children

Gail R. Benjamin

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eBook - ePub

Japanese Lessons

A Year in a Japanese School Through the Eyes of An American Anthropologist and Her Children

Gail R. Benjamin

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About This Book

Gail R. Benjamin reaches beyond predictable images of authoritarian Japanese educators and automaton schoolchildren to show the advantages and disadvantages of a system remarkably different from the American one... -- The New York Times Book Review

Americans regard the Japanese educational system and the lives of Japanese children with a mixture of awe and indignance. We respect a system that produces higher literacy rates and superior math skills, but we reject the excesses of a system that leaves children with little free time and few outlets for creativity and self-expression.

In Japanese Lessons, Gail R. Benjamin recounts her experiences as a American parent with two children in a Japanese elementary school. An anthropologist, Benjamin successfully weds the roles of observer and parent, illuminating the strengths of the Japanese system and suggesting ways in which Americans might learn from it.

With an anthropologist's keen eye, Benjamin takes us through a full year in a Japanese public elementary school, bringing us into the classroom with its comforting structure, lively participation, varied teaching styles, and non-authoritarian teachers. We follow the children on class trips and Sports Days and through the rigors of summer vacation homework. We share the experiences of her young son and daughter as they react to Japanese schools, friends, and teachers. Through Benjamin we learn what it means to be a mother in Japan--how minute details, such as the way mothers prepare lunches for children, reflect cultural understandings of family and education.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Getting Started
2. Why Study Japanese Education?
3. Day-to-Day Routines
4. Together at School, Together in Life
5. A Working Vacation and Special Events
6. The Three R's, Japanese Style
7. The Rest of the Day
8. Nagging, Preaching, and Discussions
9. Enlisting Mothers' Efforts
10. Education in Japanese Society
11. Themes and Suggestions
12. Sayonara
Appendix. Reading and Writing in Japanese
References
Index

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Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
1998
ISBN
9780814723401

1
Getting Started

Every morning, six days a week, the streets of Japanese towns and cities are full of lively groups of children converging on neighborhood schools. Elementary school children wearing leather backpacks for books and junior high school students in dark uniforms carrying briefcases, all meeting friends and calling gaily to each other, give the residential neighborhoods a sense of bustle and excitement, which emphasizes the quiet that follows during the school day.
What would it be like to be one of those children? Are the backpacks heavy? What can be in them? All of us were excited and scared at the prospect of Sam and Ellen’s becoming part of these large groups of seemingly identical but animated and happy school children.
We were coming back, really. Our family’s plan to spend ten months in Urawa during 1989–90 meant that we would be returning to the city where we had spent nearly a year during 1982–83. Our experiences during that year certainly colored our expectations of how we would spend the coming year, what we could look forward to, what we worried about, and our feelings about taking two children, ages seven and eleven, to Japan.
Both my husband, Davis Bobrow, and I would be affiliated with the Graduate School for Policy Sciences at Saitama University in Urawa. My plan was to do research on language patterns in schools and other educational settings, and Dave had a research grant from the Fulbright program to study Japanese national security policy. My work could have been done anywhere in Japan; Dave’s required that he be near Tokyo with easy access to government officials and records.
There were several factors that made our affiliation with Saitama University attractive. First, we had made good friends there in 1982–83, and knew the school to be a congenial and helpful host to visiting foreign scholars. Second, the school is located within reasonable commuting distance of the government centers, but far enough away from central Tokyo to make a significant difference in the cost of housing. Furthermore, the school had available an apartment that we could rent on the university grounds. The disadvantages were the distance from central Tokyo, which meant more commuting time for Dave, and being at least two hours away from any elementary schools where English was the language of instruction.
I had read a lot about Japanese elementary education, William Cummings’s book Education and Equality in Japan (1980) and John Singleton’s Nichu (1967) among others, and had a generally positive impression of what life for children would be like in Japanese schools. But I think that without our previous experience with a day care center and a kindergarten, we would have been much more reluctant even to consider dropping two American kids into a Japanese elementary school.
On our first visit Sam had been four and a half, and Ellen six months old when we arrived in Urawa. Sam had needed to be in a kindergarten because he needed to be with children, and Ellen had needed to be in part-time day care because both her parents were doing research. We had no particular plans about how to manage this when we arrived, but by great good fortune we ended up living in a small apartment building with wonderful neighbors. The Li family lived two floors below us. They were Koreans, Mr. Li a businessman, who had been in Japan for about four years. They were members of the Urawa Episcopalian Church and sent their five-year-old son to the church’s kindergarten. Through their intercession Sam was able to enroll in the school also.
We didn’t realize at the time what a stroke of good luck this was. Not only was this school one of the most prestigious and oldest in Urawa, but it was also small and very friendly. The members of the church included both Japanese and Korean families, and the minister had studied in England. Though there had never been a Western child or family affiliated with the school, the teachers and families seemed to have no hesitation in inviting us into the school. Most students did not come from Christian families, so our being Jewish was no barrier and only made us even more exotic.
Sam arrived at this kindergarten able to say “good morning” and to count to five in Japanese. After the first day his teacher told me that they had taught him how to say “Give it to me” because the other children didn’t like it if he just took toys, and so he needed to be able to ask. After that I didn’t hear about any explicit Japanese lessons, only occasional reports that “gradually” he was getting used to things. He was always eager to go to school, and in time my apprehensions gave way to admiration for the school and its teachers and for the students and their families.
I was particularly impressed with the way in which Mrs. Li and a circle of mothers cooperated both to incorporate me into activities with them and to protect the time I needed for my work. They were supportive of both my roles, as mother and as researcher, and made life easier and more enjoyable for me.
Arranging care for Ellen was a bit more of a problem; it was through our landlady’s efforts that we succeeded. She was not only the wife of a local politician and real estate developer, but also a pharmacist of traditional medicines with a business of her own and two grown children. She first took me to several private businesses that take care of small children, but we discovered that they would take children only on a full-time basis, six full days a week. I wasn’t prepared to leave Ellen for that long. We then went to city hall to inquire about municipal facilities, and it was that office that directed us to the university’s own day care center, where I was able to enroll Ellen for three days a week.
Here, too, we were very favorably impressed with the individual, loving care that children from six weeks to three years received. And here, too, the caregivers seemed neither daunted nor rigid about the prospect of dealing with a foreign family.
These two very positive experiences with our children were the deciding factors in our decision to live in Urawa again and to send the children to the local Japanese school. We also shared the feeling of many American parents that what our children would miss in a year away from American schooling wasn’t too important, that it could easily be made up. We believed that the immersion experience of a year of life in a different culture and language would in itself be valuable education for the children and ourselves, valuable enough to offset the inevitable frustration and despair of having to deal with an unknown language and a strange conception of school, children, and life. Such a dramatic change can be hard for both parents and children, though there’s no doubt that the major difficulty is faced by the children, who have to spend more than forty hours a week in the school environment. The year was not always easy, but we have had no reason to regret the decision.
Urawa is a typical Japanese city in many ways. It is an old city, the capital of the prefecture, a center for administration, agriculture, and industry for several centuries. It is now also a bedroom community for families of Tokyo workers; its main train station is about an hour from central Tokyo. The university was moved from the center of town to its fringes after the war, but the city has grown out around it in the haphazard “mixed use” way of Japanese cities. The neighborhood of the university also includes farms, commercial areas, temples, light industries, and some heavy industry, along with housing for families of all economic levels.
On their daily walk to school the children passed homes, shops, small apartment buildings, a kiwi orchard just behind the auto repair shop, and a big old keyaki tree fenced off from the surrounding paddy fields and marked as a Shinto shrine by the straw rope with paper streamers around it and by the plaque saying it had been recognized as a shrine by the Taisho emperor. Farther on, past the paddy fields where we could see the whole process of growing rice as the year went on and hear the frogs that lived there when the fields were flooded, a Buddhist temple with its graveyard provided an oasis of green. Gardens around the older houses also held trees, the noisy cicadas that are an integral part of Japanese summers, and an occasional Inari shrine. Right across from the school a small shop sold school supplies and snacks to students and to people who waited for the bus there.
Coffee shops and small restaurants crowded together on this major street and on the four-lane street closer to our home where the traffic also supported a number of fast-food chain stores. It soon came to seem perfectly normal to us to see a shop, carved out of a paddy field, selling small electrical appliances, next door to an old farm house, across the street from a six-unit apartment house and a small factory making aluminum window frames and doors.
We decided not to have a car, so I rode my bicycle to the supermarket about a half mile away several times a week to shop; I was glad to join a food co-op that would deliver some foods, once a week. For other shopping we took the bus downtown from the university stop about three blocks from our building. We rented a car for weekend trips a few times.
Our own apartment was in a building owned by Saitama University and used for housing the foreign students and their families who were at the Graduate School for Policy Sciences. These are primarily mid-career level civil servants from Southeast Asian countries who come to Japan for two years of study. Many of them have young children who attend the local kindergarten and elementary school. That makes these schools among the most cosmopolitan in Japan; at least our children would not be the first non-Japanese students encountered by the school, the teachers, and the students.
Our apartment was the largest in the building, because Dave was the most senior resident, and at 700 square feet was considered very spacious. It had a small entryway for storing shoes, umbrellas, and other outside gear, two bedrooms, a bathroom, a large (comparatively speaking) kitchen-dining-living room, and a balcony for hanging laundry. Perhaps the greatest luxury in the apartment was its view of Mount Fuji a hundred miles away to the southwest, visible during the clear winter days.

ENROLLING IN SCHOOL

Even though our research prospects seemed ideal, even though our housing situation seemed good, even though we felt comfortable making our way around Urawa, and even though we liked our neighborhood and felt confident the year was going to be a good one, we were still a bit apprehensive about school. Would we find that the congenial friendliness of preschool in Japan had given way to a regimented and strictly academic atmosphere, as suggested in some American media depictions of Japanese schools? Would the social pressure for conformity prove to be stronger than in American schools and uncomfortable for foreigners? Just the process of getting our children enrolled and ready for their first day of school provided answers to some of these questions and brought us face to face with differences in approaches to education that became clearer as the school year passed.
Almost immediately after moving into our apartment at Saitama University, we went to Urawa City Hall to apply for our Alien Registration cards. (Sam and Ellen like the term aliens better than foreigners, though not all foreigners feel that way.) With the help of a colleague from the university we were able to arrange a meeting with the city board of education officers responsible for enrolling children on the same day we picked up the Alien Registration cards. We were surprised that such a high-level meeting would be required. Our colleague went with the four of us to this meeting. The principal of the school was present along with two or three officials from the board of education.
The discussion covered several points of concern. The principal and the officials stressed that our children would be expected to participate fully, as Japanese children do. We were warned that no instruction in Japanese as a foreign language would be provided, that they followed the total immersion, “throw them in and see if they swim” philosophy of language learning. The principal said he would, however, assign a few children to guide ours around, play with them, and help them get started. Everyone looked relieved on hearing that Sam had been to preschool in Japan and seemed to think this would make things easier for us and for them, a feeling we shared.
Japanese are always very concerned that Japanese food is so unique that foreigners will find it inedible, and these officials said our children would have to eat the school lunches—as though they felt this might be a major problem. They did ask if there were foods our children couldn’t eat; they recognize that some children have allergies, and many of the Southeast Asian children in this school are Moslems who do not eat pork or some of the seafood found in Japanese school lunches, but our children had no restrictions.
The next part of the discussion centered on the grades in which the children would be placed. In Japan the school year runs from April 1 of each year to the following March. The rules about grade placement are rigidly followed: a child must be six years old by April 1 to begin first grade and must begin on the April 1 following the sixth birthday. Sam, born in April, had just finished fifth grade in the United States, and Ellen, born in March, had just finished first grade. The correct grade placement for Sam was thus fifth grade in Japan. The principal and the officials felt this was the best placement for him. We agreed, and we had discussed this possibility with him beforehand. We knew that much of the material covered would be different from the curriculum at home and that any repetition in Japanese would be useful. Following the principal’s recommendation, we agreed that Ellen should be put in the first grade, though according to her birth date she belonged in second. This made her one of the oldest first graders instead of the youngest second grader. First grade is a beginning, and it seemed reasonable that she also begin there.
We agreed with the principal on a day in the next week to bring the children to school to meet their teachers and join their classes; we left the meeting feeling excited and nervous. It was all becoming very real.

THE SCHOOL

Our school, Okubo Higashi Shogakko (Okubo East Elementary School), is unusual in Japan only because it has some foreign students. It is a public school, free, part of the compulsory education system in Japan, run by the city board of education in compliance with guidelines from the national Ministry of Education, and funded by both local and national taxes. Only 1 percent of elementary school children in Japan are in private schools, so this kind of education is what is experienced by virtually all Japanese children.
Okubo Higashi’s students come from the immediate neighborhood. It has students from first grade through sixth grade in twenty-five classes, about one thousand students in all, including the ten or so foreigners. This is a very ordinary size in Japan, where population densities in the cities and towns are such that this many children all live within easy walking distance of the school. There is no special transportation for students, and they are not allowed to ride bicycles to school, though most children have bikes and use them on other occasions. Think of nine hundred or so bicycles converging through narrow lanes on the school and the problem of where to put so many bikes during the school day!
The front of the school lot is the playground and athletic field, mostly open space but with some simple equipment for games and skills training around the sides. Old tires embedded in the ground serve as hurdles; there are some iron bars for simple gymnastics and some bells hung at various heights for children to try to ring by jumping. One end of the playground has elaborate sets of swings, jungle gyms, climbing poles, ladders, and slides—the same complex we saw in schools all over Japan.
Around the main buildings are some small sheds used to house animals and birds, some storage sheds, a few straggly plots for flowers and plants, the swimming pool and dressing rooms, and the gymnasium/assembly room in a separate building.
The buildings of the school follow a standard pattern, three stories of concrete construction looking very institutional if not prison-like. The two classroom buildings, joined by a short hallway section, are both one room and a hallway deep, so that each classroom has a long southern or western wall that is mostly windows, leading to a balcony outside the classroom. Most buildings in Japan are built this way, to capture sunlight and heat.
At the front there is a large staircase to the ceremonial entrance near the school office, the principal’s office and the teachers’ room on the second floor. Children, however, usually use a ground-floor entrance near their classroom, going into a large entry hall where there are shelves and cubbyholes for each person to leave outside shoes during the school day and to store school shoes while one is away from school. There are also sinks for washing hands and gargling outside these entrances. The hallways leading to the classrooms are clean and light, decorated with projects done in class.
In each classroom there is a rack for hanging book bags during the day, and each student has a desk. Shelves under the windows hold classroom supplies. There is an electric organ in each room. The walls are decorated with posters, the school motto, the classroom schedule, and student work. The windows have curtains used to regulate the sunlight, and each classroom has a gas stove for heat. This sits away from the walls near one corner and is used sparingly during the coldest months; the hallways and other areas of the school are not heated at all.
At least at Okubo Higashi, children are encouraged to wear long pants during the winter months. We were told by parents that at other schools in Urawa children who wore long pants instead of skirts or the very short shorts Japanese boys usually wear were subject to ridicule by their teachers. Stoically enduring cold has long been a means of character building in Japan.
The motto found in every classroom, in the hallways, on school publications, over the stage in the auditorium, and which makes its way into many public speeches is
Thinking Children
Bright Children
Strong Children
At first glance this did not seem to be remarkable in any way, except that I particularly noticed the word “Strong.” Interpreting it to mean physically strong as it usually does, I was a little surprised to find this as a goal in school. Only later did I think to ask my friends what the phrase “Bright Children” might mean, to confirm my suspicion that it did not refer to intelligence. They said it meant children who were lively and eager to participate in activities and life, not hanging back out of mistrust or selfishness or idiosyncrasy. These answers sent me back to the booklet about the school prepared for parents of first graders, which we were given as a new family in the school.
The motto is explained in the booklet and turns out to be shorthand for a complicated set of ideals for children. “Thinking Children” is explained as children who can consider well, making correct judgments about actions. “Bright Children” are those who are rich in cooperativeness, full of fresh and lively vitality. “Strong Children” are children who, being healthy in mind and body, are able to make the judgments needed to carry out the responsibilities of their own individual lives.
As the year went on I decided that this motto accurately reflected the goals and practices of the school, more than mottoes sometimes do. It suggests that action, not merely abstract academic learning, is the test of education; it suggests that children are active agents in their own education, not passive recipients; it suggests that education and action are embedded in a world of other people and that individual judgment, cooperativeness, and physical and moral strength are what children should be learning in school. It doesn’t mention math, reading, and science. They seem to be both components and by-products of the larger goal.

THE FIRST DAY AND THE EQUIPMENT

On the appointed day we went to school with our colleague, the last school meeting he would be required to attend. We met with the principal, the assistant principal, Sam’s teacher Ohshima sensei and Ellen’s teacher ...

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