Dear Diary Boy

An Exacting Mother, Her Free-spirited Son, and Their Bittersweet Adventures in an Elite Japanese School

Kumiko Makihara

• Publisher: Arcade
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781628728903
• eBook ISBN: 9781628728927
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Essays in Education

When her five-year-old son passed the rigorous entrance exams to one of Japan's top private elementary schools, Makihara, a single mother, thought they were on their way. Taro would wear the historic dark blue uniform and learn alongside other little Einsteins while she basked in the glory of his high achievements with the other perfect moms. Together they would climb the rungs into the country's successful elite. But it didn't turn out that way. Taro had other things in mind.While set in Japan, their struggles in the school's hyper-competitive environment mirror those faced by parents here in the US and raise the same questions about the best way to educate a child—especially one that doesn't quite fit the mold. Public or private? Competitive or nurturing? Standardized or individualized. Helicopter parenting or free-range? Amid this frenzied debate, how does one find balance and maintain a healthy parent-child relationship? Dear Diary Boy is an intensely personal, heartwarming, and heartbreaking chronicle of one mother and child's experience in a prestigious private Tokyo school. It's a tale that will resonate with all parents as we try to answer the age-old questions of how best to educate our children and what, truly, is in their best interests versus what is in our own.

IV

The Mothers

July 20, 2007

I’M STANDING AT THE CAMPUS ENTRANCE MAKING SMALL TALK with a group of mothers from Taro’s class. If I see Taro’s homeroom teacher, I need to buttonhole him for chitchat. I try to seize every opportunity to strengthen my connection with him as a conduit to Taro’s school world. But I need to do that subtly, so it doesn’t look like I’m upstaging the other moms and trying to get cozy with the faculty. We are seeing the children off as they embark on their annual retreat. As the coach buses drive away, we wave until they’re out of sight. Then we scatter into small groups. Today I don’t have to anxiously tag alongside a random cluster of mothers because I’ve already secured an invitation to go for coffee with one of the cliques.

As Taro immersed himself into student life, I delved into the parallel world of the mothers. Warnings of the pitfalls in this society came early. A few months before Taro enrolled, I exchanged emails with a woman whose son had attended The School some years earlier. Among the various bits of advice she gave me was not to join the PTA until after I had a sense of what the other mothers were like.

“I had a terrible experience. I was bullied when I did PTA work when my son was in the first grade,” she told me. Bullying among the moms? I didn’t know the woman well enough to pry details out of her, but I suspected that she must have somehow stepped out of line in this conformist country. That would be easy for me to do, too, with my unconventional past. Taro had passed the entrance exams; now it was my turn to jump through hoops to pass muster with the moms.

“What’s ‘a mothers’ lunch?’” an Australian friend asked me when I told her I couldn’t meet her because of such an event. During the primary school years, I had gotten so used to the common reference for these ostensibly social gatherings that I had used it in conversation as if it were a routine business engagement. I did in fact treat the meals like work, in that I dutifully attended as many as I could and kept mental notes on the takeaways. The coffees and lunches among the mothers sometimes consisted of trivial chatting. But more often than not, they were also crucial opportunities to gather information and check on one’s standing in The School’s social circles. I went to my first mothers’ lunch two weeks after Taro started school. Two PTA representative mothers from our class, who knew the ropes from having older children at the school already, arranged the gathering at a French restaurant near the campus. Like all lunches, it was held on a weekday. Even among the minority of mothers who worked, most seemed to have flexible enough jobs to allow them to come to these mid-day socials. The PTA-organized get-togethers took place only once or twice a semester, but smaller groups of mothers met informally a few times a month. When there was an event at school, like the swim meet or the marathon race, cliques of mothers would always go to lunch before or afterward.

March 28, 2008

Characteristics of grown-ups:

1. They like numbers.

2. They write messy on purpose.

3. They are nervous.

Nearly all of the twenty-eight mothers of First Grade Class South attended that first meal. The two veteran moms greeted us at the entrance to the private area upstairs of the bistro and collected money for the prix fixe course they had selected in advance. Then we picked numbers out of a paper bag and sat at places where there was a tiny piece of paper with the corresponding figure. Those detailed arrangements deterred spontaneity that could give rise to the slightest of awkward situations. You wouldn’t want to be caught hesitating before sitting next to someone, for example, or ordering an appetizer when everyone else just had a main course. The degree of care that went into the scripting of social settings would surprise me throughout the school years. I was puzzled once when a mother asked me if we would be meeting somewhere beforehand to walk over to a lunch I had organized even though I had distributed the address, phone number, and website with a map to the restaurant. The location of the restaurant was clear enough, another mother explained to me, but no one wanted to show up first and be alone for even a few minutes. It would be preferable to meet at a train station or department store where arriving first would be less noticeable among the bustle of anonymous crowds.

At that first luncheon, we made small talk around two long, white-clothed tables while eating a French meal of three small-portioned and tasty enough courses. Once the table was cleared of all except the coffee, the organizers asked us to introduce ourselves. One by one the mothers stood up, identified themselves by their children’s names, bowed, and said something self-effacing.

“I’m Yasuko Sekiguchi’s mother,” said a petite woman with black eyeliner drawn evenly around both eyes, demarking them perfectly against the backdrop of her porcelain complexion. “My recent worry is that I’m getting patches of bald spots from the stress of the entrance exams.”

Another woman said she had put on so much weight during her son’s entrance exam prep that she was following a yoga regime popular with celebrities to shed the pounds. A few introduced their own hobbies like skiing or making beaded flowers. All of them apologized for their children being unruly and incompetent, using terms like baka or stupid. “I’m very sorry that we might cause trouble,” was a common closing remark.

“I’m Yataro Makihara’s mother,” I began. “We started late in the exam process, and I have always been busy with work,” I said, lining up the excuses before the apology. “My son is rambunctious and doesn’t listen to me, and I am very sorry that we will cause a lot of problems.” Then I decided to add something that I thought might be a way of ingratiating myself with the group. I now regret it and am embarrassed to recall my naiveté. “I have lived overseas for a long time and can speak English,” I said. “So if any of you ever need any help with English, please let me know. I would be very happy to be of any assistance.” In the cultural context of Japan, where humility is valued, I might as well have announced my superiority. I found out later that many of the mothers had lived or studied abroad themselves. No one told me that at the lunch, though. Everyone just listened politely.

The typical mother of a child in Taro’s first grade class was a college-educated woman in her late thirties who had worked until she got pregnant and then became a full-time mother and homemaker. Among the minority who continued to have jobs, a few were medical doctors, some had office administrative positions, and some were part-time teachers or tutors. I had just started my freelance writing and translating work. Nearly all of the women were married. Among the 112 mothers of Taro’s grade, just four of us were divorced, one of whom later remarried. Fathers attended major school events like Sports Day and open classrooms, but mostly the mothers took charge of school-related affairs. With their similar profiles, the mothers even seemed physically alike to me.

I remember being struck by their sameness when I witnessed a bizarre scene at a PTA meeting. A dozen or so mothers had encircled a teacher and were bowing deeply. They were apologizing after being scolded for chatting too noisily at The School’s Sports Day. Backs ramrod straight and waists bent at a ninety-degree angle, foundation-polished faces and dark hair, semi-expensive, tasteful if bland suits and dresses, the women looked like identical spokes in a wheel. The contrite mothers later agreed amongst each other to individually write brief apology notes to the teacher. But one of the letters was revealed to be long and rich in detail after it was quoted and praised in a teacher’s newsletter to the class. The other apologizers immediately began sleuthing to find out who was the culprit that had veered from the covenant. A pitfall for that mother!

Especially in the early elementary school years when most of us were on unfamiliar territory, the mothers pursued uniformity with a vengeance. They wanted to be included in all the lunches, coffees, and playdates. They signed their children up for the same camps. The conformism assured them that they wouldn’t stand out and risk offending someone in a society that upholds propriety. And banding together kept them in the loop of the goings-on at school. The valued particulars ranged from what might be on the next science test to where to get certain school supplies. A few hours after the school distributed a packing list for a summer retreat one year, I went to a local hobby and craft store to buy one of the items: a fishing net. But it was too late. There’d already been a run on them by mothers who had decided that was the go-to store. The day after the art teacher asked the children to bring in paint sets, I ran into a group of mothers at a stationery store.

“My daughter won’t be happy unless she has the same one as everyone else,” said one, squatting by a stack of them.

Even though I already had some brushes and paints at home, I grabbed the same set everyone was buying.

Obsession with the status quo exists in other school circles, too. Around the time Taro started school, a public school in Osaka, Katayama Elementary, put out an instruction booklet that answered as many conceivable questions as possible to ease the anxieties of new parents. Dozens of local schools followed suit with their own brochures. “Katayama Navi” (short for “navigation”) is a thirty-eight-page manual, updated each year, that lists necessary supplies down to the number of pencils first graders should bring to school. It offers advice such as: “Please refrain from buying expensive items or items not needed urgently” or “As much as possible, have a bowel movement before coming to school.”

I was overwhelmed with trying to stay in good standing with the other mothers especially as I was starting out way behind the similarity curve. In addition to our odd family makeup, I looked different from the other, well-groomed mothers because my fashion style, bred from many years of living in the United States, was casual-practical, and I never bothered much with cosmetics. At the same time, it was crucial for me to stay in close contact with the moms since Taro often lost homework instruction papers, and I had to ask other parents about the assignments. So I attended all of the social gatherings I was invited to and tried not to express any divergent opinions. I groveled to find out about the must-buys and then s...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• November 16, 2007
• The Very Beginning
• I Before
• II Getting There
• III Overloaded
• IV The Mothers
• V Competition
• VI Darker
• VII Last Years
• VIII The End
• IX Transition
• Looking Back
• Acknowledgments