Ethnography: Japanese Education System

I found the videos on education interesting, especially the piece where the science teacher was talking about the children having to grab the learning for themselves so they learn how to think, instead of the learning and the knowledge being plopped down on them from outside. As a former science teacher, I know how hard it is to get children to think about experiment designs and hypotheses and alternative reasons for why they got those results and that not everything is as simple as they are told it is. 

Of course, a lot of the time in the school system, teachers want you to swallow large amounts of information without question and be able to regurgitate it on command, rather than actually think about it, due to the sheer amount of material that you have to cover, whether it is history or geography, or even maths*, which the Greeks viewed as the very foundation of teaching and learning (it is the root of the word - there’s an old Greek saying “παθαματα μαθαματα” - pathamata mathamata - experience (literally, suffering) teaches)).

And despite the emphasis on experiments and hypotheses, even in science, teachers don’t want you to turn round and say “prove it!”, or in Geography to ask them to prove that Connecticut exists...  They don’t want you thinking for yourself that much, or deciding for yourself what is important.**

Even in university, much of the time, there does not seem to be much room for discussion or critical thinking and analysis of what you are learning - the encouragement in this course to think around the material and compare cultures and languages and to blog about it is unusual in my experience. The only approach even remotely like it was when I was learning to teach, and they were teaching us about biases and perceptions, and to learn about learning.

With that experience in mind, I do wonder just how much that balanced trio of approaches of the “academic excellence, rounded humanity and healthy body%” actually exists - or what counts as “rounded humanity” given the other reports you get from Japan on the emphasis on uniformity and not diverging from the norm# in the culture and society.  Up to and including reports of children being sent home from school because their hair was brown rather than black, and it has been assumed that they have dyed it for vanity and that only children with proper natural black hair will be taught… and that even after medical reports have been provided that their hair is naturally brown, they still get discriminated against. 

I confess, that I got the least from the last video link provided by せんせい, and it took me a while to notice the channel name and realise why we kept having a shot of a hand drawn squid and a water bottle between scenes… It was the ikamirin channel… D’oh! 🙄 

It seemed like she did nothing except apply beauty products and promo the brands, and not even go to university, but went to get her brown hair dyed black, and I wondered if that was related to the reports about students (at some schools) having to have black hair.  I have seen reports about that online, and there is a lengthy YouTube video by “Let’s Ask Shogo” on weird rules in Japanese Schools - https://youtu.be/e1dC7kBALTo - just like the schools that make the news in the UK & US for sending girls home for wearing tops with the straps too thin or skirts too short, the ones in Japan that make the news like this are the outliers, or they would not making the news.  Normal, regular everyday humdrum stuff, by definition, is not news nor newsworthy.  But it is things like that which tend to go viral or get spread around and for the impression of a culture that outsiders have (if I ever finish my cultural influences blog ##, perhaps I will include in it a faint flavour of all the things my mother used to say against the Japanese, but seriously, none of us have the time for that, and no one wants to read it, just as I do not want to write it).

I originally found the “Let’s Ask Shogo” channel because a friend shared a video of theirs about why it is important not to stand out in Japan - https://youtu.be/893L3Vd86Pg & also the one about how to avoid working for a “Black Company” in Japan (which, obviously, exist in the US & UK too, despite various pieces of legislation###) - https://youtu.be/spDteU8BOI8 . 

I was really interested in the pieces about the children serving the other children at lunch, to help them learn responsibility and to build community, part of the rounded humanity. The cynical part of me says, that like with the children cleaning the halls, it must save a lot of money on staffing, but another part of me also remembered that at my middle school in the UK, the fourth year students served the first year student, and the second year students were served by the third year students - the idea being that first year students knew the least and needed the most help. We had two lunch sittings in our school, the gym/cafeteria not being large enough for everyone at once. And there was virtually no oversight of the students, or so it seemed as a child. Having been a teacher and knowing how hard it is to catch bullying in the act, or to stop it even if it is directly observed, I suspect there was more oversight than it felt like at the time. Nevertheless, I wonder if all these student-led interactions and activities provide the opportunity for a wide range of bullying to occur. However, a creative bully can do that without activities like this anyway, it just makes it easier. https://youtu.be/gp6MRtn068Q

Before watching these videos, my main exposure to Japanese education was through news outlets - so a mix of the atrocious, such as the viral school rules items, or the person who cheated on their school exams this year and then turned themselves in to the police because they felt so guilty, or news reports about how behind the UK or the US is & how far ahead Japanese students are in comparison - or through the “Let’s Ask Shogo” videos on YouTube, but they have mostly been incidental. 

The anime that we watch as a group often is set in schools, or follows school age children (usually high schoolers) - our most recent item that we are watching is called “Sound Euphonium” and is about a Japanese High School band/orchestra trying to make it to the national competition, which has been interesting because it shows more focus on the school life or post school activities of people, and the conflicts between studying for college exams and pursuing cultural pursuits. Also, it seems from this particular anime, and an occasional comment in the other videos that 先生 linked, that most people in Japan seem to specialize in their after school club, just doing one activity, even if it is multiple nights a week, whereas many people in the UK & US do multiple activities with different school clubs, and it often seems that more and more diversity in interests is encouraged in pursuit of that perfect, most interesting and well balanced, college application…possibly at the expense of having the energy and time to actually study to be able to absorb that knowledge once you get there.

One similarity in my life to the ones shown in the videos, which I suspect is a rarity in the US, is that from the age of 9, I used to catch a public bus to school, as opposed to the ubiquitous American yellow school buses, and from the age of 11, I used to catch a train 40 minutes to a station near school, and then walk about 15 minutes more to get to school. If my mother could not drop me at the station, it was a similar walk on the other end to the station. It was interesting to me how much space there seemed to be on the trains, and how the majority of occupants seemed to be school students at that time - we traveled during morning rush hour, business commuting time, and the trains were always packed and heaving - and only about 3 schools seemed to have students that traveled by train, judging from the mix of uniforms on our trains in 7 years using them, whereas it seemed really common in Japan, and there was an instant mix of uniforms as they boarded the train. 

And the bus queue at the university was not long… 🤣 That kid does not know what a long queue is, if he through that was long!  It was also interesting how it sounded like they said that the name of the campus or the school was the しょうねん university/campus, but later during a lecture, it seemed like there were some female students present too. Although, at first, it certainly seemed like an all male campus. It would be interesting to learn about coed versus divided learning in Japan, just like there are studies on it in the UK & US.

I also associated hard with the indoor shoes because of that travel that I mentioned - in bad weather, I would be wearing boots, and have a clean, dry pair of shoes carried with me to wear when I got to school - although the outside shoes would be worn all the way into the cloakroom area where we had our lockers/coat pegs, not taken off at exactly the same place like the Japanese school does. 

The Japanese approach is much more sensible - with everyone wearing their dirty outside shoes into the cloakroom#### area, you are going to transfer dirt from those out on your clean, inside shoes.. Admittedly, that was more from the wish to have clean dry feet and not clump around in heavy boots all day, or be asked why I was wearing boots, when the weather on that side of town was totally dry and fine, than from any concern on my part for the school’s flooring. Given the parquet floors in some parts of the school, I am fairly sure that the lack of concern for the flooring was not mutual, although the only people I ever saw get stopped were visitors wearing stilettos...

% I recall the Latin saying of mens sana in corporea sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body) from my time in high school, and realise that the definition of what was a sound mind and a sound body differs greatly from generation to generation, and from culture to culture - very few people wrestle naked anymore or prioritize being able to throw the discus or javelins as a measure of health and fitness because weapons and armaments and technology have moved on, even if our cultures have not, or can seem a little antiquated in attitudes themselves sometimes. 

Way too much text as usual. I could blame 先生 for encouraging us to use as much detail as possible when comparing cultures and blogging about things for enthnological reasons, but I am fairly sure that any regular readers must have noticed my style by now (including doing posts that are not course-mandated, although some of them are a wee bit shorter), and know where the true blame lies… Plus blaming 先生 for something would not be culturally appropriate… :D

* Oddity coming from the UK to the US, and allegedly the same language - everyone knows about aluminum/aluminium, but no one tells you about the fact that in one country =, it is ok to have a plural abbreviation for the subject, and not in the other.  Mathematics is plural, but the abbreviation in one country is ‘math’ & ‘maths’ in the other…

** I have a very strong opinion on what details are not important to learn,, and they very definitely are not the same ones as my history teacher thought were important… Certainly, at 15, I could see no advantage to knowing which items were on the draft proposal for the Treaty of Versailles, as brought from America, versus what was actually finally signed, nor that it was signed at 3:15pm on a Tuesday afternoon on a specific date***.  I thought only the final outcome was important, rather than the real world horse trading and stand offs and maneuvering that must have gone on behind closed doors to get the final outcomes to happen - because they didn’t present it that way, just a dry list of things to learn.

*** Totally made that up, no clue when it was signed, other than that obviously it was after the 11th November 1918… And travel was slower then, and communication also, so it would take a longer time to get all the diplomats together and approval in general for what to discuss and negotiatate on and ratification from home, so it could be up to a year later, I would imagine… And it was after the scuttling of the captured German fleet at Scapa Flow, because that was done by the German navy due to a rumor that the peace talks had broken down & not wanting the fleet to be used against Germany if the fighting started up again.  The British panicked and opened fire when they saw all the Germans rushing from the ships & 6 people were killed before they realised it was an evacuation, not an attack.  Very orderly evacuation despite that.  No other lives were lost.  

So, unless irony were even more terrible than usual, it wouldn’t have happened after the signing.  That scuttling happened in the summer, which is good, because that water is cold enough even then****, the idea of scuttling the ships in winter waters doesn’t bear thinking about!  So, probably late summer 1919.  But my teachers &/or the exam board wanted the “Tuesday afternoon at 3:15pm” level of detail, and even if I can see a reason now for why the two different lists of items are important, and that the arguing over those and that the things left out and the things forced down the throats of the losers, and perhaps lack of recompense and not caving on other points all left simmering tensions and resentment behind to accelerate the build up of another war, I still maintain that knowing the exact time on a day is only significant if you are a time traveler and want to witness the signing as a tourist or researcher… although I am aware of the irony spending this much time calculating a probably rough date of the signing when I said that the time wasn’t important.  Sequence of events, important.  Exact time, less so.  Might be why I am late for things so often ;).

**** I used to scuba dive, and I have dived on the remaining wrecks of the German fleet, and on the block ships left from world war 2, when it was used as a harbour for allied fleets, and the block ships were sunk to try to block numerous navigable channels between the islands, to try to keep Axis submarines out so they could not attack the fleet at harbor and not alert.  One did get through early in the war, before the block ships & other defenses were completed, and they sank the Royal Oak, killing over 800 of the people on board.  It is a war grave, similar to Pearl Harbour & the Arizona, Utah & Oklahoma memorials.

# Not that varying from the norm in the UK or the US is all that brilliant, or all that safe.  Whether it is bullies, or girls getting sent home from school because their skirt may or may not be half a centimeter too short and that might distract boys and ruin their education, and obviously, they are the only ones that matter, and Og help us if they are expected to learn the valuable lesson to be able to actually control themselves and focus on schoolwork or work… Differing from the norm has risks wherever you are and our societies are not kind to people that are different. Just look at the Supreme Court decision last Friday, or don’t, given the irony of it coming so hard on the heels of the second Federal celebration of Juneteenth, with its celebration of freedom and acceptance and maybe making progress as a society for once - and risking overturning Loving v Virginia too.

## I do intend to continue with writing that.  I’m just crazy busy…

### I was working in the UK when they passed a law banning people from working more than 48 hours a week. But the law was so loose that you could drive a bus through the holes in it - you couldn’t work more than 48 hours a week, unless you signed a piece of paper saying that you wanted to…. The Black Company video was interesting for how the health statistics had been compiled, I had never seen those before. Nor did I know about the Japanese labour legislation, everyone just has an impression of people in Japan working insane amounts and working themselves to death (presumably to balance their perception of people in Europe taking the whole summer off, and having giant siestas everyday, even in countries where that is not part of the language, and never working…).

#### A literal cloakroom, a place to put your cloaks and outside vestments, rather than a euphemism for the toilets… One of my schools actually had a school uniform cloak rather than a coat. I still vividly remember the day that the wind got inside it, lifted me up, and carried me across the road before dropping me on the other side! I was only a little dot, and I was really lucky that there were no cars coming!

% Where I was learning Latin as a third language, not my first, thank you…